Realme 5s is the fourth addition to the Realme 5 series. It arrives in India in November 2020 for a starting price of only Rs. 9,999. It is essentially a slightly-upgraded model of the Realme 5. The handset’s highlights include 48MP quad rear cameras, 6.5-inch display, Snapdragon 665 SoC, and 5,000mAh battery. 

Realme 5s: Design

The phone is equipped with 4 rear cameras at the back with a 48MP main sensor. All four sensors are stacked vertically. In addition, joining the camera setup on the back are a fingerprint sensor in the center, a LED flash next to the camera setup, and a Realme logo at the bottom.

On the front, Realme 5s is equipped with a 6.5-inch "water drop" screen with HD+ resolution. At this point, you must be worried because the large screen but the resolution is only HD +. So does this have an effect on your experience? Please see more in the next section.

One more thing that we see very clearly on the front panel is the relatively thin bezels, except for the thick bottom edge. 

Overall, the design is also quite nice, although there are still some downsides such as a thick bottom edge. However, with the affordable price that we spend to own the phone, we are pretty happy with the design.

Realme 5s: Display

In this section, I will go in more details about the screen of the Realme 5s. As I mentioned earlier, the device owns a 6.5-inch display, but only supports HD+ resolution. So in your opinion, does the HD+ resolution affect your experience in watching movies and playing games?

When using a device with a large screen like the Realme 5s, users will tend to place the device at a suitable distance to the eye to be able to see the entire screen. That is why it is hard to see the downside of the HD+ resolution. However, if you watch movies or videos, the issue will be more visible.

The device is equipped with an IPS LCD panel for wide viewing angle and high brightness. As a result, even if you look at the screen at different angles, the image remains the same, providing a better viewing experience. Not only that, with a high brightness, you can also use the phone under direct sunlight.

Realme 5s: Performance

I will use PUBG Mobile to evaluate the gaming performance of this phone. It is equipped with a Snapdragon 665 SoC, which is said to be pretty decent at gaming. However, it seems that the Snapdragon 665 is not performing as well as expected. We can only play PUBG Mobile at the Balanced graphics setting. Even so, the game is only running at medium stability, with fps sometimes dropping to 14 FPS and hitting an average fps of around 20. Not just that, the phone will heat up when gaming.

If you want to be the best in PUBG Mobile, you might need to find a smartphone with a more stable performance. I myself do not appreciate the Realme 5s' gaming capabilities, but with the affordable price tag that you spend to own this phone, perhaps that is reasonable.

The handset is scheduled to get ColorOS 7 sometime in May this year, according to OPPO’s roadmap. In case you don’t know, OPPO released ColorOS in India with multiple localized features, but Realme promises that the ColorOS’s version for its phones will have exclusive features to Realme smartphones and will look closer to stock Android.

Realme 5s: Camera

Although only in the mid-range segment, Realme 5s is still "favored" by Realme and get four rear cameras, including:

• Wide-angle camera: 48 MP resolution, f / 1.8 aperture.
• Ultra-wide-angle camera: 8 MP resolution, f / 2.2 aperture, 13 mm focal length.
• Macro camera: 2 MP resolution, f / 2.4 aperture.
• Portrait camera: 2 MP resolution, f / 2.4 aperture.

As I said in the design section, Realme 5s owns up to 4 rear cameras, with a 48MP wide-angle. As you can see, the Realme 5s are full of lenses with completely different features and support for each other. Thanks to that, the image captured from this four-camera cluster will also surprise you. 

In bright enough conditions, the Realme 5s did not disappoint its users with pictures with high detail, good color reproduction, and high contrast. Thanks to that, the image is both bright, rich and full of life.

In low-light conditions, the Realme 5s still shows value when delivering pictures with good brightness and high amount of details. The contrast is also adjusted accordingly.

When taking photos of a close-up subject, the device automatically detects and switches to the macro mode. However, looking at the photos, I can clearly see that the camera fails at capturing all the details of the object and quite blurry in some parts. Finally, I switch to portrait mode. It is handled very well, with better exposures and skin tones. 

Not only do the four rear cameras perform well, but even the 13MP selfie camera is just as interesting. Selfies taken in daylight look pretty good with a fair amount of detail and natural skin tones. However, Realme needs to work a bit on the portrait mode as the background blur effect is a bit too aggressive. 

The selfie camera doesn’t do a good job when it comes to low-light photography. You can see that photos lack details and have a lot of visible noise.

Realme 5s: Battery

As mentioned, the Realme 5s has a beefy 5,000mAh battery just like its siblings. Despite having the same capacity, the handset appears to achieve better battery life in our test. It managed to last for a total of 27 hours and 16 minutes. That is very impressive, beating its siblings (around 22 hours) by a large margin. 

With normal use, users can easily use the phone for around two days before having to charge it. There isn’t fast charging support and the bundled charger isn’t that good as well. Therefore, it takes the phone 30 minutes to reach 23 percent and one hour to charge 43 percent. 2 hours are what it needs to get to 100 percent of the battery.