Design
- Beautiful, 'shimmering' rear (plastic) panel, and a modern, notch-less 6.5-inch OLED screen - easily one of the best looking phones in this price bracket
- The notch-less display spans almost edge to edge, with a pop-up selfie camera mechanism
- Fairly fast in-display fingerprint reader
Display
- Very good 6.5-inch OLED screen - colors are lively, with deep blacks
- The lack of a notch really helps make the screen appear immersive, and consuming content on the screen is a pleasure
Software
- ColorOS UI is now much more streamlined than before - there’s also now an app drawer, and a useful shortcut menu accessed by swiping from the sides
- The gesture navigation is nice and intuitive too
- ColorOS still has some bloatware though, and is not quite as clean/simple as stock Android
Performance
- Very good performance backed by the powerful Snapdragon 710 chipset - everything from daily use to high-end games is smooth
- GPU performance is an especially strong point of the Snapdragon 710, so if you are into gaming, the phone tends to comfortably outperform rivals
Camera
- Excellent set of dual rear cameras (48MP+5MP) and front camera (16MP)
- Very good overall image quality in daylight, and fairly good quality in low-light as well
- Night mode is pretty effective too
- Very good portraits
- Pretty great selfies too, from the 16MP front camera
- Realme’s EIS does a solid job of stabilization during videos at up to 1080p/30fps
- Support for 4K video recording (without EIS though)
- Overall, the Realme X is arguably the best camera setup of this price bracket now, even beating the excellent cameras on the Redmi Note 7 Pro and the Realme 3 Pro - and is in fact comparable to cameras in phones at twice the price
Battery
- Good battery life with a 3750 mAh cell - you will comfortably get a day of use, even with heavy usage
- The class-leading VOOC fast-charging nicely complements the long battery life - it fills a completely depleted battery in 1:18h and it's at the 50% mark 30 minutes into it - which are some excellent numbers
Verdict
- The Realme X looks like an incredible value package, no matter how you look at it, and will inevitably disrupt its price bracket in a big way - what you get is top-end specs, a 'full screen' AMOLED display with a pop-up selfie camera, very good performance, an excellent set of cameras, and super fast charging - you can't ask for more