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Realme 5 review: Impressive smartphone with quad camera, long battery
The budget smartphone space is cluttered, but if you look closely, you can easily pick the right device for you. Realme is known for bringing feature-heavy devices with aggressive pricing, and has done it yet again with one of its recent offerings.
Realme 5 is a stripped-down version of Realme 5 Pro and the successor to Realme 3 smartphone. With a price range starting from Rs 9,999 (3GB RAM, 32GB storage), the smartphone boasts a quad-camera set up, a powerful processor and a 5,000-mAH battery.
But does the feature-heavy offering from Realme ring a bell with the performance-hungry users? Let's find out.
Realme 5 design
In terms of overall design, Realme's latest offering has a 6.5-inch HD Plus (720×1,600 pixels) display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection. The diamond pattern on the back has been updated to a more crystalline design, giving it a neat look.
The smartphone has a polycarbonate body with a laminated plastic back that makes it susceptible to fingerprints. The crystalline pattern and gradient design look striking, though. There is also a waterdrop-style notch at the front that houses the selfie camera. The phone is a bit bulky and due to its screen size, single-hand use gets difficult. The bottom of the phone has a speaker, headphone socket and a micro-USB charging port.
The fingerprint sensor at the rear is within reach and responds quickly. The speed at which facial recognition works is impressive. It fared fine in low light, too.
Battery
Realme 5 boasts a 5,000-mAH battery and as per expectation, it lasted quite a while even with moderate-to-heavy use on regular basis. On a rough account, it easily lasted for over a day with heavy camera usage and a few games of PUBG, besides regular calls, texts, and music streaming. However, it lacks fast charging support, so you'd have to be patient as it takes its own sweet time to fully charge.
Display
The front has a 6.5-inch HD+ IPS LCD screen with Corning's Gorilla Glass 3 protection. The bezels are minimal and there is a dewdrop notch housing the selfie camera.
The brightness is sharp but a full HD screen may have added to the experience, considering the size of the screen. The contrast is good but the colours could have been vivid. The gesture-based navigation makes it easier to use with a single hand.
Performance:
The phone is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 665 chipset with up to 128 GB of internal storage and up to 4 GB of RAM. It features the Android Pie operating system-based ColorOS 6.0 user interface, which offers a customised skin.
There's hardly anything to point out when it comes to performance. the overall experience was good with the phone faring well on speed. It can easily handle heavy usage, and the switch from playing a heavy game to camera or texting is smooth. However, the phone is a bit bulky and difficult to hold, so, you can't expect a rough usage.
The phone lacks Widevine L1 support, though, which limits its ability to play content from over-the-top platforms in HD resolution.
Camera:
The quad-camera set up is one of the key highlights of the phone and considering the price, it's quite a deal. Other than the 12-megapixel primary camera with f/1.8 aperture, it offers 8-megapixel wide-angle camera of 119-degree field of view, 2-megapixel depth sensor, and a 2-megapixel macro lens. One the front you have the 13 MP camera.
The camera setup produces fine images with crisp details and clear saturation. The portrait mode delivers fine pictures with blurred backgrounds, even while maintaining the minor details. I felt the camera doesn't over-blurr and that makes the close-up shots look good. The ultra-wide angle lens lacks autofocus but you can use Nightscape with it. I was able to get a good view under the frame so it did the job well. Also, I expected some grains with the ultra-wide mode, but the picture was fine
Verdict:
Considering the price tag of Rs 11,999 (4GB RAM, 128GB Storage version), Realme 5 offers a slew of features without compromising on performance. The camera setup is impressive and the battery allows the user to make full use of the phone. Quick-Charge support and full HD screen would have added to the package but the price point and the features offered don't leave space for complaints.
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Realme 5 review: Come for quad cameras, stay for the battery life
In a little over a year, Realme has launched a little over a dozen smartphones in India ranging between Rs 5,000 to Rs 20,000. Most of these phones have earned high praises without which the company would not have seen the kind of popularity most newbie brands yearn for in such a short span of time. This year, Realme is looking more aggressive than usual, launching phones back to back. After the Realme 3 and Realme 3 Pro earlier this year, the company has already come out with the Realme 5 and Realme 5 Pro.
Why did Realme launch the Realme 5 and Realme 5 Pro less than six months after the Realme 3-series? Simple. It wanted to be one of the first brands to launch affordable quad camera phones. And that's exactly what the two phones highlight. But in typical Realme fashion, that's not all they boast of.
Compared to the Realme 3, the Realme 5 is a bit of a show off. It gets a new crystal design, more cameras, more battery and a new Snapdragon chipset. There are some notable upgrades here, but it's clearly a phone with excess features. In our Realme 5 review, we take a look at whether these excesses work in favour of the smartphone that costs under Rs 10,000 or if they make the Realme 3 look better for its simplicity.
Realme 5 Design
The Realme 5 is definitely a bulkier and heavier phone weighing at 198 grams as opposed to the Realme 3 at 175 grams. You can feel the difference the moment you hold the two devices in your hands. It also gets a bigger display compared to the Realme 5 Pro and it's not always easy
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Realme 5 Pro review
The Realme 5 Pro succeeds the Realme 3 Pro in just four months, yet manages to bring in significant updates without pushing the price tag by a lot.
The most notable upgrade comes with the camera, as the Realme 5 Pro is the first of many devices to sport a quad-camera setup and will be a trend in followed by most Realme devices going forward. Secondly, the processor gets a slight boost with the Snapdragon 712 instead of the 710. Lastly, the back panel gets a facelift with a new design.
With all of that, Realme has managed to make a device that is one of the best for its price, and gives much needed competition to the Redmi Note 7 Pro in India.
Realme 5 Pro price and availability
In India, the Realme 5 Pro is available in three configurations. There's a base 4+64GB variant which is priced at Rs 13,999, followed by the 6+64GB variant at Rs 14,999 and the top variant with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage is priced at Rs 16,999.
Design
The Realme 5 Pro aspires to look a lot more premium than its price tag would suggest. More evidently because of its “Crystal design” on the back which almost looks like facets of a diamond. It looks cool but is a little overdone currently as almost every smartphone manufacturer has some form of a gradient blue finish available.
However, it is still a plastic back and will be susceptible to scratches over time. Thankfully, my unit has had none till now, and the included case adds a little more peace of mind.
It definitely doesn’t feel very premium in the hand and attracts ample smudges too. Overall, it’s a functional design that isn’t too slippery or bulky, but is unlikely to blow you away. It looks more interesting than your regular plastic back phone and doesn't feel flimsy.
Display
Smartphone displays in this budget are usually pretty basic, and the Realme 5 Pro is no exception. Spread across 6.3-inches, we get an IPS LCD panel with a resolution of 2340 x 1080. Eating into that screen, there’s a small waterdrop notch housing the front camera. Realme states that this “minidrop” notch is smaller than the previous generation, and by the looks of it, it definitely seems small.
The panel itself is pretty color accurate but lacks the oomph inherently present on OLED displays. But considering the price of the Realme 5 Pro, that is a reasonable trade-off. Unless you compare it to an AMOLED panel, the colors and contrast won't disappoint.
Maximum brightness levels are pretty adequate too, bringing serviceable sunlight legibility. Similarly, the minimum brightness was also pretty ow for use in dark scenarios.
As for protection, we get Gorilla Glass 3+. There's a simple plastic screen protector pre-applied with the phone which is always appreciated.
Performance
Thanks to companies like Xiaomi, India has grown to be a very processor-centric market, and Realme has carefully powered the 5 Pro with the Snapdragon 712 AIE chipset. This chipset has been fabricated at 10nm, bringing in higher efficiency and raw processing power than any other phone in this price segment. Interestingly, the SD 712 is supposed to be 10% more powerful than the SD 710 which powers the much more expensive Realme X.
For regular use including social media, multi-tasking, calling and texting, etc., the Realme 5 Pro never broke a sweat. Every action was usually snappy, just slightly bogged down by not-so-fluid animations. The Snapdragon 712 is paired with up to 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM and UFS 2.1 storage which work in tandem to increase performance and reduce app opening times.
Another increasingly common use case in this segment is gaming. The processor always held its own for even heavy 3D games such as PUBG while providing a consistent and stable frame-rate throughout, with minimal heating. We've seen this same chipset perform a lot worse in other phones, so Realme must have done some solid optimising.
The Realme 5 Pro runs on ColorOS 6.0.1 built atop Android 9 Pie. ColorOS is not a light skin by any means, and brings a lot of cosmetic and functional changes over stock Android. Everything from the icons to the notification shade is very different and can overwhelm those coming from stock-ish Android interfaces. Customization are limited to visual changes such as the wallpaper and icons, but most other elements remain intact.
Having said that, it does bring in some useful features such as a private space for sensitive content, hotspot management to limit the data by each user and downloadable themes.
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Realme 5 review: Great design and versatile cameras
Realme 5 Review: The big picture
The Realme 5 enters a fairly crowded segment. Between Xiaomi’s myriad options and the likes of Asus’ Zenfone series, Realme has made a mark for itself by stepping up the hardware game. Add to it a reasonably well polished software build and cameras that are a cut above the rest, and it’s no surprise the phones are extremely popular.
In fact, according to IDC, Realme garnered a respectable 7.7% of the market in India during the second quarter of 2019. This is no mean feat, given Xiaomi’s stronghold on the market and ample competition from the likes of Samsung, Oppo, and Vivo.
Design
164.4 x 75.6 x 9.3mm
198g
Fingerprint reader
Polycarbonate construction
Design has always been a strong suite for Realme. The Realme 5 furthers that tradition with a beautiful diamond cut finish. While the finish isn’t quite as aggressive as on some previous devices, I feel the restraint works in its favour. Our unit is finished in a glittering blue that has an almost jewel-like appearance. Up top, you can find the quad camera module as well as the fingerprint reader
The phone errs on the heavier side, but that can be attributed to the large battery. I suspect most people will be okay with the trade off. Build quality is generally solid and the buttons have a good feel to them. If I had to nitpick, the volume rockers are placed just a bit too close to each other, which made me fumble around when adjusting the volume when the phone was in my pocket.
Display
6.5 inches
1,600 x 720 HD+
269ppi
20:9 aspect ratio
Gorilla Glass 3
IPS LCD panel
The Realme 5 trades screen size for resolution. Clocking in at 6.5-inches, the display is one of the largest in the sub-$150 segment, though the HD+ resolution doesn’t do it any favours. Text rendering, in particular, quickly reveals blurry edges and a distinct lack of sharpness. The default color profile has an obvious blue tinge to it and is far from neutral.
Performance
Snapdragon 665
Adreno 610
3GB/4GB RAM
32GB, 64GB, or 128GB ROM
The Snapdragon 665 on the Realme 5 is an interesting beast. Built on an 11nm process (compared to the 14nm process of the Snapdragon 660 of the Redmi Note 7S) you can expect to see some gains in battery life. On the other hand, the peak clock speed has been dropped a bit, which means that performance, at least in CPU benchmarks, isn’t quite as good as the 660. The improved GPU should, however, give a boost in gaming applications. All this to say that the Snapdragon 665 isn’t quite a performance leap forward and you should keep your expectations tempered.
Battery
5,000mAh
No fast charging
Micro-USB
A key requirement for entry-level phones in India is tremendous battery life. It is no surprise that we are seeing a host of smartphones packing enormous 5,000mAh batteries. The Realme 5 is one such phone and, predictably, battery life is pretty darn great. Of course, there is a caveat here. The phone does not support fast-charging and topping off that huge battery takes an equally huge amount of time. You will have to put aside a little over 150 minutes for the phone to charge fully from scratch.
Software
Love it or hate it, Color OS is what you get on Realme’s hardware. I find it odd that the company keeps flipping between different visual styles for notification shade toggles and iconography. The phone makes extensive use of white in its interface, a definite eyesore.
My biggest gripe with budget devices in general is the boatloads of pre-installed apps. The Realme 5 is no exception, and while most can be uninstalled, the ‘Hot Apps’ folder and its constantly refreshed list of apps cannot. Beyond that, however, this is a fairly typical budget smartphone from a Chinese manufacturer. It comes with the standard range of customisation options, including gestures, a floating convenience key, and the magazine-style lock screen that constantly refreshes the wallpaper.
Camera
Rear:
Standard: 12MP, f/1.8
Ultrawide: 8MP, f/2.2
Depth sensor: 2MP, f/2.4
Macro: 2MP, f/2.4
Front:
Standard: 13MP, f/2.0
4K at 30FPS
Realme has been delivering the goods as far as camera quality is concerned and the Realme 5 keeps pace for the most part. Images look pretty good, but have a bit too much sharpening. This isn’t particularly noticeable on the phone’s display, but enlarged on a monitor and you can easily spot the processing.
Audio
The Realme 5’s single speaker turned out to be sufficiently loud for blasting some music or for taking a call. Quality isn’t particularly great. There is no bass here, but the audio doesn’t crackle unless you crank the volume up to the maximum level. I would say the Realme 5’s speaker performance is in line with most of its competitors.
Realme 5 review: The verdict
The Realme 5 is a good package that redefines what you can get in an entry-level smartphone. Between the top-tier build quality, the versatile camera, and a solid hardware package, it’s hard not to get excited about this smartphone.
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Realme 5 Review
In India, it's hard to not have heard of smartphone maker Realme by now. Even though it's a relatively new company, it started life within Oppo, and thanks to aggressive marketing and pricing, it has managed tremendous growth over the past year. With the budget smartphone war constantly escalating, the company wants to disrupt the market once more with its new Realme 5 series and Realme is making the leap from dual to quad cameras on the backs of its phones, across the board, including models which are priced below Rs. 10,000.
The Realme 5 is a big upgrade over the Realme 3 (Review) across the board, including its processing power, cameras, and battery capacity — which the company hopes will set a new bar for what buyers can expect from a phone in this segment. Armed with an impressive resume of features, it's time to see if the Realme 5 can deliver an equally impressive Android experience.
Realme 5 design
Realme has updated its design language a bit with the Realme 5. The phone still uses a polycarbonate body with a laminated plastic back, but it's taller than the Realme 3 and features a larger display. The design of the diamond pattern on the back has been updated to a more crystalline pattern, which looks neat and helps the phone stand out. The Crystal Blue finish that we have is very striking, but if you're looking for subtlety, the Crystal Purple option would be a better pick. Also, minor scuffs from everyday use are going to be less visible on the purple version than they will be on the blue Realme 5.
The size of this phone does make one-handed use quite cumbersome, and even with large hands, we struggled to tap anywhere near the top of the display. Thankfully, ColorOS offers a one-handed mode to help tackle this issue. The Realme 5 is a bit heavy too, at nearly 200g. Button placement and tactile feedback of the volume and power buttons are good and at the bottom, we have the single speaker, headphone socket, and a Micro-USB charging port.
The front has a 6.5-inch HD+ (720x1600 pixels) resolution display, with a small dewdrop notch and fairly slim bezels all around. The notch is slightly smaller on the Realme 5, although it's not easily noticeable at first glance. There's scratch protection in the form of Corning's Gorilla Glass 3 as well. The display also has a pre-applied screen guard, which got annoying for us pretty quickly but your mileage will likely vary. We found the brightness to be more than adequate, and colours had good saturation. The sharpness of text and icons isn't the best but this is only noticeable if you use this phone side-by-side with one that has a full-HD (or higher) screen.
The Realme 5 is among the first set of Realme phones to pack in four cameras at the back, but we'll get into the details of this later on. There's a fingerprint sensor in the middle of the rear, which works well, and there's face recognition too. Just like previous Realme offerings, face recognition is very quick. In low light, the screen compensates for the lack of light so you can unlock your phone even in the dark.
Last but not least, Realme says that this phone features multi-layer humidity protection for the SIM slots, gaps, battery cover, etc, and says it should be able to survive light splashes of water. In the box, the Realme 5 ships with a silicone case, a 10W adapter, a Micro-USB cable, an extra screen guard, a SIM eject tool, and the usual quick start and warranty booklets.
Realme 5 specifications and software
The Realme 5 is the first phone to be announced in India with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 665 SoC. As its name indicates, this processor sits between the Snapdragon 660 and Snapdragon 675. This SoC is built on an 11nm fabrication process, so it's more power efficient than the Snapdragon 660 and it even uses the same Kryo 260 cores. The integrated GPU has been upgraded to the Adreno 610, which should enable better gaming performance.
The Realme 5 is available in three variants — 3GB of RAM with 32GB of storage (Rs. 9,999); 4GB of RAM with 64GB of storage (Rs. 10,999); and the one we have, which has 4GB RAM with 128GB of storage (Rs. 11,999). Other Realme 5 specifications include dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5, slots for two Nano-SIMs plus a microSD card of up to 256GB in capacity, support for four satellite navigation systems, USB-OTG, FM radio, and the usual suite of sensors.
The Realme 5 ships with ColorOS 6.0.1, which is the latest version of it. Realme has added a few cosmetic refinements to the interface, compared to what we recently saw in the Realme X (Review). Our unit also had the July 2019 Android security patch at the time of our review.Realme says it has refined the look and feel of some of its app icons and UI elements based on user feedback. The company's own apps, such as ORoaming, Calculator, etc, have a flatter, cleaner look.
ColorOS has gotten rid of the oversized bubbles around notification toggles switches, for a flatter and cleaner look too. The battery section in the Settings app is also a lot easier to read compared to the previous version, although we're still waiting on that battery level graph.
We didn't have any issues with spammy notifications from apps on this phone. You still get the same plethora of preinstalled apps as always, including DailyHunt, Helo, etc, but all of these can be uninstalled.
Realme 5 performance and battery life
We generally had a good experience using the Realme 5 on a daily basis. We got used to the thickness and weight of this phone after a couple of days, even though we found it top-heavy and one-handed use continued to be a challenge. The bundled phone case doesn't add much bulk, and provides a layer of protection to the back. The display offers very good sunlight legibility and its size makes it great for media consumption. There's no Widevine L1 support, though, which means video streaming apps won't be able to play content at HD or higher resolutions.
The AnTuTu benchmark refused to run completely, but in all our other standard tests, we got fairly good numbers. In PCMark, we got a score of 7,719 points, while the T-Rex graphics test in GFXbench managed 50fps. Compared to the Helio P70 in the Realme 3 and even the recent Oppo A9 (Review), the Snapdragon 665 generally has slightly better scores in gaming benchmarks but for CPU, its pretty neck and neck.
Realme 5 cameras
This is where things get really interesting. The Realme 5 is the first phone with four cameras to be priced under Rs. 10,000 in India, and the company is really driving this point home. Other than the primary 12-megapixel primary sensor and 2-megapixel depth sensor, Realme has given this phone an 8-megapixel wide-angle camera with a 119 degree field of view, and a 2-megapixel macro camera for closeup shots. The primary camera has an f/1.8 aperture and PDAF, so focusing is quick. The ultra-wide-angle camera lacks autofocus but you can use Nightscape with it. The macro lens has a very narrow aperture of f/2.8, so it's not useful in low light. During the day however, you can get some really detailed closeups.
Verdict
The Realme 5 is a significant upgrade over the Realme 3 (Review), and the fact that its pricing starts just below Rs. 10,000 is commendable. Compared to the Realme 3, you get a slightly better processor, nearly two-day long battery life, and improved cameras. Plus, the addition of the wide-angle and macro cameras definitely gives you more creative freedom to capture different types of shots.
Some things to keep in mind are the weight and size of this phone. The bigger battery has made it heavy, and the tall display might not suit everyone, especially if your routine involves a lot of one-handed use. The cameras also struggle in low light, for both stills and video.
Considering you get a dedicated slot for storage expansion, the base variant of the Realme 5 offers better value compared to the 128GB version, which feels a little expensive considering there are phones in the sub-Rs. 15,000 segment that offers higher resolution displays, fast charging and equal or better processors such as the the Redmi Note 7S (Review) and the Realme 3 Pro (Review). If you don't mind the HD display, then the Realme 5 is still worth getting for its big battery and versatile wide and macro cameras.
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