GADGETS | Realme 2
Designed for the competitive entry-level market, its latest model, RealMe 2, is packed with a pretty decent hardware configuration.
A new mobile phone brand is now out in the Philippine market. Dubbed as RealMe, this smartphone is a sub-band of popular mobile phone maker Oppo.
Designed for the competitive entry-level market, its latest model, RealMe 2, is packed with a pretty decent hardware configuration: Qualcomm Snapdragon 450 and 3GB of RAM. 6.5” 720p display that has a 19:9 aspect ratio, dual rear cameras and a 4230mAh high-capacity battery.
Aesthetics
The phone’s design tries to steer away from the usual plain matte or glass back with what Realme calls the nanoscale design that reflects its diamond-like glass reflections when put under the light. The phone’s body feels pretty good on the hands with its rounded edges.
On top of the camera you will find a distinct notch that has become the norm for most smartphones nowadays. The notch houses the front camera, earpiece, and sensors.
On the bottom of the phone you will find the micro-usb port, headphone jack, and bottom firing speakers.
On the right side you have the unlock button, volume rockers and hybrid sim tray on the left, and a fingerprint scanner on the back.
First impressions
We’ve used this phone a couple of days now and it has proven to be an impressive entry-level smartphone with a Qualcomm processor. Being able to do the daily social media, messaging and YouTube is satisfactory as the phone’s user experience is very fluid thanks to its 3GB of memory and the Snapdragon 450 processor. Even though that the processor is quite dated, the custom OS which is based on the Android 8.1 is well-optimized even for lower spec’ed out mobile phones.
The dual-rear camera which uses a 13MP+2MP sensors is also a decent shooter but make sure you have enough lighting. The auto-focus is quite snappy and the depth of field using portrait mode blurs backgrounds quite nicely. Though it’s a little bit on the soft side, a talented mobile photographer can do wonders with it.
The front camera though is very Oppo as it uses the “beautification” features very well which is on paper, says that, it is using AI to beautify the face and the body. Though it would still depend on the person taking the selfies, but the beautification feature is very popular among young people nowadays.
As for the battery life, we are very impressed as we ran the battery benchmark more than 12 hours now and battery benchmark hasn’t finished yet. We will thoroughly test this one as well since the battery life is also one of the main features of this phone.
So far so good. This is beyond what we are used to in entry-level smartphones as the processing power, camera features and battery life is decent. We only used this phone for less than a week and we have yet to see how it performs on the daily grind with LTE and constant use, as well as gaming. We’ll be back after a couple of days for a full review of this phone.
But for now, we’ll leave it at a satisfying user experience when it comes to what is expected from an entry-level smartphone. The dual-camera configuration looks promising as the Realme 2 still carry in its heart the Oppo name.
by Ira James, contributing writer
