Realme C3 review: the smartphone that’s cheap but acts expensive

Realme has produced a cheap $269 phone that could be popular in a pandemic economy.

The Realme C3 budget smartphone costs $269.

Realme has released an Android phone with a big screen and huge battery for just $269. That could be a game changer in the highly competitive lower end phone market, which is where many consumers are heading in the languishing post-lockdown coronavirus economy.

Phones do come cheaper; you can buy them for less than $100. In my experience, you are reminded every instant that you have a terrible phone when you buy one at this price; slow operation, poor screen sensitivity, poor battery life and low resolution cameras can leave you feeling sad.

However it gets interesting at $200 to $300. Manufacturers can add some bells and whistles and offer a decent smartphone experience. Your phone can even have some stellar features.

Realme has sought to provide some pizzazz in cheap phones since its launch in Australia last year.

Realme is a relatively new Chinese brand, having been launched in Shenzhen in May 2018.

Whether Realme is part of Oppo or an independent company has been hard to fathom. The company name existed back in 2010 as a sub brand of Oppo which in turn is a subsidiary of BBK Electronics, the parent also of Vivo and OnePlus.

However its founder Ski Li, a former vice president of Oppo, says the modern Realme is an independent company. He does credit his career to Oppo CEO Tony Chen, who on Twitter he says is “a man of vision, vigour and generosity, who led me in the past 18 months”. That places Realme as more a breakaway from the Oppo stable.

The fledgling phone maker already has models in the Australian market, having launched the Realme C2 ($199), Realme 5 ($299), Realme 5 Pro ($399) and premium Realme XT ($499) in the Australian market last year.

The Realme C3 budget smartphone costs just $269.

It’s now released an upgraded C3 with promising features. It looks like a 2020 phone with a large screen at front and a textured plastic mat back that doesn’t leave fingerprints. It comes in blue or red and doesn’t feel cheap at all.

It has a small bezel or border around its large 6.5-inch IPS LCD display and offers reasonable resolution at 270 pixels per inch. Images look sharp on its 720p display, but not as crisp as they would on 1080p (full HD) or 4K display.

You do however get bells and whistles such as the latest Google Android 10 and face and fingerprint unlocking. The fingerprint sensor is on the rear of the phone rather than on screen, as with other recent phones. Both forms of biometric login work quickly.

The display is reasonably bright and glossy, with 480 nits brightness, the app tray that I love on Android devices is intact, and the screen is very sensitive to touch, which isn’t the case with all cheap phones.

A gentle flick upwards displays the app tray, and a gentle flick downwards displays shortcuts and notifications, as they should. The phone uses Realme’s UI overlay but it seems only a slight departure from vanilla Android and doesn’t seem to slow operation.

The phone has plenty of features. It can house two nanoSIM cards and a microSDXC card – there are three slots in all. You can add 256GB of microSD card storage to the 64GB of internal storage. The storage isn’t massive, but for many people it should be enough. The phone is NFC enabled for payments.

The C3 has a decent 8-core cortex processor with two cores rated at 2.0GHz and the remaining six at 1.7GHz. That’s not fast but it is respectable for the price. Australian models have 3GB of internal memory which is light on.

I used the AnTuTu benchmark for smartphones to test the C3 and it scored 180297, which is not earth shattering to be polite. It’s CPU score (72921) defeated 19pc of existing results, its GPU just 7pc, memory just 16pc and usability 24pc.

The Realme C3 budget smartphone costs just $269.

This isn’t fantastic but I’ve seen worse with phones costing more. For example its overall score is better than the Huawei Mate 20 Lite of mid 2018. The C3 however doesn’t “feel” that slow when handling basic tasks.

There are some reservations. While the battery has a large capacity, you miss out on wireless and fast charging. You charge the C3 with an old fashioned microUSB cable which is a blast from the past these days, with most phones offering a USB-C port for charging. This limitation means you can’t plug in a portable drive as you could with a USB-C port.

There is no water or dust rating.

The C3 does have an FM radio and 3.5mm audio jack for headphones. Some people will jump up and down for joy over that. There’s also a flashlight and support for Bluetooth 5.0.

Then there’s the camera. The app offers portrait, time-lapse, panorama shots and 1080p video at 30 frames per second with the back facing camera. However, there’s only a single 12MP lens and 2MP depth sensor.

The front facing camera is just 5MP so don’t expect your selfies to have the detail of a Pablo Picasso masterpiece. You can get a decent shot in good light though, but don’t expect much in darker surroundings.

Cameras are often the one big compromise made to bring the price of phones down. If that doesn’t worry you, this Realme update offers a decent user experience and it runs the same three million or so Android apps you get on a high end handset.

For most part, you don’t feel you are using a cheap phone at all.

Price: $269. Available from JB Hi-Fi, Bing Lee, Make it Mine, mobileciti, 5Gworld, Essential Appliance Rentals, Amazon, Kogan, eBay, Catch.com.