Realme 6i, analysis and opinion

With the realme 6i, the brand turns the market for cheap mobiles in our country upside down with a model that has been pushing hard on price and performance by the flag, although on the way it leaves benefits that we do find in the realme 6 that we already analyzed a few weeks ago.

The price is one of the main arguments for this realme 6i since it only costs 179 euros Presenting itself as a torpedo in the waterline of the Xiaomi and its Redmi Note 8. Is it worth betting on this realme 6i or is it better to invest a little more in its big brother the realme6? We discover all the keys in this analysis with opinions.

realme 6i, analysis and opinion

• Design: keeps the line realme cutting in materials
• Screen: screen without HDR or 90 Hz, low-cost gaming pays its toll
• Performance: Helio G80, low-cost gaming processor that fits like a glove in the realme 6i
• Software: realme UI is not as smooth as on other devices
• Camera: five cameras that seem impossible in this price range. Does anyone give more?
• Battery: 5,000 mAh battery that gives a lot of play
• Connectivity: NFC and FM radio, but without Wi-Fi 5
• Conclusion: the mid-range narrows the fence and complicates the choice of cheap mobiles

Keeps the line realme cutting in materials

As we have already said, one of the main arguments for the realme 6i is to get a smartphone with good performance, but at an affordable price for everyone. This has forced realme to adjust the belt when configuring the features of this model.

Design has been one of the aspects in which clipping is most appreciated Regarding his older brother, Realme 6, we had the opportunity to analyze just a few weeks ago.

 

For this model, the glass back has been replaced by a polycarbonate one signed by the designer Naoto Fukasawa, which shows a finish between satin and mother-of-pearl that draws curious glossy longitudinal bands that change depending on how the light falls on them.

In our case, we are testing the unit with the white finish which they have actually called Cream White, although it is also available in a Green Tea finish with the same effect of longitudinal shine on the back.

Being a less glossy finish than its older brother, the footprints are not so marked, so it stays clean for much longer.

Surprisingly, despite having the same screen size as realme 6, this realme is slightly more bulky with a 164.4 x 75.4mm size and 9mm thickness.

This, in terms of comfort, has little impact when it comes to holding it in the hand since those two millimetres of difference are offset by a back of a texture that provides better grip on the terminal.

The weight also increases slightly, standing at 199 grams, enough not to consider it a heavy smartphone, but it takes its toll when you have been playing with it for more than an hour.

In the rear We find smooth and rounded lines around the perimeter, which are accentuated on the sides, drawing a slight curvature that facilitates grip.

Regarding the distribution of the elements, realme has maintained the same line that we already saw in its previous models, with the encapsulation of the cameras anchored in the upper left corner, the LED flash next to this module, and a fingerprint sensor located in a position centred in the upper third, as we found it in the realme 5 Pro.

The camera module does not protrude too far from the rear and is protected from scratches when you install the silicone case with a transparent grey finish that is included with the smartphone.

At the edges of the terminal, the presence of plastic continues as the main ingredient, although this time with a metallic-look finish that mimics the texture of aluminium.

The layout of the buttons on the realme 6i is similar to the one we already saw in the analysis of realme 6 with the exception that in this model the fingerprint sensor has passed to the rear and therefore the dual function of the power button is lost.

On the opposite side we find the volume buttons and, on them, the tray for two nanoSIM cards and one micro SD card with which you can expand the capacity of this terminal.

Having grown slightly, it seems to us that the buttons should have been relocated a little lower since sometimes it is necessary to reposition the smartphone in your hand to reach them.

The upper edge remains clean, while the lower edge is grouped 3.5mm headphone jack, the microphone holes, the USB Type-C connector, and the main speaker on the right.

As usual with affordable realme phones, the Corning Gorilla Glass 3 The screen is not inserted directly into the chassis, but rather it is inserted in a black plastic frame that surrounds the entire front, helping to increase the frame feel around the screen.

The use of the front it is practically traced to the one shown by realme 6, with lateral edges of just a couple of millimetres and a pronounced chin that is thickened by the plastic frame that we mentioned before.

At the top appears a small notch in the form of a drop in which the front camera is located just below the call speaker that is hidden between the insert of the screen glass and the plastic frame that surrounds it.

As expected since it is the same series, realme has maintained the general design guidelines for realme 6, but inserting the fingerprint sensor on the back and adding the notch on the front.

We cannot say that we were surprised by the presence of polycarbonate as the main ingredient in realme 6i. In the end, It is a cheap and resistant material that does its job perfectly and maintains a good design, considering that we are talking about a terminal that you can find in stores for 179 euros.

Screen without HDR or 90 Hz, low-cost gaming pays its toll

With a 6.5 inch IPS screen and generous frames we can not say that the realme 6i is a compact smartphone, it does offer an adequate screen size to fulfil its purpose of becoming one of the best alternatives to achieve a cheap gaming mobile.

Despite its similarities to the realme 6, this model loses some features on its screen. The most outstanding ones, go to an HD + resolution of 1,600 x 720 pixels with a density of 270 dpi and lose the HDR and 90 Hz support that its older brother presented.

The realme 6i keeps the stranger 20: 9 screen ratio which makes it stay halfway between the usual 19: 9 that most terminals have and the 21: 9 ultra-wide format.

Fortunately, it comes with a more than correct factory colour setting, although in our case we have slightly varied the colour temperature to make it a little warmer.

This adjustment can be easily done from the operating system, where you can configure the white balance temperature to your liking in three positions: Colder, Default and Warmer.

The screen It offers a good level of brightness even indoors, although it is necessary to configure some settings in the battery management system to prevent it from limiting the maximum brightness.

If you don’t, you will find that even when the brightness bar is set to maximum, the screen doesn’t shine as it should. Anyway, once the adjustment is made, the screen is capable of offering good visibility even outdoors although you can lose some visibility in the screen content under intense sun.

With the realme 6 experience still fresh, it gives us the feeling that the panel that mounts the realme 6i is even somewhat brighter than that of the realme 6 and offers a higher level of contrast.

Automatic brightness has behaved efficiently by changing the brightness of the screen quickly and with the appropriate intensity, although sometimes it is conservative with the battery and is lazy when it comes to increasing the brightness.

By having an IPS screen viewing angles are slightly sacrificed and the panel begins to lose some brightness and contrast when viewed from the side. This hardly affects the gaming experience or when viewing videos since when doing so the viewer usually places himself in a centred position.

Helio G80, low-cost gaming processor that fits like a glove in the realme 6i

Entering fully into the hardware section we find that the realme 6i focuses its main attraction on price, but at the same time, it offers a gaming-oriented processor.

We talk about MediaTek Helio G80, a 2 GHz eight-core processor and manufacturing at 12 nm that, while offering performance below the G90T that mounted the realme 6, has shown itself as a very capable chip.

This processor unfolds with ease in the day to day facing all kinds of tasks without question. Ride 4 GB of RAM which contributes to smooth user experience, although it is true that on some occasions it has shown signs of being fair when switching between demanding apps.

When facing any of the latest Google Play games, does not disappoint and the GPU Mali G52 pulls muscle allowing to run games like Asphalt 9 Legends or PUBG Mobile in its highest quality, although, yes, it must be taken into account that the screen limits the resolution to HD +.

We can only say that the Helio G80 has behaved in a solvent way although, we insist, not with the brilliance that the immediately superior model did. Although in this case, having 4 GB of RAM does not work in your favour either.

This leads us to recommend the version with 4 GB instead of the one with 3 GB of RAM and 64 GB of internal storage for best results.

If we limit ourselves to synthetic benchmarks, the response has not disappointed and adjusts to the sensations that the processor transmitted to us in games and normal use, obtaining amazing scores for an affordable smartphone it only costs 179 euros.

Further, this processor does very good heat management since we have only seen a slight increase in temperature in the rear after a long session of games.

On the other hand, mount 128 GB of internal storage It allows you to install a good amount of games and applications.

Unlike many current smartphones, this realme phone does allow you to add extra storage of up to 256 GB by installing a microSD card.

Realme UI is not as smooth as on other devices

Only a few weeks ago since our last meeting with Realme UI, so nothing indicated that we were going to experience great changes. Broadly speaking, this has been the case, but we have found a somewhat more unstable interface than we remembered.

Incorporates the realme UI layer based on Android 10. This layer has little to do with the ColorOS system that the first realme models came with as standard and has evolved very favourably to get closer — over distances — to the spirit of OxygenOS that we have also been able to see in the last OnePlus 8 that we have analyzed.

One of the things we like about Realme UI is its customization capacity, in which you can modify from the appearance of the home screen and the application drawer, the appearance of the icons, to the performance of the terminal to adjust the consumption Of battery.

How differential element of realme UIwe like the Smart sidebar, which is displayed by a gesture from one of the sides and allows it to be configured as an application dock to access them from anywhere, in addition to facilitating access to the screen capture or recording tool.

The realme 6i It also allows gesture control in two modes: based on sliding your fingers from one side of the screen to the other or based on gestures from the bottom bar. It also supports control via traditional Android touch buttons.

However, not everything we liked in the realme UI layer. During the days that we have been using this mobile as a personal phone, we have found that the interface was unstable, closing applications such as the Camera or blocking the browser for no apparent reason.

In the security section, it is worth noting the good behaviour of the fingerprint sensor located on the back, with very good response time and a good percentage of success.

This sensor can be combined with the facial recognition system that, by means of an ingenious screen brightness control system, allows the face to be illuminated for just enough time to recognize in low light situations with a good percentage of correct answers.

Five cameras that seem impossible in this price range Does anyone give more?

We come to another of the most prominent elements on mobile. Photography has become highly relevant in these devices in recent years, and the variety of lenses has become commonplace even in smartphones with prices as tight as realme 6i.

The configuration is somewhat atypical, now that most are more inclined towards zoom cameras, but it is not entirely unknown to us since it tracks the focal lengths (not the benefits) of the reference model, realme 6.

The realme camera app is also not much of a mystery since all the firm’s smartphones share the same app, to which the specific characteristics of each model are added.

One of the common features in the camera app is the mode Color enhancement it saturates colours and increases contrast to create more striking images. This trick is fine for improving the look of your photo on social media, but it does take some of the realism out of it.

The main camera applies pixel binning processing to the photos you take, so after grouping four pixels, the result is a 12-megapixel photo.

From the app you can choose a 48-megapixel shooting mode with which this grouping of pixels is disregarded to show all the information of the sensor, as well as a pro mode with manual adjustments.

In general, it is an app that is easy to use and intuitive, but somewhat sparing in functions and that hides settings that, a priori, it should show first. An example is in adjusting the degree of blur of the background in the portrait mode, which appears when you press an icon when it should appear directly when you select that shooting mode.

At this point, we will see how their cameras unfold. Since this link, You can download the original samples so you can check their quality for yourself.

As expected, photos in bright light tend not to be a problem for cameras. Photos with this scenario show a good dynamic range and well-defined edges.

In general, good results are obtained with the main camera and we could hardly see any difference between the photograph obtained by means of pixel binning and the 48-megapixel “unprocessed” one.

We didn’t see a big difference when turning HDR on or off therefore, its effect is not decisive when it comes to improving the exposure of the photo, although it may be interesting to keep it in automatic mode so that the system can use it in case of finding very sharp shadows.

The realme 6i 8 megapixels ultra-wide-angle camera She is also not lazy in good light, although she cannot prevent 119 degrees viewing angle cause some distortion in the vertical lines as you get closer to the ends of the photo.

From the camera app, it is possible to select two zoom modes: 2x and 5x. Lacking a dedicated telephoto lens, the result is a digital zoom that crops at that scale.

Photos with the crop at 2x zoom worthy of support, but at 5x the edge definition begins to falter even in scenes with good light.

The samples show an excess of processing in the artificial focus of the edges of the image, which leads us to wonder if it is not more convenient to use the main lens to take a photo and make a crop to enlarge the detail and obtain the same frame with more quality.

The differential factor to use this Macro lens and not the main one is the depth of field and the optical blur that these focal points naturally generate. On the other hand, this camera has only offered us decent results in full sun, since in low light it is the one that suffers the most and it is easy to lose definition.

The Camera app automatically activates the lens when it detects this type of focus in Photo mode, but it also gives you the option to select the Super Macro shooting mode with which to shorten that focus distance even more, but the quality of the result is exactly the same.

In the mode Portrait The main camera and the secondary monochrome sensor that uses to obtain background information intervene to apply the cutout to the silhouette of the protagonist.

The realme 6i falls into a common trap in this type of photo: the loss of detail in the cut out of the silhouette and the errors when recognizing parts of the foreground. The clearest example we have in the hair, in which it loses definition in many contours, and in the ears or sideburns of the glasses, which directly fade into the background.

Further, the camera app fails to accurately represent blur, and what seems to be a photo with a poorly defined border, is finally corrected in post-production and a good result is obtained. The negative part is that it can also happen the other way around and trust you with a good photo that later is not exactly as it seemed.

This instability causes the camera to lose reliability and it is necessary to review each photo in detail to check if it is correct or not. As in Macro mode. The cameras accuse the scenes with low light showing a notable loss of sharpness. On the smartphone screen the result seems acceptable, but just take them to an external monitor to see the loss of definition.

The mode Night It enhances the exposure of the scene, brightening especially dark areas, but at the cost of adding some noise and subtracting realism from the final shot.

When using the front camera we find a 16-megapixel sensor that it behaves quite well in most scenarios; both in full sun, where the only drawback can be found in the tendency to overexpose the skies, and in low-light scenes where it maintains a good level of definition and detail.

Little to say in the video section, where it only offers support for 1080p and 720p resolutions at 30 fps, but at least Lets you play in slow motion modes and Time Lapse.

The realme 6i does not stand out for offering outstanding quality, however, putting it in its market context, it is within the quality parameters offered by most terminals in that price range.

They are photographs with more than enough quality to move on social networks and messaging apps, but they do not allow extensions or other uses beyond those displayed on the screen of a smartphone.

5,000 mAh battery that gives a lot of play

The autonomy of the battery is, without a doubt, the star characteristic of this terminal. A feature that, on the other hand, is decisive for any mobile that intends to run games without having to depend on the charger.

The drums have a 5,000 mAh capacity and admit an 18W fast charge provided by the included charger. This represents an increase with respect to the 10W offered by the realme “low cost” terminals in 2019, but it is far from the 30W that realme 6 supported.

Even so, and considering that it is a huge 5,000 mAh battery, the loading times are not bad. In 73 minutes 50% of its charge is reached and it will take a little over three hours to reach full charge.

It may seem that, in times of the immediacy of charging that some terminals have been offering, this model takes almost an eternity to charge. However, it is not so bad if you think that with that charging time you get up to two days of real moderate use and more than one day with intensive use.

Special mention to the intelligent battery management system that acts on the consumption of resources in the background. We have already been able to check its good performance in our analysis of Realme 6, and we have checked it out on Realme 6i.

This system makes the most of the functions of Dozen energy saving on Android 10, reducing the activity of the background applications and causing a “deep sleep” in the terminal when the idle state is prolonged to reduce the consumption of resources to a minimum.

Admittedly, in its factory setting, the battery saver system can be somewhat restrictive in terms of screen brightness or in unleashing the full power of the processor. However, these options can be configurable to strike a good balance between energy savings and performance.

In general terms, the autonomy it offers is simply spectacular far exceeding 9 hours of screens even making intensive use of the terminal in demanding games and applications.

We have no doubt that having an HD + resolution is decisive in obtaining these figures, but it would not have been wrong to let the user choose whether he prefers better autonomy or higher resolution.

NFC and FM radio, but without Wi-Fi 5

The section of the connectivity It has its lights and its shadows, some of them are still surprising.

If we begin by doing a review of the wireless connectivity, in which the presence of Bluetooth 5.0 and NFC With which you can make payments from your mobile among many other things such as pairing your smartphone via Bluetooth with other devices with a single touch.

Besides, the incorporation of the 3.5 mm jack leaves the door open to the FM radio since this uses the headphones as an antenna.

The negative point is found in the Wi-Fi connection. In this section, two major absences are accused. On the one hand, the realme 6i does not comply with the WiFi 5 (802.11 ac) standard, so only allows connections at WiFi 4 speed (802.11 n).

This implies that does not support 5 GHz WiFi networks, an increasingly widespread standard that provides greater speed in connections.

In terms of sound, it has a single main speaker located to the right of the USB Type-C connector. This implies that, when holding the terminal in the horizontal position, this speaker will be on top and the holes will not be covered with a hand. Good for realme!

The sound is enough to watch some videos or play sporadically, but they do not offer quality sound or too high a volume.

The intermediate tones are easily solved, but it suffers quite a lot from the high tones, where they quickly fall into distortion, and it completely lacks the body provided by the lowest tones.

In terms of quality and power, it is enough to reach 60% of its volume to begin to appreciate the first distortions, which only get worse as the volume increases.

With headphones, things improve if they are connected through the 3.5 mm jack and you can see a slight loss of quality when playing uncompressed audio via Bluetooth.

From the settings of sound, you can improve the sound somewhat thanks to the technology Real sound with which you can equalize the sound to personalize the experience.

The mid-range narrows the fence and complicates the choice on cheap phones

We come to the end of this analysis with some doubts and mixed feelings that really make us doubt about the place that this smartphone occupies in the market.

Go ahead that the realme 6i is most likely one of the best lower-middle-range smartphones you can buy for 179 euros at this time. Something that will undoubtedly take the sleep off more than once in the Xiaomi offices.

It is for its impressive battery that will delight all those users who, making heavy use, do not reach the end of the day without going through the charging process.

The other great argument for realme 6i It is the good performance it offers, more than remarkable for a smartphone in its category.

Nor does it perform badly in the photographic section, which, although it is slightly below what its older brother Realme 6 offers, offers a reasonable quality for a terminal in the price range that this realme model moves.

Aspects such as screen resolution, connectivity or sound play against it, which subtract points from that gaming spirit transmitted by the processor it mounts.

At this point in the analysis of Realme 6i, more than one reader will have thought: and is it worth saving the difference of just 70 euros that separates it from realme 6 with equivalent memory?

By doing so you give up a better screen, better materials in the finish, a more powerful processor and better connectivity features. However, 70 euros for many users can be a world.

If they decide not to cross that bridge, users should know that, for the 179 euros what this real 6i costs, they are taking home one of the best mobiles in relation quality price and power.