Friends+Design
- Gorgeous design, with some eye-catching color combinations for the (plastic) back panel
- Very good build quality and finish
- Fast fingerprint sensor, and face unlock
Display
- Good 6.3inch IPS panel, with a small dewdrop notch, and minimal bezels - it's sharp, decently bright, has high contrast, and accurate colors
- Media playback is handled well, and videos are rendered with punchy colours
Software
- ColorOS 6 UI has a new, cleaner look, and is quite feature packed, including plenty of motion and screen gestures
- Thankfully, unlike, its main competitor, the Redmi Note 7 Pro, there are no spammy ads in the UI
- Realme continues to pre-install quite a few third-party apps such as a Webnovel, NewsPoint, ShareChat, etc (though most of them can be uninstalled)
Performance
- Class leading performance (especially in terms of GPU) with a Snapdragon 710 at the core - everything from daily use to complex games like PUBG is a breeze
- The phone also doesn't heat too much even after prolonged gaming sessions
Camera
- Excellent camera package - mostly on par with the leading camera phone of this price bracket, the Redmi Note 7 Pro
- Packs the 16-megapixel Sony IMX519 sensor with an f/1.7 aperture - this is the same sensor used in some premium phones such as the OnePlus 6T - there's also a secondary 5-megapixel depth sensor for the phone's Portrait mode
- In daylight, the the Realme 3 Pro captures very good details in landscape shots
- Macros are sharp and well detailed too
- The phone's AI scene recognition is quick to recognise most common objects such as flowers
- Night photography is pretty decent too - and the the phone's Nightscape mode comes in handy here - it takes a second or two longer than usual to capture your shot, but the end result is a sharper image with much better detail
- The depth sensor does a very good job with edge detection, and even in low light, you can get a very pleasing bokeh effect
- Good 25-megapixel selfie camera too - selfies from the Realme 3 Pro pack a lot of detail and noise is kept in check - colors are excellent as well
- Selfie portraits are quite good too, even though they don't get the benefit of a dedicated depth sensing camera - subject separation is very competent, there are no clipped ears and blur is natural-looking as well
- Good video recording performance too - with good overall footage quality, and nice color reproduction
- Video stabilization at 1080p could have been better though
Audio
- The single speaker gets loud enough for media playback
Connectivity
- Uses the old microUSB port, instead of the modern USB Type-C port
Battery
- Excellent battery life - the combination of a large 4045mAh battery pack, an efficient processor, and Realme's optimizations means that this an easy 2-days battery life phone, even beating out (slightly) the excellent Redmi Note 7 Pro in battery life tests
- Super fast VOOC fast charging using the bundled charger is again class-leading - it can top up the battery from zero all the way to 90 percent in about an hour
Verdict
- Overall, the Realme 3 Pro is absolutely great bang-for-the-buck, and is pretty neck-to-neck with the other top phone in this price bracket - the Redmi Note 7 Pro - while the Redmi Note 7 has a more premium glass build, and the modern USB Type-C port, the Realme 3 Pro has an edge in terms of a bundled fast charger, a slightly better processor, and cleaner (ad-free) software
