Realme 1 (3 GB)

Oppo, after setting up its footprints in the offline smartphone market in India, is now planning big for the online market, where the competition is fierce and the prices are very competitive and Oppo is definitely not known for reasonable pricing. So, Oppo has introduced its new online exclusive brand ‘Realme’ with an aim to penetrate Xiaomi’s dominating hold in the budget smartphone market. The first phone from the new brand is the Realme 1, which packs heavy specifications for its price.

It sports a big 6.0 inches FHD+ (1080 x 2160 pixels) display with 18:9 aspect ratio. The display is good in quality and comes with natural colors and good viewing angles. The Realme 1 comes with thin bezels on the top and bottom, because of which it accommodates the big screen in the size of a typical 5.5 inches phone. The phone comes with a fibreglass back and has a diamond cut design, which reflects light in different directions and looks beautiful. The build quality is good but, it is still plastic.

The Realme 1 is powered by a powerful 2.0 GHz Octa Core Mediatek Helio P60 processor, coupled with either 3 GB, 4 GB or 6 GB RAM and Mali-G72 MP3. The performance is very good for day to day usage and powerful enough f some gaming and multitasking. The same processor is used in the Oppo F7 also. The Realme 1 runs on Android 8.1 Oreo out of the box with Oppo’s ColorOS 5.0 running on top. The ColorOS is a very heavily customized Android skin and comes with lots of added features and customizations but looks wise, it still needs to become more minimalistic. It uses AI and Machine Learning to analyse usage pattern and allocate more resources when needed more. It also accelerates games and hides distracting notifications while gaming.

Coming to the cameras, it comes with a 13 MP rear camera with LED flash, the picture quality is good for its price, however, for portrait shots, the AI based edge detection needs to improve a lot. On the front, there is an 8 MP selfie shooter which is decent but not up to the mark of the excellent front cameras we have seen on phones like the Oppo F7. Pictures taken in the night and artificial light turn out grainy. The camera app comes with lots of modes and filters, especially the AR (Augmented Reality) stickers are good and fun to use.

The biggest downside of the Realme 1 is that it doesn’t come with a fingerprint scanner and relies totally upon Facial Unlock, which works well usually but in low light, you will surely miss the fingerprint scanner. Also, the software-based facial unlock is not as secure as a fingerprint scanner so, opting to not include the fingerprint scanner is a mistake, at least for us. The Realme 1 comes with dedicated slots for the two sim cards and the microSD card. Good thing is, it has Dual 4G and Dual VoLTE option so you can use two 4G sim at a time. It comes with 32 GB, 64 GB and 128 GB storage variants, all of which are expandable up to 256 GB. The Realme 1 comes with a non-removable 3410 mAh Li-Ion battery which delivers good battery backup but very disappointingly, it doesn’t come with fast charging support.

Realme 1 (Diamond Black):

Realme 1 (Solar Red):