With a super smooth 90 hertz hole punch display, quad cameras, massive battery, 30 watt fast charging and this killer blue gradient back all for less than $200. This is the realme 6 and it very well might just be the best phone that you can't buy.
Today I'm running solo, which has given me plenty of time to check out the brand new range of realme phones, one of which is trying to slide off the desk. Now, yes, technically, if you live in the Indian market, for example, you're probably very familiar with these. But as far as me being here in the US, it is very, very difficult to get your hands on a realme phone, which is a shame because these things are really good.
So take the realme 6 for example. In India, you can pick this up for around 14,000 rupees, which is significantly less than 200 US dollars. If you want to take a step down even farther, you can pick up the realme 6i which is available for something like 150 euros. It actually has a very interesting sort of finish on the back, although interestingly it's actually plastic which it doesn't really feel like it, it’s pretty premium. Now, there certainly downsides to using such a cheap phone. Now, yes, the display while it's fairly large and it does have a notch is only 720p, it’s lacking like 5GHz WiFi.
There's certainly some performance issues, but you have to consider just how cheap this is. It is impressively does still have four cameras, now four cameras might be a little bit ambitious considering that while it does have a 48 megapixel main camera as well as a an ultra wide, it has a macro lens as well as a depth sensor, which means it's like 2.5 cameras as far as I'm concerned. However, the quality isn't terrible. So this is a budget phone and it is very clear. Well, the main shooter actually isn't bad. I've certainly wouldn't call it great, but it's fine and at the price, no complaints, but the ultra wide is a little bit on the soft side and nice thing to have. And of course the telephoto is just a cropped in version of the standard camera.
However, again, we have to keep in mind just how cheap this phone is. And this is the the bottom of the range as the actual realme 6 is significantly better. Now keep in mind this is a sub $200 phone with a 90Hz 1080p display, you know like a better display than pretty much any phone that you could get last year short of like the OnePlus I guess.
This is a great example of how premium features like higher refresh rate displays have already trickled down to budget phones when they haven't even hit like the iPhone yet. Now, yes, this is not a AMOLED display. It is still an LCD, but besides that it has a hole punch. It is fairly vibrant, it gets decently bright, but importantly it is incredibly smooth with that 90Hz refresh rate.
Now yes, you can set the phone to automatically switch between 60 and 90 to save battery life but because it has reasonably mid range specs and a giant 4300 milliamp hour battery, I just left it on 90Hz and it has been absolutely no problem. It is so nice to see this on such an affordable phone and of course we do have the hole punch front facing camera. Which is respectable and might not be incredibly impressive, but when you flip around to the back not only do we have an upgrade from the 6i with a 64 megapixel camera.
Wait, I was about to take a photo of the camera but I realized this is dumb. Let me take a photo of... I mean, I'll say it is a lot of megapixels It might not be the sharpest thing in the universe. But you have to consider that this is a fairly affordable phone. So this is the slightly awkward part of the video in which I try to take a portrait selfie by myself so... Oh, wait, what, that's actually pretty good.
I mean, it definitely misse the edge of my glasses. That's actually that's not bad. We also do have the ultrawide camera here, but what I want to try is the video mode so actually can we go up to 4K? I think we can. This probably a bad idea. But why don't we try some 4K 30 HEVC encoding. I'll be right back. So this is what the 4K video looks like straight off the realme 6. Now while it might not make you throw your iPhone or Galaxy in the garbage what you're getting here is something which again punches well above its weight considering the price, just like the standard stills I was about to say it's not bad, but Ken would yell at me if I said that, it's perfectly acceptable.
Even though it doesn't really do a good job of staying focused, but that's fine. Are you really vlogging with your realme 6? Probably not. Although I guess technically you could. Inside you're getting impressive specs too. So it is taking advantage of a mid range MediaTek Helios G90T processor. But when you compare it to something like a Snapdragon 845 of two years ago, you're getting very equivalent performance. And keep in mind, this is again in a phone which is really quite cheap.
I mean, honestly, a lot of the specs of this phone would actually have been cutting edge one to two years ago Now you can get it for like, you know, 14,000 rupees, I definitely had to look up how much 14,000 rupees are, but once I found out I'm like “Hey! This is not bad.” I know it sounds like I really love this phone at this point. But they're even more features which are really impressive.
So in the box it comes with a 30 watt fast charger, which similar to what you get with the Warp Charge on the OnePlus side can charge this phone from 0 to 100 in less than an hour. It does have, well okay it has a very loud speaker but it only has a single bottom firing speaker, however, it gets so loud that I mostly listened to it like 60% volume, and surprise surprise, it still has a headphone jack.
It's a brave new world we live in my friends, although I'm not gonna lie kinda kinda of nice that the headphone jack back. For example, this is what these single speaker on my 1400 dollar Galaxy Z Flip sounds like, [Austin on phone] Hello and welcome my friends to Mystery Tech. And this is the realme 6. [Austin on phone] Hello and welcome my friends to Mystery Tech.
If however, you've got a few extra rupees in your pocket, and you can pick up the realme 6 pro which still comes in at only about 19 to 20,000 rupees or just about $250. Now not only does it have this very cool sort of textured back, but it takes a lot of what makes the realme 6 a very impressive phone and adds to it with things like a telephoto camera as well as well “different” specs, not entirely upgraded specs, but different specs. Inside you're getting a Snapdragon 720G which obviously here in the West Snapdragon is much more common.
However, when you actually put it side by side in the benchmarks, it trades blows with the standard realme 6 and actually falls behind in graphics. So that's really not enough of a reason for me to pick this phone up. Now it has pretty much all the same features. So do you have the 30 watt fast charging and everything like that, but in addition to the telephoto camera around back, you also have a secondary selfie camera which is an ultrawide angle.
So gonna turn off beauty mode. Okay, so this is a standard selfie, and this is the ultrawide. This is actually legitimately pretty nice feature. And of course we do have the telephoto option, which is fine. The telephoto does do a reasonable job of getting you obviously a tighter shot, but the rest of the cameras are pretty much identical, which means that they're fine. They're just not really great, I guess. Now yes, the pro does have a very slightly larger 6.6 as opposed to 6.5 inch display. Realistically it's the same resolution, same 90Hz refresh rate.
There's not a lot of difference between this and the standard realme 6. However, there's one more phone which actually legitimately is a flagship, and that is the realme X50 Pro 5G. Don't let the realme name fool you. This is a proper flagship with the same Snapdragon 865 inside as you'll find in something like the Galaxy S20 Ultra.
Not only does it also support 5G when you look at the performance, it's actually slightly better than the S20 thanks to the vapor chamber cooling inside. Also could we just take a second and point out just how nice this back looks. It's got this sort of like burnt orange which kind of turns red under some lights. It is incredibly cool looking and which is nice because all of these realme phones actually do come with a clear case in the box. Normally I'm like, I just throw a case on who cares.
But these backs, man, all four of these phones look legitimately really cool once you kind of get them in the reflections, I mean, that's just, it's a very different look, that's for sure. You also have an upgraded 90Hz OLED panel as opposed to the IPS in the realme 6 and the 6 Pro, and it does have an in display fingerprint sensor as opposed to the side mounted on those phones, although I kind of prefer the side mounted because it's a little bit more reliable.
But regardless, there's a lot to like here, especially considering that while yes, you give up the headphone jack. In exchange, you get a ridiculous 65 watt fast charging solution. Now sadly, my review unit actually didn't come with the charger in the box. But supposedly this phone can charge from 0 to 100 in just 35 minutes. So at this point, you might be forgiven for asking, what's the catch? I mean, these things seem too good to be true. Why exactly are they so cheap?
While yes, you can import them generally speaking, you will pay a fair bit extra but even so, it might be worth it right? Well, they're not perfect. The thing is at 600 euros, the X50 Pro 5G, while cheaper than something like an S20 Plus or an S20 Ultra does come with some downsides that those phones simply don't have. So first of all, are the cameras. Now the camera setup is almost identical to what you'll find on the standard realme 6 Pro, which is fine at that $250 price point.
But at 600 euros, that starts become just a little bit more of a bigger issue. Now beyond that, the build of Android that all of these phones shipped with is Android 10, which is great to see right out of the box. Many phones don't even have it yet. But the downside is that it is taking advantage of realme UI. Now it's certainly not a terrible skin of Android. It is fully compliant with like the Google Play Store right out of the box. But the problem is it's a little bit heavy handed it reminds me of kind of the older school days of Android.
And the bigger issue is bloatware. So all of these phones have varying degrees of bloatware inside, a lot of which you just simply can't get rid of short of doing something like rooting. Now, just like with the rest of this video, I'm willing to put up with some of this stuff if the price is right when you look at something like the realme 6, that is something that at $200 I will put up with a lot of bloatware because I'm saving so much money with this phone, I'll find some way aroun it or I'll just ignore it.
But at 600 euros, that's kind of the line where I'm not quite comfortable making that trade off. And that's really where I do feel like the realme 6 is the best phone out of all these options that I’ve taken a look at if you could get your hands on it for that 14,000 rupee price. It seems like an incredibly solid value. If you have to pay a lot more to import it like I would here in the United States though it kind of depends, is it a little bit more? Sure, totally worth it. Is it a lot more?
Maybe something like that Pixel 3a starts to look like a little bit of a stronger option, which is really why this is the best phone that you probably can't buy or at least if you can buy you might not want to buy Is a that clear enough conclusion? Probably not. Well anyway, thank you guys very much for reading all of this.
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