Realme made its entry into the market a few months ago and it has come up with some interesting phones. We have with us the Realme 5 Pro today which is their mid-segment phone, and the initial impressions are nice.
Introduction and Hardware:
As soon as I took the phone in my hand, I could feel that it had a good grip. Though it has a glossy and shiny body, it does not feel slippery when you hold it. It comes with a cover in the box which has a snug and tight fit and feels a bit sturdier than most covers that come in the box. We have the Crystal green colour which is like a shiny emerald green. It looks great, but the surface does attract fingerprints.
At the rear of the phone is the fingerprint sensor and four cameras (more on that in the Camera section). I found the fingerprint sensor to be super fast especially while unlocking. I think the lack of unlock animation makes it seem even faster than most other phones; either way I was impressed.
The phone comes with a 3.5mm jack and uses the USB-C standard for charging. It sports a 4035 mAh battery and supports fast charging which Realme refers to as VOOC Flash Charge 3.0 and takes 1.38 hours to fully charge the phone. The Realme 5 Pro comes with a 6.3″ screen which they refer to as “dewdrop display”. It has a little round notch in the centre. The phone comes with a Snapdragon 712 AIE processor which is pretty good considering the price point of this phone. There are various RAM options, and the one we have with us has 8GB along with 128 gigs of storage on board.
Camera:
As mentioned above, it has a quad camera set-up. Starting from top, the first one is a 8 MP ultra-wide angle camera, below that is the main 48 MP primary camera which has an aperture of f/1.8 and a 1/2″ sensor. Next is the portrait camera which is for depth sensing, and lastly it is the 2 MP macro camera for super-close subjects. The Realme 5 Pro does not have a telephoto camera.
By default, the phone does not shoot in a resolution of 48 MP, but using the same camera, it scales it down to about 12 MP (4000 x 3000 resolution). There is a separate mode which says “Ultra 48 MP” and this is the one which gives you a resolution of 8000 x 6000. The other modes are nightscape, pano, expert, time-lapse, slo-mo, and Ultra Macro. For taking wide-angle photos, there was only a small icon on the top which looked more like the icon for taking panoramic pictures and was a bit unintuitive. The expert mode allows you to control the ISO, shutter speed, white balance and the focus. The Realme 5 Pro can shoot videos in 720P, 1080P as well as 4K, however there is no expert mode for the videos.
I liked the pictures that it shoots in Nightscape mode. If you’re shooting at night, they certainly look much brighter.
Photos clicked in the “Ultra 48 MP” mode, surely can be zoomed into more, although the clarity is just average. Of-course, given the price point, I don’t expect flagship-like sharpness.
ultra-wide 
1x 
2x digital zoom 
5x digital zoom
The macro camera is not too bad either. You can get pretty close to the subject. However this being a 2MP camera, gives you less clarity when zoomed in.
Overall, I liked the performance of the camera. It isn’t of a very superior quality, but if you’re on a budget constraint, then you surely get a bang for your buck.
The front camera is a 16 MP shooter powered by the Sony IMX 471 sensor and is quite good. It has a portrait mode to give that bokeh effect when you’re clicking selfies. It also has the nightscape mode for which is useful during low light situations. I was pleasantly surprised to see the pano mode for the front camera. I’ve seen this feature on very few phones; this does not go as broad as a conventional panorama but you pan towards the left and right a bit, and it will combine the photos into one so that more people fit in the frame.
Software and real life usage:
The Realme 5 Pro runs the Color OS 6 which is based on Android Pie. The icons and the colour schemes look a tad bit outdated, but the phone feels fast enough for everyday use. Switching between apps does not have any lag for most situations. The geekbench score in our test was at 319 (single-core) and 1490 (multi-core) which isn’t the best, but not bad given the price point.
The notification bar has icons in various colours – blue, green, and yellow – for various functions. Also, when you try to increase the brightness to the maximum, the phone warns you saying “high power consumption”.
The battery life seemed quite good with a day and a half of moderate to high usage. The Realme 5 Pro has some really cool screen-off gestures. Drawing a certain letter (or a particular pattern) does a predefined task. For eg.: Drawing a “V” will directly switch on the flash light, or an “O” will open the camera; you can also customize various patterns for various functions.
Another practical feature in-built in the phone is called “Component Check”. This is done through the phone manager app. It checks the various hardware components in the phone like bluetooth, wifi, & GPS receivers, camera, charging port. proximity sensor etc. and tells you if they’re working or not.
You also get dark mode on this phone despite it not having Android 10 yet. It works not only for native apps, but third party apps too which is pretty cool.
Final Verdict:
Given that the price of the Realme 5 Pro does not have a comma in it (AED 850), it has some great features. On paper, it comes very close to some of the flagship phones in the market. Except for the latest processor or the sharpest camera, it has got pretty much everything. If you’re considering getting a phone for everyday tasks, and nothing too power intensive, then this will certainly meet your expectations.
