The Realme 5 Pro review: Is there enough bang for the buck?

Rating: 4 stars

Realme as a smartphone brand has been aggressively populating its smartphone lineup. They have launched at least one phone every month since March 2019 (except June) with the Realme 5 series launched last month — Realme 5 and Realme 5 Pro. While both the phones boast of a rear quad camera setup, the Realme 5 Pro gets user attention as it comes with a 48MP primary sensor.

Quad rear camera is the big USP of the Realme 5 Pro. At this price point, only Realme and Oppo are two players offering rear quad cameras. The Realme 5 Pro has a 48MP primary sensor (Sony IMX 586), 8MP wide-angle, 2MP portrait and 2MP macro sensor.

You can actually shoot photos at 48MP resolution if you want but by default, the photos are shot at 12MP resolution for better details. Image quality is impressive with good dynamic range, crisp details and rich colours when used in daylight. In low light, switching to the nightscape mode gives you photos that are bright enough to view on phone and share on social media, but you can see a lack of details when zoomed in. You can further enhance the colours by enabling HDR and Chromaboost option.

There are three more camera sensors at your disposal. First is a wide-angle lens that proves to be great for shooting landscape shots. Second is the depth sensor for portrait shots and it impressed with its edge detection capabilities. The third is the macro sensor which opens up interesting composition options, but you are stuck at 2MP resolution and getting a good focus in the macro mode required at least 4-5 attempts to figure out the correct distance from the subject.

That being said, the rear camera setup and performance is great for the price in our opinion for mobile photography lovers. This doesn’t mean that the front camera is a slouch in any way. You get a 16MP front camera which is capable of taking great selfies in daylight as well as indoors. However, portrait mode was not up to the mark – the edge detection was poor and there was a visible shutter lag as well.

Performance from the phone is excellent thanks to the powerful Snapdragon 712 processor combined with 8GB RAM and UFS 2.1 storage. PUBG and Asphalt 9 ran smoothly at high settings and there was minimal heating on the device. Multitasking between 30+ apps was a breeze and there was no visible slowdown or sluggishness anywhere. Battery life is also stellar – we got a full day’s battery backup with heavy usage. Plus, you have Vooc fast charging (charger included in price) which gave us a 50% charge in half-hour.

Realme 5 Pro comes with a new crystal design on the back. The crystal design changes shades as per the ambient light and gives a cool effect – full points for style. What we didn’t like is that it is a plastic body and if used without a cover, it tends to pick up scratches in a few days. We are also not fond of the fat protruding camera module on the rear as even it is vulnerable to scratches over time due to wear and tear. You get a 6.3-inch IPS display with sleek bezels and thin bottom chin. Realme has opted for a smaller dewdrop style notch on the top that gives you more screen estate.

We liked the screen’s brightness level thanks to which it had excellent sunlight legibility. Even the touch response is great, and you get the option to adjust the colour temperature, night shield and full-screen display for individual apps. The screen is a joy to use for watching videos, gaming as well as browsing.

Some of the other features that impressed us on the Realme 5 Pro include its fast and accurate fingerprint scanner, fast face unlock, dedicated microSD slot for storage expansion, availability of USB Type-C port and the feature-rich ColorOS user interface. What we didn’t like was the plethora of preloaded bloatware apps and the sub-par loudspeaker output.

All in all, the Realme 5 Pro proves itself to be a good all-rounder and that too at a great price. Trouble is that Realme’s aggressive launch cycle makes its devices seem obsolete quickly. The Realme X, which was launched two months back, now seems outdated as you get a better quad-camera setup on the Realme 5 Pro.