realme are making a real splash in the Australian market through great products at even greater value for money. Today they have announced their new affordable flagship, the realme 6 coming in at an impressive $469 further undercutting last year’s flagship.
The realme 6 is their flagship but obviously to get to such a low price some corners had to be cut, instead with them focussing on areas realme deemed important to their users. Let’s talk about the good first.
As per usual for realme it seems, the realme 6 is gorgeous and the Comet Blue in real life is far superior to any picture you see of it online. It is also available in Comet White which no doubt is also a great looking colourway. The rear of the phone is curved and has decent weight to it, allowing it to sit comfortably and securely in the hand.
The realme 6 arrives with a 6.5-inch holepunch 1080P flat LCD display which is a decent 405ppi density. The display is covered with just Gorilla Glass 3 but does support 90Hz refresh rate — a focus by realme as they want the phone to be suitable for gamers.
There is no fingerprint sensor on the rear of the device, nor is it under the display — it is on the power button — something we don’t see much of these days. The fingerprint sensor is fast — 0.29 seconds fast, as is the face unlock.
The camera setup includes a quad rear camera module housing a 64MP primary camera, an 8MP ultra-wideangled lens, a 2MP macro lens and a 2MP black and white lens. The front facing camera that sits in a hole punch on the top left hand side of the display is a decent 16MP lens.
Other notable additions include Bluetooth 5.0, NFC, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac (which they will have in every smartphone they release in Australia this year), an FM radio, a headphone jack and support for dual SIM with microSD expansion at the same time. Battery-wise the realme 6 is packed with a 4,300mAh battery with support for VOOC 30W charging — charger is included in the box.
The Australian version will arrive with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage but the corner cut is with the processor. Instead of a Qualcomm processor realme have again included a Mediatek Helio G90T chipset which is their mid-range gaming processor — we need to use it in real life to determine whether it stands up to the test.
The software is realme UI based on Android 10 and is very similar to ColorOS and although realme is meant to be more stock it might be but is still more ColorOS than stock Android. We already have some thoughts on that and will be testing it out thoroughly in the coming days.
The realme 6 is available from 23rd April for just $469 in Comet Blue and Comet White from various retailers including the realme e-store, JB Hi-Fi, Bing Lee, Make it Mine, mobileciti, 5GWORLD, Essential Appliance Rentals, Amazon, Kogan, eBay, Catch.com.
We have one sitting on our review bench and look forward to putting it through its paces in the coming days but at this price it already looks to be a compelling device.
Yes, there is a pro version
https://www.gsmarena.com/realme_6_pro-10114.php
Keen for the review to drop… This will probably be up there as the best sub $500 phone with NFC and 8GB RAM and 128GB storage and a butter smooth 90Hz screen. The downsides are it’s LCD, and is using a MediaTek SoC. The SoC is pretty quick though!
Cheers
Sounds interesting. However, I have a question about software updates. Since the realme uses VOOC, I assume they are part of OPPO. And OPPO are not good at all with software updates. My wife’s R15PRO, which was an Android 9 test device might I add, still runs Android 8.1.0 (ColorOS 5.2) and the latest security update was August 2019. Not too fussed about ColorOS nor about Android updates. However, it would be nice if the security update is the most recent. If realme is anything like OPPO in this regard, then no thanks.
if you guys do a review Id love to hear about the stability as with realmi and also Xiaomi there seem to be a few signature and potentially bad bugs per model
Sounds interesting… looking forward to the review. Is this their highest spec device? Or do they have a ‘pro’ or something?