Friday, May 8, 2020

Realme 6i First Impressions

Realme has a new bang-for-your-buck smartphone here in the Philippines — the Realme 6i, which I guess is the direct successor to the Realme 5i from earlier this year. In typical fashion, this is packing pretty nice specs, especially for its sub-PHP 10K price tag. So without any further ado, let’s check out what it has to offer.

Let’s first talk about that back design. The Green Tea color is cool-looking with those vertical lines that look better in person. It was designed by famed industrial designer Naoto Fukasawa, who is behind a lot of Muji products. Yeah, that Muji.

Anyway, on the other side, we get a 6.5-inch IPS display with an honestly low resolution of 1600 x 720. It uses a Waterdrop notch for the 16MP front camera as well as the call speaker.

Returning to the back, we got a quad-camera setup consisting of a 48MP primary, 8MP ultra-wide, 2MP macro, and 2MP depth sensor. Next to the camera module is the LED flash, and in the upper center of the back, we have a capacitive fingerprint scanner.

On the left side, we have the volume controls as well as the card tray with two nano-SIM slots and a dedicated microSD slot.

On the right, we get the power button.

At the bottom, headphone jack, primary microphone, USB Type-C port, and the loudspeaker. Our box didn’t come with included earphones for that headphone jack, but hey, just get yourself some Realme Buds, they are not that bad.

Powering the Realme 6i is a MediaTek Helio G80 chipset with 3GB or 4GB of RAM, and 64GB or 128GB of internal storage. You can expand this by up to 256GB with a microSD card if you need to. Checking out the battery, we have a massive 5,000mAh cell with support for 18W fast charging. It’s not VOOC, but I’m sure it’s still going to be fast enough for most people.

For software, the 6i is running Realme UI out of the box, on top of Android 10. You’ll get features such as icon customization, new System Themes, Dual Mode Music Share so you can use your Bluetooth and wired earphones simultaneously, and, of course, Dark Mode.

The price for this Realme 6i will be announced on May 13, but Realme Philippines has confirmed that it will be under PHP 10K, so stay tuned for updates.

This phone’s looking promising as I think it’s got the stuff to go head-to-head with other entry-level to mid-range phones on the market such as the Redmi Note 9S. I’m going to be testing it out over the weekend, so stay tuned for our full review.

Realme 6i specs:
6.5-inch HD+ (720 x 1600) IPS waterdrop notch display
MediaTek Helio G80 2GHz octa-core CPU
Mali-G52 MC2 GPU
Realme UI (Based on Android 10)
3GB, 4GB RAM
64GB, 128GB eMMC 5.1 storage
Up to 256GB via MicroSD (dedicated slot)
Quad rear cameras: 48MP main + 8MP ultra-wide + 2MP macro + 2MP portrait
16MP F2.0 front camera
Dual SIM
4G
WiFi
Bluetooth 5.0
A-GPS, Glonass, Galileo, BDS
Rear-mounted fingerprint scanner
3.5mm audio jack
Reverse charging
USB Type-C
5,000mAh battery w/ 18W charging support
White Milk, Green Tea