Realme 5 full review: Best performance and camera smartphone in sub-Rs 10,000 range

Realme has become the new market influence with its aggressive tactics of beating its own sport in perfecting its camera and processors with each of its successive launches. Realme has been leading the mid-segment smartphone market by providing the latest technology, style and camera sensors infused in its devices within the mid-Rs 20,000 segments. With the launch of Realme 5 under Rs 10,000, the company has dared to take a massive leap in providing its customers, cheaper phones with peak-high technology, creating a benchmark in the industry.

Realme 5, the latest revelation by the Chinese smartphone manufacturers, has been kicking its competitors off their tracks with its challenging price and impeccable specifications. The device challenges most of the mid-range brands like Vivo and Oppo and Redmi smartphones with its screen size, processor, security and is superior to most smartphones with its quad-camera setup.

Cutting down the comparisons, here is the full review for Realme 5 after 12-days of usage, keeping the pricing of the device in mind.

Built quality: Attractive and stylish

The built quality of the handset seems to be amazing with the tall display intact on the phone and the back posing out with its diamond-cut design on a plastic case. The overall hands-on the device gives a premium feel. Though the device is a bit heavy because of its large battery, customers will have to compromise on the weight to gain longer juice for their usage.

Display: Taller and brighter

Enclosing a 6.5-inch IPS LCD display, Realme 5 gives the user a tall bezel-free look. The screen with a resolution of 720x1600 pixels offering 270 ppi pixel density, is good to go in artificial lighting and indoor conditions. Under the sunny sky, the display seems to be dull and some might find it difficult to use it in outdoor settings. The overall display is clear, vibrant and gives a balanced look without over-saturation.

Security: Responsive but with some bugs

Realme has invested a lot in perfecting the security of its devices. With Realme 5, we see that the fingerprint scanner at the back is very responsive and unlocks within seconds of placing the finger on the sensor. The face recognition was found to be very fast and responsive and accepted the facial algorithms from different angles and lengths.

A glitch was noticed during the face recognition testing where the device was getting unlocked even when the complete face other than the eyes were covered. This raises a question to how accurate is the face recognition security provided by the company and can it surpass the face cloning test. Let's hope that the company finds a way to patch the bug in the upcoming security update.

Performance: Offers the best in price-range

Realme 5 is powered by Snapdragon 665 chipset running on the Android v9.0 operating system. Configured with 3GB/32GB storage, Realme 5 hosts an octa-core (2 GHz, Quad-core, Kryo 260 + 1.8 GHz, quad-core, Kryo 260) processor.

The overall user experience of the device is average with minimal lags when multiple apps are minimised on the app drawer. Being a tall handset, Realme 5 gives a good gaming experience with moderate graphics settings. It showed some lag in high resolution and heavy games like Asphalt 9 and PUBG. Realme 5 was quite responsive to multi-tasking and reported negligible lag and app crash.

Talking about the extensive use, though the device was not used to its limits a continuous usage for 3 hours with prolonged video streaming and gaming, witnessed multiple app crashes. The usage was against all barriers and was not applying to the day-to-day usage, so the customers will not have to worry unless they are extensive users.

Multimedia: Immersive experience

Realme 5 provides a longer landscape view for the multimedia experience. The viewing angles are great when compared to all the other devices within the price range. It gives a stiff competition to the Redmi devices in the price range. The display pop-out vivid colours and perfect saturation for providing an immersive experience to the users.

Now coming to the speaker grills, the device lacks good clarity in both the speaker and the earphone output. The audio output is comparably low in the device and does not provide a good and clear experience. This might kill the multimedia experience of the handset.

Camera: Built for photography

Realme has left the market way behind by pushing the quad-camera setup within the sub-Rs 10,000 price range. The camera has a great dynamic range with amazing edge detection capability in the portrait mode. The ultra-wide photography also gives great clarity and depth even though the pictures are not taken by the primary sensors. Even if the ultra-wide-photography has smooth edges without edge cuts, what more can be expected from an 8MP shooter within the price range.

The macro-mode also clicked good pictures but, the device lacked a good self-adjusting ISO because of which without external lighting, the device could not produce clear macro clicks.

The cameras also allowed clear 4K videos from the rear primary shooter. The device though shot 4K videos; the focal stability might be an issue for some who understand photography by depth. If not very good as compared to higher models, the device is capable of producing good and clear videos.

Batter: More the juice, more the experience

Realme 5 boasts of a 5000mAh battery. Extensive usage of the device for a day with heavy multimedia streaming, gaming with regular chat and about 4 hours of calling-time cut down the battery juice by about 75 percent. So according to the tests done on the initial days, the battery performance was very good that allowed a device usage of about 34 hours until it needed to be plugged into the charging board.

The major problem that arose with the large battery was the time required to charge. The battery takes a charging time of more than two hours, which is quite a long time to regain its juice.