Realme 6 review: Brilliant budget phone and the best in its class

BBK Electronics Corporation, has once again defied the laws of budget phones with the new realme 6 series. and their headliner – the realme 6.

It’s the cheapest 90Hz phone you can buy today. And it has a lot more to offer than just a high refresh rate screen.

The newest entrant in the smartphone market in Kenya, is a mid-range excellence and introduces a 90-Hz display.

While smartphones with 90-Hz displays are becoming more and more popular, they are still a rare sight in the mid-range category.

It is interesting to see how one manufacturer after another is conquering the market with good but also cheap hardware.

The realme 6 runs on Android 10 OS plus Realme UI and comes with Mediatek MT6785 Helio G90T processor, 6.5 inch screen, 128GB internal storage and 8GB RAM.

It also comes with a Quad main camera set up (64 MP + 8 MP + 2 MP + 2 MP) and a 4300mAh battery, with fast charging.

The positive

Fluid experience – the gadget comes with a 6.5″ LCD display that gives it a near bezel-less design close to 90 percent screen to body ratio, apart from the chin and the punch-hole interruption at the top left corner. The screen is vibrant and at a resolution of 2400 by 1080 pixels, decent enough for consuming multimedia content.

Selfie cameras – it comes with five cameras, four at the back and one front-facing. The AI-powered quad-camera setup includes a 64MP f/1.8 primary sensor, an 8MP f/2.3 wide-angle lens with 119-degree field of view, a 2MP f/2.4 macro lens and a 2MP f/2.4 monochrome depth sensor and an LED light. The camera module is surrounded by metal trim. There’s a 16MP punch-hole selfie camera.

Design, materials and build quality – Each medal, as you know, has two sides. The same can be said about the design of realme 6. Its front looks modern enough. There is no boring teardrop-shaped notch in the center, but a hole in the upper left corner of the screen. Yes, it’s also not new, but it’s much trendier. The bezels on the sides and the top are relatively thin. Only the lower area has an increased height. This is one side of the realme 6.

The negative

The other side is represented by the cameras that are arranged in a column. We’re talking typical elongated shape that’s located in a no less familiar place – the upper left corner. No trendy squares or rounded rectangles for you.

Rear cameras could do with more tuning – there is a huge variance in white balance performance when switching between camera modes. This is particularly noticeable when alternating between ultra-wide and telephoto. There are trade-offs in either. For example, the ultra-wide mode falls short on dynamic range while the telephoto lens isn’t very sharp and there are noticeable artifacts.

The back – now, the back is much worse. I expected glass, but got plastic. The front uses Corning Gorilla Glass 3. But I can’t find fault with the build quality. The phony feels monolithic and sturdy. No dust and moisture protection has been declared by the manufacturer.

Earphones – Although it has a headphone jack, it does not come with earphones, which you have to purchase separately.

The realme 6 performance – he Realme 6 uses a chipset not from Qualcomm, but from Mediatek. Namely, Mediatek MT6785, aka Helio G90T. This is an 8-core platform with 2 Cortex-A76 cores with a maximum clock speed of up to 2.05 GHz and 6 Cortex-A55 cores with a clock frequency of up to 2.0 GHz. The graphics accelerator in the smartphone is the Mali-G76 MC4.

Overall, at Sh29,999, realme 6 did a mostly stellar job evolving the hardware. Cheap-feeling volume buttons aside, the realme 6 is a piece of kit that doesn’t weigh too much in your hand and has good ergonomics to boot.