Realme GT review: Jack of all trades

Lately, Realme has been making massive strides when it comes to delivering affordable performance smartphones. The Realme GT is the company’s first flagship offering in the country. We spent some time with the device and were impressed with the choices that Realme has made.

Right off the bat, you’d notice that Realme has decided to go with a display that is slightly smaller than other smartphones in the price range. This makes the phone very easy to hold and use with one hand. The vegan leather finish on the back of my review unit also adds to how good the phone feels in your hand. The racing yellow trim however is only available with the pricier 12GB/256GB variant. The 8GB/128GB variant makes do without it and is offered in two colour options – blue and silver.

The Realme GT features a 6.43-inch Super AMOLED display with a cutout for the selfie camera. There is an in-screen fingerprint reader that works reliably. The display gets adaptive refresh rate going up to 120Hz and compares favourably with the competition with vivid colours and good brightness. There is a set of stereo speakers that sound pretty good along too. Realme has even opted to have a 3.5mm jack at the bottom of the phone.

Realme has made some smart choices when it comes to the things that it has decided to leave out. These include wireless charging and an IP rating. While both these features can be useful additions, not many would actually miss them much. Instead Realme has invested heavily when it comes to performance. The Realme Gt gets Qualcomm’s flagship 888 SoC. Here it is paired with 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage. The phone is powered by a 4,500mAh battery and you get a 65W adapter in the box. The Realme GT, as expected, has sprightly performance and you would really struggle to push it to its limits. There is no lag or stutter even while gaming at maxed out settings. The phone does get slightly warm to the touch but the back panel remained cool. There is some bloatware that comes with Realme UI 2.0 but it isn’t something that is a concern. Even under moderately heavy use, the Realme GT’s battery managed to last me well over a day. And 35 minutes to a full charge, there are no worries in the battery department.

The Realme GT features three rear-facing cameras and a single front-facing one. You get a 64-megapixel primary camera, an 8-megapixel ultra-wide shooter, and a 2-megapixel macro. Selfies are captured by a 16-megapixel front camera. Photos taken from the main camera are good with impressive dynamic range but with a hint of oversaturation. That said, the camera does capture details well and images came out sharp and clear. Photos from the ultra-wide were pretty good but there was a little fringing around the edges. The selfie camera does a decent job as well.

At Rs. 41,999, the Realme GT offers almost all that you’d expect in a form factor that balances the screen size and ergonomics. There are a couple of other options with similar performance in and around this price point, but the Realme GT makes a very compelling case for itself.