realme 6 review

Where to buy

realme isn't a firm that particularly sells itself on having "flagship" phones, because its focus is instead on the low-cost youth market, with an array of bright and shiny phones that offer good value without being market leading.

That changes – if even only a little – with the realme 6, the effective new "flagship" of the realme brand that brings mid-range pricing to an Android device with an appealing 90Hz display. 90Hz displays aren't novel in the premium space, but they're a new addition to the sub-$500 space for sure. Alongside that tempting display, realme crams in four rear cameras to give the realme 6 further appeal.

There are some budget-conscious corners at play here, especially in terms of how that display affects battery life, but in the ultra-competitive mid-range space, the realme 6 has some real appeal.

Design

Design

• 6.5-inch 90Hz display
• Side-mounted fingerprint sensor
• Blue or white finishes

• Read more about the realme 6's design

  Somebody in realme's marketing department must have a thing for astronomy, because the realme 6 sells in two shades that you could just call "Blue" or "White".

  Instead they're "Comet Blue" and "Comet White". What's comet-centric about them? I have no idea, but for the Comet Blue model I've been testing, it's a reflective light blue shade that diffracts light across its rear casing, a very common design idea for Chinese phones of late.

  It looks good in photos, and I'm a noted fan of blue as a phone colour anyway, but the plastic feel of the casing can't help but come across as cheap. It's meant to evoke glass, but that's an illusion that's shattered the moment you pick the realme 6 up.

  At the front there's a 6.5-inch 2,400x1,080 90Hz capable LCD. We've seen some AMOLED screens at this price point, but none that can kick the refresh rate up to 90Hz. However, it's notable that this isn't the default screen refresh rate; if you want that silky-screen goodness (and trust me, you do) you'll have to dip into the settings to enable it.

  The realme 6 features a "full screen" display with very minimal bezels, marginally thicker at the base, but unlike some of realme's other models it doesn't utilise an in-display fingerprint reader. Nor is it found at the back of the phone. Instead, it's a thin sliver that also serves as the phone's power button, an arrangement that Sony used to love for its Xperia phones back when it still sold phones in the Australian market. It's an interesting design approach, although one that doesn't leave you with a very large strike zone for actual fingerprint recognition. I had more than a few fails when unlocking the realme 6 during the review period.

  Unlike the recently reviewed realme c3, the realme c6 has stepped up to USB C for charging, and there's still a headphone jack present. Just above the standard volume controls on the left-hand side is something unusual at this price bracket in the SIM card tray. The realme 6 is dual SIM, but it's sporting a triple tray, so you can actually run two LTE SIMs and expand its storage via microSD without having to sacrifice a SIM card slot.

Camera

Camera

• Quad lens has lots of flexibility
• Lacks optical zoom

• See sample photos and read more about the realme 6's camera

  The realme 6 is one of the lowest-cost phones we've seen to incorporate a four-camera rear array. Like many more budget-minded models that's not four different lens types you can shoot from, and there are some choices and compromises made along the way, but the core camera recipe on the realme 6 does encourage a degree of photographic experimentation, which I genuinely like in a camera phone.

  The primary sensor on the realme 6 is a 64MP f/1.8 wide lens, which sits in a vertical array along with an 8MP f/2.3 ultrawide 119° lens, 2MP macro lens and finally a 2MP monochrome portrait/depth effect lens. It's this latter lens you can't choose to shoot directly from, because like most mid-range phones it's instead invoked when you pop the phone into portrait mode to give shots some reasonably genuine looking bokeh. It's not likely to trouble the true premium players for absolute crispness, but it's certainly a good performer within its mid-range field.

  That 64MP primary lens by default takes 8MP shots, although you can force it into 64MP mode if you're keen. It's not often worth it, but it's the same heavy megapixel ability of that lens that also gives it limited in-built "zoom". That's in quotes because there's no dedicated telephoto lens with actual optical magnification on board. Instead, what you're looking at is 2x or 5x zoom that essentially crops down a 64MP image, although there may also be some AI smoothing at play there too.

  Here's a sample shot with no zoom shot in standard photo mode of one of my local neighbourhood cats.
  

  The same cat, a second or two later at 2x zoom. It didn't stay still. It turns out cats are photographically pretty, but not terribly obedient. The detail level here is fine, because the crop factor isn't immense:

  

  And then finally, at 5x zoom, where you do start to see some imperfections creep in. Compared to the digital zoom on many cameras, though, it's actually fairly decent for what it is.

  

  If you believed realme's hype for the realme 6, it's a competitor phone to the likes of the Apple iPhone XS Max, Huawei P40 Pro or Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra. That's not really so, because it's still a little deficient in areas like real zoom or higher quality night shooting modes. It can handle a multi-exposure night shot, but results are often a little murkier than I'd like. The king of night shooting in the mid-range remains the Google Pixel 3a… at least until the Pixel 4a formally breaks cover.

  Still, the range of lenses on the realme 6 does give you a lot of scope to play around with different shot types, and it's capable of producing some genuinely nice photos while you're doing so if all you want to do is point and shoot.

  realme 6 sample photos

  

  

  

  

  

  

Performance

Performance

• MediaTek Helio G70 isn't fast
• RealmeOS can be kludgy
• NFC onboard but not tested

• View test results and read more about the realme 6's performance

  So how do you deliver a 90Hz display and quad camera in a phone that costs less than $500?

  You do it by opting for a much more affordable processor, and in the case of the realme 6, that's MediaTek's Helio G90T, paired with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of onboard storage. 128GB isn't huge, but as noted above, you can pretty easily boost that with microSD storage if you need to.

  That's a fair amount of RAM paired up with one of MediaTek's faster processors, although that's a company that very much plays in the budget space, so you do need to temper your expectations a little.

  The realme 6 at least benchmarks well, although at the current time it does so under a rather serious cloud of suspicion. Here's how it compared to similarly priced handsets using Geekbench 5's CPU test:

  For graphics performance, here's how it stacked up using 3DMark's Slingshot Extreme test:

  There's a big issue with those benchmark scores. Leading tech publication Anandtech has detailed how many of MediaTek's processors – including the Helio G90 found in the realme 6 – actively juice their performance when they detect that they're running popular benchmarks, including those we use.

  As such, there's considerable doubt around the veracity of scores for phones using MediaTek processors right now. Which is a pity, because in every other respect the realme 6 does appear to be a decent performer within the mid-range space. It's perhaps not quite as slick as Google's Pixel 3a, but that could be down to the underlying pressures of not only running Android 10 but also realme's own launcher, RealUI. Its phones used to run on Oppo's ColorOS, and there's definitely still some of the feel and flavour of Oppo in Real UI. That's no surprise, as they're both owned by Chinese electronics giant BKK Electronics.

  RealUI does have some rough edges if you're used to a more plain Android approach, and it's also got many of the same issues with permissions that I find on Oppo's phones. I'm still not sure why a photo gallery app needs permission to view my SMS messages, for example, and while I appreciate that I'm at least told it's going to do so, it feels creepy and invasive. Thankfully, this is an Android phone, and you can always just eschew realme's default apps for your own preferred ones.

Battery life

Battery life

• 4,300mAh battery life isn't as high as expected
• Fast wired charging

• View test results and read more about the Realme 6's battery life

  Plenty of phones in the mid-range – with the notable exception of Apple's iPhone SE 2020 – have been opting for very large battery capacities. The realme 6's 4,300mAh battery isn't the largest we've seen, and I was curious to find out how much of an impact that 90Hz display had on overall battery endurance.

  Putting the realme 6 through our standard battery test, running a YouTube video at full brightness and moderate volume, gave an impression of how it compares to similarly priced models. The current coronavirus pandemic meant I could only run the test at a maximum of 480p, which may have saved the realme 6 just a little bit of energy compared to the regular test which runs at 1,080p. Here's how it compared:

  There is, as expected, a price to pay in battery life terms for that silky-smooth display. You can disable it to save power, but you really wouldn't want to limit the realme 6 in that way unless you had to. To its credit, realme does include a range of power-saving modes in its realUI that could eke you out a few extra hours if you were away from your charger.

  Speaking of the charger, Australian models should ship with a compatible 30W fast "Flash" charger – again an approach similar to the proprietary VOOC chargers that stablemate Oppo uses. My review sample was an international one on a plug adaptor that was also 30W capable according to its statutory markings, and it certainly made short work of topping up the realme 6 when it ran low. There's no in-built wireless charging, but then that would require an all-glass back, not one that just sort of looks like glass but is actually plastic.

Verdict

Verdict

How we score our reviews

• A very good phone for the price

Should you buy it?

The realme 6 presents a good range of features for a phone that will set you back less than $500, and it's easily the best phone that we've seen from the Chinese firm to date.

The mid-range space is very competitive, and the realme 6 is a good indicator of just how good phones in this price space are getting, because there's relatively little in the usage needs of an everyday phone user that this won't provide for, along with some fancier features such as that nice 90Hz display and quad camera array.

Pricing and availability

Price

RRP: $469.00

Where to buy

Check price at eBay

Check price at Amazon

Bing LeeKogan

Alternatives

The realme 6 is – more or less – the replacement for the realme XT, and that's a phone that actually started life with an RRP a little higher than that of the realme 6. It'd only be worth considering if you could score one cheaply.

Within the realme family, you could consider the realme 5, which only costs $30 more, comes with a 5,000mAh battery and a quad-camera array.

You could also consider the Oppo A91, if you wanted to stay within the same broad product ownership grouping as the realme 6.

If you wanted pure Android, consider Google's exceptional Google Pixel 3a, still our pick of the best all-round mid-range handset.

Specifications