In mid-June, the Realme GT3 smartphone was introduced in Russia with the fastest charging among all available devices on the market, 1 TB of built-in and 16 GB of RAM, a 144 Hz screen and a powerful chipset. What else is the novelty hiding, and is it worth the money – in the review of Gazeta.Ru.
Equipment
The Realme GT3 comes in a small black box containing a smartphone, a black silicone case, documentation, a 240W charger, and a USB-C to USB-C cable that can handle current up to 12A.
Losing the block and wire is not worth it – they are unlikely to be easily found in stores near the house. In which case, you will have to wait for delivery from AliExpress. Moreover, the purchase of such a kit is comparable to the price of a budget smartphone.
The screen of the GT3 has been applied with a factory protective film that will protect your smartphone from accidental scratches.
Design
The front and back of the gadget is covered with glass, and from the ends it is protected by a plastic frame, which at first glance seems to be metal. This decision “cheapens” the device, and since most users, however, hide the smartphone in a case, it is almost not noticeable. The back glass is frosted, so the lid does not collect smudges and fingerprints.
To the right of the smartphone’s camera unit is a transparent surface behind which you can see the device’s chip – Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, as well as IR blaster (IR) and NFC signatures. Perhaps these elements are really somewhere in this area of the gadget, but the visible chipset is clearly a dummy for decoration. Around the chip there is an RGB bezel in the form of the letter “C” with the signature Dare to leap – the brand’s slogan.
This “window” often gets dirty and collects fingerprints.
The front is a flat display with rather narrow bezels and a cutout for the front camera, which is placed in the middle at the top of the screen.
In general, the device, weighing 199 grams, feels like a flagship in the hand – there are no questions about the assembly and quality of materials.
Screen
Realme GT3 is equipped with a 6.74-inch AMOLED screen with a resolution of 1.5K (1240×2772 pixels) and a refresh rate of 144Hz. The peak brightness of the screen reaches 1400 nits. On a sunny summer day, using a smartphone outdoors does not cause inconvenience, all the details on the screen are quite distinguishable.
In the settings, you can find four color modes or manually adjust the color temperature of the screen in warmer or colder shades. There are also additional features such as sharpening photos and videos, improving the color reproduction in videos, optimizing videos to 60 or 120 FPS, and the ability to enable a vivid mode for HDR video.
Oddities arise with the screen frequency: in a smartphone it reaches 144 Hz, but most applications, including system ones, work at a maximum of 120 Hz. This happens in the frequency mode “Auto” and “High”. But when you select the latter, a list of applications for manual installation appears, as well as frequencies for them. You can, for example, set all 144 Hz in the browser, 90 Hz in YouTube, 60 Hz in the gallery, and set 120 Hz in some game. That is, there are four frequencies to choose from: 60, 90, 120 and 144 Hz.
Perhaps the manufacturer in future updates should simplify this point and entrust the choice of frequency up to 144 Hz to the system – not every user is ready to understand this.
Also worth noting is the presence of a PWM frequency of 2160 Hz. Now high-frequency pulsation is a trend for all “self-respecting” Chinese flagships. Thanks to this technology, the screen pulsates so often that the user does not notice it, which means that his eyes are less strained and tired.
cameras
The main module in Realme GT3 is represented by a 50-megapixel Sony IMX890 sensor with optical stabilization and f/1.88 aperture. This is a very high-quality camera that is capable of producing rich and detailed photographs. However, it falls short of the flagship iPhone, Samsung and even Xiaomi.
The camera algorithms in Realme make the photo sharp and saturated, after which the images do not even have to be edited before posting them on social networks.
The main camera records video up to 4K resolution at 60 FPS. I would also like to note that the smartphone does not have an annoying bug known to many users of smartphones running Android, due to which the video freezes in the first seconds – the video is smooth from start to finish.
However, the ultra-wide-angle module in the smartphone let us down. Realme GT3 is the global version of GT Neo5. The correspondent of Gazeta.Ru, being the owner of the previous generation of the GT Neo3 smartphone of this line, noticed a great simplification in this camera module. Firstly, there is no revolution in the part of the photo in it – its quality has not changed in any way when compared. Secondly,in terms of video shooting, the camera has become worse – if in the predecessor it was possible to shoot from the ultra-wide-angle module in Full HD at 60 FPS, then in Realme GT3 the maximum value became Full HD at 30 FPS.
This is strange, given that the chipset has become more powerful. For some, this will seem like an important omission.
As a rule, smartphones have only one or two noteworthy cameras. The third module is usually called a “plug”, which is rarely used by anyone. In the case of Realme GT3, everything is different. As the third module, a 2-megapixel microscope is used here, the image quality of which leaves much to be desired, but the ability to “look” into the world invisible to the eyes is fascinating.
For example, consider the structure of fabric, skin, hair, grass, or plush toys—anything that comes to mind. It is unusual, really interesting and attractive. The only pity is that the microscope is available exclusively for photography mode – you can’t record video on it.
Separately, I would like to note that the night photo in automatic mode turns out to be quite bright – for this it is not necessary to switch to the appropriate mode. In the case of the main camera, the picture is detailed and not blurry. However, the night photo from the ultra-wide-angle module does not always come out clear and clarified, blackouts may occur in some areas.
The smartphone has a front camera with a resolution of 16 megapixels, capable of recording video in Full HD at 30 frames per second. Photos on this module are good, however, at times, algorithms with a lack of light can greatly twist the sharpness of the image, which is not always beneficial.
If the Realme GT3 had a better ultra-wide-angle module, then the camera could have been given a five, however, due to this shortcoming, the smartphone gets a solid four with a plus.
Performance
Realme GT3 is equipped with one of the most successful chips in recent years – Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 from Qualcomm . This is the flagship chipset of the second half of 2022, which is increasingly appearing in low-cost smartphones, whose cost is $500-700 for the European market.
In the Geekbench 6 benchmark, the device scores 1371 and 3758 points in the single-core and multi-core tests, respectively.
This result is enough for everyday use of a smartphone with a margin of several years, including for mobile games.
Realme GT3 handles any game without any problems: PUBG: Mobile, Call of Duty: Mobile and even Genshin Impact at maximum settings, showing a result of 60 FPS. In the latter, the smartphone heats up, but this does not cause discomfort.
In addition, the Realme GT3’s “Game Mode” now has the ability to make more graphics settings in games using the “GPU Settings” feature. It looks almost the same as in the graphics settings on the computer. In this mode, you can increase or decrease the value of MSAA anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, MIP-texturing, as well as set the profile “Performance”, “Quality” or “Balanced” for texture filtering.
The RAM, which is 16 GB of the LPDDR5X standard, also helps the smartphone in speed. It can also be expanded with permanent memory, but how effective this is is unknown. There is also a lot of built-in memory here – a whole 1 TB of UFS 3.1 standard. This version of the smartphone is the only one – there is no option with more compact storage on sale.
The smartphone runs on Android 13 with RealmeUI 4.0 proprietary shell. The system interface as a whole is not much different from other brand devices with this firmware. The exceptions are advanced screen customization options, slightly modified icons and RGB backlit control menus.
The backlight works as an “annunciator” for incoming calls, notifications, charging, and when the game menu “GT Mode” is turned on. You can select the backlight style (“breathing” and flicker), backlight speed and color (25 available).
Battery
The battery in Realme GT3 is very controversial – only 4600 mAh. It lasts an average of 6.5 hours of active screen. In general, this is a normal result, but not ideal – other smartphones from the company work much longer.
However, you can close your eyes to this, because the smartphone is charged from 1% to 100% in just 9.5-10 minutes. It depends on the surrounding conditions – it happens that charging takes 12-15 minutes. The very first charge did last about 18 minutes, that is, twice as long as stated. This can be explained by the fact that the smartphone has a smart charging function that “understands” when and how much current to apply. Probably due to the summer heat, the smartphone decided that it would be safer to loosen the charge.
The Realme GT3 gets moderately hot when charging fast. But if you use the original memory, you can not worry about the safety of this process.
The manufacturer claims that with 1600 charging cycles from a complete charger, the smartphone will lose about 20% of its initial capacity. That is, the battery will “weaken” by one-fifth after more than a thousand days, if you charge it once or twice a day.
Other features
Realme GT3 has an infrared port that allows you to control household appliances, NFC for contactless payment and a linear vibration motor. It does not provide a headphone jack, as well as support for memory cards, but with 1 TB of storage, this is unlikely to seem like a problem to anyone.
The smartphone also has stereo speakers, but not full-fledged two, but the so-called “one and a half” – one multimedia and conversational, which complements the first. In general, the sound is good, but it does not reach the level of the iPhone and even some Xiaomi.
Conclusion
Realme GT3 is one of the most interesting smartphones on the Russian market, but at the same time very strange. The manufacturer in everything wanted to show it only from the best sides – this is indicated by the terms that were encountered in the review: powerful hardware, fast screen, the fastest charging and a very large amount of memory. For all this they ask for 69 thousand rubles. in retail. And for such a device, this is not much.
However, the decision to release only the maximum version of the device looks unjustified – the company cuts off potential buyers who need, for example, 256 GB of memory. Simpler modifications could have a positive impact on the cost of a smartphone, making it even more attractive to buy.
