E Device Class ("Mercedes" scale A, B, C, E, S)
Rating scale 1-6 (6-excellent)
Let's go< /h3>
Reviewed realme GT belongs to the segment of smartphones that evoke particularly strong emotions - it is currently the cheapest smartphone with the most efficient Snapdragon 888 processor. Who wouldn't like to have the fastest phone that can handle any task and at the same time not ruin the household budget? So far, the two cheapest smartphones with an 888 processor were Mi 11i and Asus Zenfone 8. The first costs PLN 2799 and the second PLN 2999. At this point realme GT comes in all white with a price of PLN 2299 - it's PLN 500 cheaper than Xiaomi. I will not be surprised when realme GT will enjoy great interest for this reason alone. Before buying, however, it is worth checking what the manufacturer has saved on and whether it is actually a reasonable purchase, and now I can reveal that despite the low price realme GT solved some important issues better than the more expensive competition.
Main pros and cons of realme GT
Pros of realme GT:
Cons of realme GT:
How do we rate the design? - rating 5-
realme GT is available in two casing finishes. The cheaper version costing PLN 2299 with 8/128 GB of memory has a housing made entirely of plastic - both the frame and the back of the housing. The color of the housing goes from almost black to blue depending on the angle of the light and has a subtle stripe pattern. This version was sent to the editorial office for testing and is called speed blue. The thickness of this phone is 8.4 mm at 186 grams of weight - it is less than competitors with a similar diagonal and with an equally powerful processor.
There is a second version called racing yellow, which has more memory 12/256 GB and part of the housing is finished with vegan leather, which also affects the slightly thicker device at 9.1 mm. The price of stronger equipment is PLN 2,499 and I did not have the opportunity to test this version.
It's impossible to judge a version that I haven't tested, but I suspect that eco-leather may be a more attractive option. I like the pattern on the realme GT case and it partially hides touch marks, but not as well as the matte finish. Undoubtedly, the use of materials is one of the compromises associated with a lower price than the competition. The housing also does not have a water resistance standard, or even a symbolic seal on the plastic drawer for two nano SIM cards. There is also no space for a micro SD card.
Not everything is "cheap" about this phone's design, however. Unlocking both the face and the pressure plate is absolutely instant - faster than in many flagships. The screen will not fully wake up and light up yet, and the phone is already unlocked. This significantly increases the comfort of using this phone. We also have a more modern type of reader hidden under the screen.
Another plus is the stereo speakers, which have a full-fledged separation of the left and right channels. Speakerphone is loud and offers good sound quality. It is suitable both for listening to broadcasts and for other multimedia. realme GT is also one of the very few smartphones with a top specification that still offers a headphone jack. Although the design is often the Achilles heel of cheap devices, realme GT comes out unscathed, and the advantages for me significantly outweigh the compromises.
What do we think about the display? - Rated 6-
realme GT's 6.43 inch screen is made with Super AMOLED technology. It has a resolution of FHD+ 2400 x 1080 pixels and offers a refresh rate of 120 Hz. This is a Samsung-supplied panel, so there's no cost-cutting involved here. For the sake of completeness, it is worth adding that the touch is read at a frequency of 360 Hz, the pixel density is 409 PPI, and the aspect ratio of the screen is 20: 9. The maximum brightness of the panel reaches 1000 nits.
The screen is bright, contrasting, with saturated colors and good viewing angles. Technically, it's hard to fault him. The most expensive flagships often offer even higher QHD resolution, but it does not significantly improve the comfort of use.
The screen settings include dark mode, eye comfort, color temperature adjustment, three color modes: vivid, soft and dazzling. There are also automatic mechanisms for improving image quality - video sharpening, video color corrector, and increasing screen brightness for materials played in HDR. In short, there are practically no compromises in the display, and all differences from more expensive models come down to nuances.
Specification and operating system - 6 rating!
Specification is the realme GT's strongest point, as the name of the phone itself suggests. We have the latest and most powerful Snapdragon 888 processor clocked at 1x Cortex X1 2.84 GHz + 3x Cortex A78 2.4 GHz + 4x Cortex A55 1.8 GHz. The processor supports 8 GB RAM and 128 GB for the system and files in the test copy, but a stronger version of 12/256 GB will also be available on the Polish market for PLN 200 more than the basic one. The only downside here is the lack of support for a memory card, but it is difficult to associate this decision with a lower price - this is an increasingly common approach among manufacturers without regard to the price shelf. It may also be related to the desire to avoid keeping files on the usually slower memory such as a micro SD card - realme GT is equipped with the fastest type of UFS 3.1 memory
Benchmark results are as follows:
Currently, realme GT is at the top of the Antutu ranking, although my score was 7th. This may be due to the fact that I have a cheaper version with less memory in my tests, and it may also be due to the fact that the top places of smartphones, which all have the Snapdragon 888 processor, are so close to each other that the differences are not significant statistically. This is certainly the top class of performance among smartphones, without any compromises. There is also a cherry on this cake - realme GT is by far the least heated smartphone with a Snapdragon 888 processor I've tested and it's not a subtle difference. Both Mi 11i, Mi 11 and Asus Zenfone 8 heat up quickly and strongly. Even without benchmarking and gaming, just install a dozen apps and download updates to get these smartphones very warm. realme GT after two runs of Geekbench 5 and Antutu literally gets slightly warm. If it is thanks to the Stainless Steel VC Cooling System developed by realme and used in GT, then I bow to you. The difference from the competition is clearly felt and I have not seen two mobile devices with the same processor differ so much in this respect for a long time.
The realme GT connectivity package includes 5G, 4G LTE, WiFi ax (6th generation), Bluetooth 5.2, and NFC. Navigation is carried out using GPS, Beidou, Glonass, QZSS and Galileo standards. The sensor set includes an accelerometer, a gyroscope, a proximity sensor, a light intensity sensor and a fingerprint reader under the screen. In short - nothing was missing, we have all the latest smartphone equipment standards.
realme GT runs on Android 11 with security updated as of March 5, 2021. realme UI system overlay is V2.0. Moreover, the manufacturer participates in the Android 12 Developer Preview program, which means that realme GT will be one of the first smartphones to receive an update to Android 12. I also received information that Polish users will be able to take part in beta tests of the new version of the system. We'll see how the manufacturer fulfills its promises, but it looks promising.
The system on realme GT runs completely smoothly, which is the result of a combination of top specs, the fastest type of memory and a screen with a refresh rate of 120 Hz.
The realme UI overlay itself is quite indifferent to me in terms of aesthetics - it is neither among my favorites, nor do I have any reason to complain about it. Some translations into Polish are not the happiest in my opinion, but functionally we will find here everything that is most important.
What kind of photos and videos does he take? - rating 4-
It must be said directly that realme GT is not bought for cameras. There is no smartphone on the market that costs half or even a third of what the most expensive flagships and can fight as equal with equal photo quality in all conditions. The quality of the cameras is the last special feature reserved only for the most expensive devices. However, what does realme GT offer us?
Let's start with the fact that the 2 megapixel macro camera is added just to make it look good in the specs and in practice I definitely prefer to take close-ups with the main camera.
The quality of the photos from the main camera is fine in a technical sense - the photos are sharp and detailed enough, not too noisy, and not too low in dynamic range. For my taste, they are too aggressively processed by algorithms - too contrasting and you can see artifacts on the enlargements of details. Night photos are surprisingly good for a camera without optical stabilization - they are also heavily processed, but night photos are more contrasting by their very nature. At the same time, they are not blurry and too dark.
Wide-angle shots, as is often the case, are less detailed and more distorted than from the main camera, but they still come out acceptable - in my opinion better than the OnePlus Nord CE, which I recently reviewed.
The biggest call for the camera seems to be photos in cloudy, gray weather - then the white balance is not doing well and as a result we get strange, quite unnatural colors with a tendency to fall into green - even in, for example, a blue sky. In my opinion, night photos are much better than daytime photos.
The camera application in the preview itself suggests using x2 and x5 magnification in the form of dots symbolizing the available options, but these are enlargements made digitally by cropping the image from the main matrix and the effects are worse than without magnification. In particular, I consider encouraging the use of x5 magnification to mislead the user, because in my opinion this magnification is of such poor quality that it is simply not worth photographing in this mode.
The big advantage of realme GT is stabilization when recording in all video modes, including 4K resolution. This stabilization is effective and gives good results, provided that we film in good lighting conditions - if we start filming at dusk, artifacts and blurring will appear, which the stabilization will intensify. There is also an ultra-stabilization mode that strongly crops the image from the ultra-wide-angle camera and allows you to film even while running, but it is also of the poorest quality, both due to the quality of the matrix and the wide-angle lens, as well as additional image cropping. The picture quality of 4K and FHD is fine. Here, the main objection for me is the inability to shoot in 4K with a wide-angle camera, as well as the inability to switch between cameras even when filming in 1080p.
Selfie photos are of mid-priced quality.
Example photos:
Example video:
How long does the battery last? - 5 rating
realme GT has a 4500mAh battery and super fast charging with a 65W charger - basically the fastest type of charging on the market today. Manufacturers present single examples of faster charging, but they are not present in most of the models offered.
The manufacturer ensures that the phone can be charged from zero to 100% in 35 minutes. This parameter depends on several factors, including the ambient temperature and in hot weather charging may be a little slower, but it does not change the fact that it is still a dizzying speed. The more so that we rarely charge the phone completely discharged and in the case of fast charging we do not want it to be charged to 100% every time. If we additionally take into account that at the beginning of charging the speed is the highest, we can charge several dozen percent of the battery literally getting ready to leave the house. This gives great comfort and completely excludes overnight charging.
Unfortunately, we do not have the option of wireless charging, but in a model focused on the most attractive price, it is not surprising.
When testing YouTube video streaming with the screen brightness set to half, the smartphone discharged to 20% after 14 and a half hours, which is the same rate as the recently reviewed OnePlus Nord CE, which has a mid-shelf processor. The same realme GT should offer more than 18 hours of video playback. The Snapdragon 888 processor tends to drain the battery faster under mixed loads, but I don't think it matters in the case of realme GT with such fast charging available. A whole day on a single charge is no problem for realme GT anyway.
Our final rating
I think it's safe to say that realme GT does not disappoint and more than meets expectations. It offers top performance at the lowest price on the market and does it by the way, heating up less than all the competition with the same processor that I came to test. Is this fact alone not enough for a recommendation? If you add to this stereo speakers, screen unlock speed that is at the forefront, Super AMOLED screen with 120 Hz refresh rate and 65W charging from zero to full in 35 minutes and remind again that this is the cheapest smartphone with a Snapdragon 888 processor, it turns out that in many ways in terms realme GT is simply unrivaled.
This does not mean, however, that it maintains this sensational level in all aspects. The housing is plastic, which is rather rare in this price segment, and there is no form of sealing either. The second compromise is cameras that are not at the level of other flagships. You can buy a phone that will offer similar, and maybe even better opportunities in the price range of PLN 1,000 - 1,500.
Comparing the advantages and compromises of realme GT, it becomes clear that it is addressed primarily to those who value performance, 120 Hz screen refresh and loading speed, including the most demanding players and people sensitive to the smoothness of the system and applications, not to lovers of mobile photography.
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