“The Realme X is expected to launch in India soon, but we managed to get our hands on the smartphone at its global launch event in China”
What seemed like a one-off implementation to achieve the holy grail of an all-display fascia suddenly seems to be the ‘in’ thing these days. You might have guessed it right. We’re talking about the trend of pop-up selfie cameras. And the latest brand to board this bandwagon is Realme. The brand ventured into the Chinese market with the introduction of the Realme X and X Lite. While the latter is just a rebranded Realme 3 Pro (review), the former does bring some interesting features to the table. We managed to get our hands on the Realme X and here’s how we’ll sum up our initial impressions.
As soon as you lay your eyes on the Realme X, what catches your attention is the phone’s impressive screen-to-body ratio. The use of an elevating selfie camera module also means that the handset is able to offer a larger-than-usual screen size of 6.53-inches. With full HD+ resolution, the panel offers sharp visuals with good colour reproduction. The Gorilla Glass 5-protected screen also comes with a sixth-gen under-display fingerprint scanner which works as advertised.
Coming to the pop-up selfie shooter, it’s not as fast as we’d have liked. However, the brand has mentioned that the units we tested aren’t final and things would change when the Realme X becomes available commercially. The pop-up module holds a 16-meg f/2.0 snapper for capturing selfies. The other design elements are fairly standard, though it’s odd to see the brand continuing with the dated micro-USB port for charging and data transfers.
Another big change over the Realme 3 Pro is that the Realme X flaunts a high-res 48-megapixel IMX586 f/1.7 shooter on the back, which is paired with a 5MP depth-sensing unit. As usual, you get features such as AI scene recognition, and super slow-mo video recording on the phone. In our brief usage, the cameras seemed to offer a good level of detail in test shots, though we’d like to refrain from passing any judgment at this point.
With regards to the internals, the Realme X isn’t much different from the Realme 3 Pro. The smartphone is fuelled by the Snapdragon 710 octa-core processor, which is paired with 4GB / 6GB / 8GB RAM. Depending upon the variant you go for, the handset ships with 64GB or 128GB user-expandable storage.
On the software side of things, the Realme X boots Color OS 6.0 running atop Android 9.0 Pie. Powering the show is a 3,765mAh battery which comes with Super VOOC 3.0 support.
The handset is available in White and Blue hues, but you can also opt for special Onion and Garlic editions. The Realme X price in India hasn’t been announced yet, but we do know it’ll arrive in the country sooner than later. And if its Chinese pricing of RMB 1,499 (~Rs 15,500, for the base variant) is any indication, then the mid-range segment has the potential to be shaken up by Realme, yet again.
Photos by Keshav Khera