Realme 3 Review: One Of The Best Realme Smartphones So Far

After the launch of Realme 1, Realme 2 and 2 Pro, Realme C1, C2, and U1 last year. The Realme 3 is the first smartphone to be released by the brand in 2019, March to be exact. This is the seventh phone already, so what does Realme have to offer this time? Let’s take a closer look and get some quality Realme 3 review.

Realme 3 Specifications

The phone’s body features Gorilla Glass 3 on the front and a multi-layer plastic back. Its HD+ display measures 6.2 inches and has an aspect ratio of 19:9. In addition, the handset sports a dual camera setup on the rear, including a 13MP main sensor and a 2MP depth sensor, along with a LED flash. On the front, there is a 13MP selfie cam. They all support 1080p videos at 30fps.

Furthermore, the Realme 3 runs on Android 9 Pie with the ColorOS 6.0 on top and is powered by the Helio P60/P70 chipset from MediaTek, with an octa-core CPU and Mali-G72 MP3 GPU. Next, the phone comes with the internal storage of 32GB or 64GB and a dedicated card slot of up to 256GB of external storage.

Finally, the phone packs a 4,230mAh battery with support of 10W fast charging. Other features include Dual SIM (4G), microUSB 2.0, FM radio, Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.2, GPS/GLONASS, and a fingerprint scanner.

Realme 3 Unboxing

The retail box looks cool with a brand’s logo in yellow paint. Packed with the phone is a 10W charger, a microUSB cable, and as usual, you’ll see a transparent plastic case in the box for extra protection for the phone.

Last but not least, you will also see a factory-applied screen protector, which is much better than using disposable screen stickers.

Realme 3 Design

While Realme still applied the plastic body design on this phone like on all the previous offerings it released, the company surprised us again with fresh stunning colors options: Realme 3 Radiant Blue and Realme 3 Dynamic Black.

We have seen Dynamic Black before, on the Vivo V11 smartphone, which was called Starry Night. This color is simply brilliant, a catchy gradient from black towards sprinkled dark blue. Meanwhile, the Radiant Blue is a mixture of vibrant blue and green to generate a chameleonic effect.

The phone’s back is made of durable plastic, featuring a glossy finish. The Realme 3 sports a unibody design, which means its back warps the entire device all the way up to its display. The phone doesn’t really have a frame, but the curve on its sides is sharp enough to give it some grip.

Also, the dual rear camera setup and the LED flash are arranged vertically, which is a first for a Realme phone. There is a yellow ring circling the main 13MP camera on the top, under which is the 2MP depth sensor and finally, the LED flash is placed at the bottom.

The back of the phone also houses a fingerprint sensor, which is always on and works accurately.

Regarding the front, this phone is quite similar to the Realme U1 and 2 Pro. The Realme 3 display size is 6.2-inches IPS LCD, it has a small curvy notch housing the 13MP front-facing camera. However, its resolution is lower than the Realme 2.

All the essentials lie on the sides of the phone, with the audio port, the loudspeaker, and the microUSB port placed at the bottom. On the left side of the phone, there is a tri-slot to contain two nano-SIM as well as a microSD card.

The Realme 3 measures 156.1 x 75.6 x 8.3 mm in size, and is about 175g heavy, quite the same as the Realme 2.

So, at this price point, the Realme 3 design is excellent. And while the phone is slippery and easily keep fingerprints on, this is inevitable for a glossy design.

Software And Performance

Software

Realme 3 is probably the first smartphone to run on the latest ColorOS 6 from OPPO while its ROM is based on Android Pie with several improvements.

The ColorOS 6 makes use of a light color scheme, which mostly mixes light color gradients with a white backdrop, creating an airy atmosphere. The font OPPO Sans is an important part of the ColorOS 6, developed by the company in collaboration with Hanyi. In addition, the operating system has an app drawer, which is default in the Realme 3.

As usual, the ColorOS 6 comes with built-in machine learning to freeze background apps rather than closing them. It will analyze the user’s app activity for a fortnight to understand their habit, but you can prevent this by adjusting in the battery settings.

Although there are graphics changes based on Pie, this phone UI still look familiar.

Now, the fingerprint scanner is always active, fast, and accurate. Besides, users can also use face unlock, which is really fast too. Realme 3’s face recognition is blazing fast, relying on 120 recognition points and is expected not to be fooled by a photo.

However, the phone doesn’t have a Theme Store, which is odd. It’s unsure if the coming Realme 3 update will include this feature. Moreover, the notification shade comes in a brand new look with a brightness scrubber, quick toggles, and notifications. There’s a task switcher that’s like what on iPhones, but it includes an End All button. The handset also allows split screen for all compatible apps.

The Realme 3 also enables Full-Screen Gesture, but it’s by default to mix keys and gestures. Swiping the Home key will open the task switcher, and a long press will call the Google assistant. Some other useful features include file safe, clone apps, and real-time translation.

The Phone Manager is quite similar to that of Xiaomi and Huawei phones, which takes care of memory cleaner functions, encryption, app permissions, virus scanning, etc. meanwhile, in the Game Space, users can manually select which notifications to pop up so that they won’t be interrupted while gaming. The OS also offers various performance modes as well as an option for locking the brightness for certain games.

Plus, there are multimedia apps of all sorts as in today’s phone: Music, Gallery, Video, and FM radio too.

Performance And Benchmarks

Depending on the market, the Realme 3 will pack the Helio P60 or P70 SoC. However, there’s no need to worry because there’s hardly any noticeable difference between the chips’ performances.

While both of them feature an octa-core chip, the P70’s big cores have its clock raised by 100MHz. That means the Helio P70 features 4xA73 cores at 2.1GHz, and the Helio P60’s chips are clocked at 2.0GHz. The pair have the same four A53 cores clocked at 2.0GHz.

The GPU remains the same on the P60 and P70, which is the tri-core Mali-G72 Mp3, but the P70 has a higher clock speed, raised by 100MHz. Both the chipsets have the same algorithms and AI core.

With these SoC, the Realme 3 easily aces the GeekBench and got some impressive scores. Especially, thanks to a lower screen resolution, the phone has certain advantages in terms of graphics, helping it beat all rivals in its price range. The GPU registers quite an impressive raw performance too.

This may be the most powerful handset from Realme so far. There are small differences between the Helio P60 and P70, but they are hard to notice in real life use. It’s worth noting that it didn’t heat up while running the benchmarks even in a longer time and no throttling was noticed.

All in all, the Realme 3 boasts the leading performance in its segment and users won’t face any hiccups during their use of the phone. And if you’re into gaming but have a small budget, this phone can help you out.

Camera and image quality

Camera features

There is an AI scene recognition in the phone’s camera app, shown as a small icon when it recognizes a scene, at which the software will adjust all of its settings accordingly. The phone did an almost perfect job in catching grass, sunsets, pets, snow, and food, as well as other scenes.

The app offers three main modes, namely Photo, Portrait, and Video, which users can switch by swiping. There is also the Chrome Boost toggle, along with HDR mode and flash settings.

In addition, the app’s hamburger menu gives more modes for shooting such as Nightscape, Slow-mo, Time-lapse, Pano, and Expert. Nightscape is the long-exposure handheld mode to take night shots, a common feature among today’s phones, which is cool to see in a budget phone.

The camera app additionally brings about a 2X zoom toggle, which only does a digital zoom, the phone is not equipped with a telephoto lens. This can be one of the Realme 3 disadvantages.

Image quality

In daylight, the phone generates sharp photos with enough resolved detail, great contrast, as well as accurate colors. It shows an average dynamic range, with few clipped highlights, that where the HDR kicks in. The phone also has a balanced noise control, resulting in areas of uniform color.

Though the zoom is just digital, it still does an adequate job.

The auto mode works well, and the HDR mode is smooth on this phone, its processing is not too extreme and helps save details in highlights and shadows.

Then we have the Chrome Boost mode that users need to enable in the viewfinder. It is advised that user only use this to further improve the dynamic range and if they want the colors to be duller than they’re supposed to. The feature does improve the dynamic range with the help of more advanced image stacking, in exchange for some fine detail during the process.

The 13MP rear camera does a good job at night, considering that it’s made for a budget device. Though the noise level is high, night shots are still detailed enough. As expected, many highlights are clipped but the HDR mode is there to save the day and will bring in even more detail.

The Realme 3 is one of the cheapest handsets to provide a night mode, dubbed Nightscape. However, it does worse than the HDR mode.

If users turn to Chrome Boosts for low-light shots, they can get nicely balanced photos.

Portrait mode

Using this mode, users get high-resolution 13MP portraits. The images look nice, good subject separation, not many abrupt transitions between sharp and blur, nice bokeh. Overall, it can’t be denied that the Realme 3 produces really good portraits, even compared with flagships.

However, it takes a while to snap a portrait so users have to keep their hand steady for 1 to 2 seconds. But once again, it’s a budget phone.

Selfies

The front 13MP sensor does a decent job/ while the dynamic range is not so impressive, we can’t really complain. There is plenty of detail, nice colors, and the shots are sharp.

Using the selfie camera, users can also take advantage of bokeh, which produces 8MP images but does a fine job when snapping portraits. There’s also a Beautification mode, along with an AI-powered one, but we don't mention them in this review of Realme 3.

Video recording

The phone’s chip is capable of shooting 4K clips, but the phone itself cannot. There’s no EIS nor 1080p@60pfs.

The phone captures 1080p videos with stereo sound and there is a lot of resolved detail considering this segment. All in all, the Realme 3 does a good job with recording videos.

Realme 3 Battery

This battery has the same capacity as that of the Realme 2. With the help of a 10W charger, the phone manages to charge 23% in 30 minutes and 30% in 40 minutes. This is not exactly what we imagine about fast charging, but still, this is a budget phone.

The Realme 3 durability test of the battery showed an excellent result with a 108-hour Endurance rating. The device registers 37 hours and 3 minutes of 3G talk time, survives 15 hours and 25 minutes of web browsing, and 13 hours and 31 minutes of non-stop video playback. These results are impressive, proving the Realme 3 rating deserves it.

Conclusion

The Realme 3 launch date in India was April 29, 2019, days after Realme 3 release date. For a small budget, the review of Realme 3 has shown that it can be considered one of the best devices you can get. Although there are Realme 3 pros and cons, in general, the design is decent, its software and OS does a great job with no heat-up or hiccups, its camera works well overall, and its battery is a beast.

Hopefully, with this detailed Realme 3 review, we have helped you get a good overall view of the phone’s quality and make a better decision for your next smart mobile device.