Realme, a smartphone brand from China, has started selling its phones in the U.K. and Europe, beginning with the Realme 3 Pro. We’ve looked at Realme’s phones in the past, and have been consistently surprised by the low prices. Has this continued? Most definitely. The Realme 3 Pro costs 175 British pounds, or 200 euros, and the specification, build, and design is good enough to make it an astonishing value.
It’s cheap, but it doesn’t look cheap, The plastic rear panel has an oblique gradient line, that Realme says was inspired by the look of a race track, and comes in two different colors — a blue and a purple. It catches the light nicely, and doesn’t feel plasticky, even though it weighs a light 172 grams. A fingerprint sensor sits towards the top of the back, alongside a dual-lens camera and flash unit. Set inside a small bump, it does not stick out too far from the 8.3mm body.
The camera consists of a 16-megapixel, f/1.7 aperture main lens, and a 5-megapixel f/2.4 second lens. It has dual-pixel technology, can take bokeh portrait shots, and has a Nightscape mode that takes several photos at different exposures to create the best possible low-light photo. The Chroma Boost feature boosts colour and brightness, while the Ultra HD mode takes enhanced 64MP photos. It also has a 960fps slow-motion video model and 4K video recording with EIS, plus a 25-megapixel selfie camera with an A.I. beauty mode.
Around the front is a notched, 6.3-inch IPS LCD screen with a 2,340 x 1,080-pixel resolution, and covered in Gorilla Glass 5. Being displayed in Android 9, but covered in Oppo’s Color OS user interface. If you’re wondering why it’s an Oppo interface, it’s because Realme is part of the same smartphone empire as Oppo, Vivo, and OnePlus. There is a Realme theme over the top, and the entire experience differentiates the user experience greatly from the Android you’ll find on the Google Pixel 3a, for example.
Other interesting features include a 4,045mAh battery with a super fast charging system, taking it from zero to 100% in just 80 minutes (although it does this through an aging MicroUSB connector), plus a 3.5mm headphone socket, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 710 processor, and two configurations — 4GB of RAM and 64Gb of storage, or 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. The prices? It’s 175 British pounds for the 4GB/64GB, or 220 pounds for the 6GB/128GB model.
You’ll be able to buy the Realme 3 Pro from June 5 at the new realme website. We were recently impressed by the Realme X smartphone, and while we have had mixed experiences with previous models based mostly on the software side., it’s impossible to deny the value on display here.
