Oppo announced the entry of a new sub-brand in India, the Realme. The Realme brand was announced to take on with the Redmi series of smartphones in India and the company announced their first budget smartphone, the Realme 1 in India. The Realme 1 is equipped with 5.99 inches Full HD display and is powered by Helio P60 Octa-core processor with 3/4 and 6GB of RAM and is the first phone to offer 128GB of storage for less than 15K. So how good is the Realme 1 in this segment? Let’s find out in the detailed Realme 1 Review.
Here is the video review of the device.
Design and Build:
Realme 1 is made of fiberglass and has a diamond cut finish on the back panel. The glossy diamond cut offers a great look when light falls on it. In terms of design, the Realme 1 is a pretty compact smartphone with almost 85% screen to body ratio with minimal bezels. The durability of the fiberglass is something which we are not sure, but during our usage, there were no issues as such. Even though the device is made of plastic, the build quality looks great.
The volume keys are placed on the left side, while the power button and the SIM tray is on the left side. The bottom panel has 3.5mm audio jack, micro USB charging slot, and the speaker unit. The device misses out on the fingerprint scanner. The rear panel has a 13MP camera, LED flash and Realme logo along with Oppo branding.
Display:
Realme 1 packs a 5.99 inch Full HD+ resolution display which has an 18:9 aspect ratio. The display quality is pretty good and colors are also rich. The viewing angles are also good and the touch response is quite ok with the default screen guard which is pre-installed. The brightness levels could have been a tad better and you feel this especially when you are using the device under bright sunlight. There is also Gorilla glass protection offered on the display.
Software:
Realme 1 comes with Color OS 5.0 on top of Android 8.1 Oreo out of the box. Color OS is the same UI which powers Oppo’s smartphone and there aren’t any changes with respect to the UI. It is customized software with a lot of additional tools and options.
Color OS offers themes to customize and also has additional features like dual apps, smart split screen, kids corner, one-handed UI and more. There is also support for gestures in the UI. You can also customize the navigational buttons and add an assistive ball for phone navigation in case you want to disable on-screen navigation.
Oppo’s game acceleration mode helps in loading games much faster than regular phones. The phone also comes with app lock which is supported with face unlock and also file safe where you can store all your personal files securely.
Performance:
Realme 1 is powered by Helio P60, the Octa-core processor from Mediatek which powers the Oppo F7 as well. Helio P60 was announced at Mobile World Congress 2018 and is one of the really powerful mid-range chipsets with great performance. It competes with the Snapdragon 636 and 660 in the mid-range segment. The Realme 1 has great performance all round and there wasn’t any sort of lag or issues in day to day performance.
The gaming performance of the device is also really good and it was able to play almost all games in high graphics settings and without any issues. The heating on the device was slightly on the higher side and it reached close to 46 degrees.
The call quality of the phone is good and it supports 4G LTE and there is also a dedicated SD card slot available in case you want to expand the storage on the device. The speaker performance from the bottom firing speaker is good. It is not the loudest in terms of performance but does a decent job.
The device misses out on fingerprint scanner but it has face unlock feature. The face unlock is probably the fastest we have seen in this segment, but fails to work in extremely dark conditions.
Camera:
The Realme 1 features a 13MP rear camera with f/2.2 aperture and LED flash, while the selfie camera is an 8MP shooter with f/2.2. The camera interface is largely unchanged and is similar to what we have seen on Oppo’s smartphones. There is bokeh mode available for rear camera as well as for selfies.
The camera samples taken in daylight conditions had decent color quality and sharpness levels. The close-up images also came out well. But when you zoom into the images, you can see the images are a bit noisy and blurry and losses out on sharpness and details. The low light images were are average in terms of performance. The front 8MP camera did a good job with details and good colors in the selfie. The video recording is at 1080p resolution and the video quality is strictly average. Here are some samples taken with the device.
Battery:
Realme 1 packs a 3410mAh battery and the performance is good. If you are a moderate user, you can get more than a day of usage. Even with heavy usage, you should be getting around a day of battery life with the device. Since the Color OS does not allow measuring the screen on time, we couldn’t calculate it. There is no fast charging included in the phone and takes more than 2 hours to charge the phone completely.
Verdict:
The Realme 1 is priced Rs 8,999 for the 3GB RAM, 32GB storage, Rs 10,999 for the 4GB RAM and 64GB storage and Rs 13,999 for the 6GB RAM and 128GB of storage. At this price, the Realme 1 is definitely a steal deal as this is the first time a 128GB storage device is offered below Rs 15,000. Realme 1 offers great performance, stylish design, customizable UI and decent battery performance. But at the same time the Android updates is something which you don’t expect much from Oppo and also the camera performance needs a bit more improvement to compete with Redmi Note 5 Pro which is the current leader in camera.
If you are looking for a value for money device, the Realme 1 is a good deal. It is available exclusively on Amazon from May 25th and can be bought from here.
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