Realme 7 5G: Parents, this is the phone you should have got your kids for Christmas
- Reference: 1609506911
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/01/01/realme_7_5g/
- Source link:
Now those lines are so blurry, you'd be justified in asking your ophthalmologist to check for cataracts. And it's all thanks to devices like the Realme 7 5G.
I should hate this phone. It's emblematic of a trend within the smartphone industry that's making it harder to pick and choose between devices. Priced at £279, the Realme 7 5G sits in a price band that historically housed slow, feature-crippled phones with awful cameras. And yet this handset has pretty much everything a normal person wants from a phone, and then some.
[1]
It's not a "powerhouse," although it's certainly good enough for most day-to-day stuff. The Realme 7 5G is fitted with enough RAM for multitasking (6GB), ample storage for apps and content (128GB, using UFS 2.1), as well as a MediaTek Dimensity 800U processor that holds up well in challenging conditions.
It has other charms too. Battery life is excellent, comfortably providing two days of charge if you're conservative with usage. This is enhanced by 30W fast charging. And that's before we mention its fluid 120Hz display, as well as support for 5G.
Picture Perfect?
The display is 6.5 inches, 1080 x 2400, and bracketed by four slender bezels that give it an 90.5 per cent screen-to-body ratio. In the top-left corner, you'll find the phone's 16MP wide-angle selfie camera housed in a small hole-punch cutout.
Given the price of this device, Realme had to pick between the quality of the panel, and the speed of its refresh rate. A compromise had to be made. It opted to go down the latter path with a weaker IPS LCD display capable of 120Hz speeds.
[2]
It panders to the device's target audience: price-sensitive, game-obsessed bods. Even if you aren't partial to the occasional bout of Call of Duty , you'll notice a faster screen will make UI elements feel smoother. Briskly scrolling through your email inbox produces none of the juddering you'd otherwise experience when using a standard 60Hz panel.
Still, colour fidelity is an issue on LCD screens, and the Realme 7 5G is no exception. If you've been spoiled by an AMOLED display, you'll start to notice a real downgrade. Colours look washed out and black tones are dull when watching films or reading a media-rich website.
The ultra-high refresh rate also feels somewhat redundant when you consider this phone doesn't exactly tout premium specs. Don't get me wrong, the MediaTek Dimensity 800U is fast enough for most low-stakes tasks, and compares favourably with its immediate Qualcomm rival, the Snapdragon 765G. Still, when you're playing a visually intensive game, you'll start to encounter performance headwinds. These occasional splutters dilute the benefit you'd otherwise get from a 120Hz panel.
Stayin' alive
Realme isn't stingy when it comes to the battery, which is rated at 5,000mAH. That's at the upper end of what you'd typically get in a mainstream Android phone. You can surpass that if you opt for a niche device, like the Doogee N100, which touts a 10,000mAh battery, but those are the exceptions and not the norm.
[3]
If you're conservative, you can stretch this to last two days of continuous usage. This is easily done by dropping the display refresh rate to 90Hz or 60Hz, avoiding 5G, and limiting your use of battery-gobbling apps and games. Given most people are working from home, and 5G coverage is still relatively sparse, you'll probably end up doing this anyway without realising. If you throw caution to the wind, you can expect something north of 24 hours based on our testing.
There's no wireless charging, which is a common trait to devices made by other firms owned by Realme's parent, BKK Electronics. Still, it makes up for this with the inclusion of brisk 30W fast charging, which can deliver a full charge from empty within an hour, providing you're using a compatible USB-C charger.
Snap happy
As is common with devices in its category, the Realme 7 5G has a quad-camera setup. No surprises here – the primary camera is 48MP using Samsung's S5KGM1ST sensor tech.
High megapixel counts are just a marketing gimmick designed to sway those who incorrectly believe that "more" is the same as "better". For starters, you almost never end up with a 48MP photo — and, for that matter, nor would you want to.
[4]
To squeeze more pixels onto a sensor, camera manufacturers have to make them physically smaller. This makes them less capable at absorbing light. So, the sensor performs some technological trickery, combining multiple pixels into one. This is called "pixel binning" and it usually produces shots that are as much as four, six, or eight times smaller.
The primary sensor on the Realme 7 5G is good enough for most people, and produces solid (if not slightly overexposed) shots under decent lighting conditions. And its accompanying 8MP ultra-wide angle lens is perfectly serviceable, offering a 119-degree field of view.
There's also a 2MP macro lens, allowing close-up shots from within a focal range of 4cm. Sadly, the resulting images are too grainy and low-resolution to be of use.
This is in line with what you'd expect on a low-end phone with a quad-camera setup. You typically get one or two usable cameras, and a further two that are too low-resolution to provide any utility, but nonetheless serve as a marketing hook for those who don't know any better. You can't really fault Realme for this; it's pretty much standard across the entire Android industry.
Wrapping up
Despite the complaints, the Realme 7 5G is decent value. There are flaws, certainly, but they're what you'd expect from a device in its category.
Sure, the camera is only so-so, and the display isn't as vibrant as we'd like. Realme redeemed itself by including extras that more than make up for those sins, including an excellent battery, fast charging, and a generous complement of RAM and storage.
This is a phone you can give to a parent or younger child, and they won't hate it. We'd recommend it over more expensive models, like the OnePlus Nord and Motorola's Moto G 5G Plus. And for £279, who can argue with that? ®
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[1] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/12/11/realme72.jpg
[2] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/12/11/realme71.jpg
[3] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/12/11/realme74.jpg
[4] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/12/11/realme75.jpg
[5] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
This review shows just how quickly we've got used to expensive phones.
Do people really consider £279 "a price band that historically housed slow, feature-crippled phones with awful cameras"? and something that's cheap enough to give to a "younger child"?
I've never in my life paid more than £150 or so for a phone, and never had any of the problems the reviewer talks about. Juddering? Performance issues? Washed out colours?
And as the other comment points out, it's kind of light on practical information such as MicroSD slot, headphone jack etc.
But it's long on information about battery life when 'lightly used', which is not remotely definable.
Hell, my phone's battery is smaller than that and lasts an age if it's off. Not a useful metric. Here's a better list of the specs without the storytelling involved:
https://www.gsmarena.com/realme_7_5g-10590.php
I grew up with PAL
PAL uses a screen resolution of 720 x 576 pixels and has a refresh rate of 25 frames per second. Does make me smile
Re: I grew up with PAL
Indeed.
Mind you, when watching shows recorded for that standard upscaled, you really notice how far we've come.
I converted some old 'Complete and Utter History' DVDs over the holidays, and the effect is even more apparent.
Re: I grew up with PAL
All depends on the quality of the upscaling and, of course, the original video. I have some home videos on miniDV - an SD format - which look quite good even at huge size on our living room TV. We also have quite a collection of DVDs, some of which are straight transfers of (something like) broadcast Beta to DVD, some of which have been "cleaned and restored". The latter are great for watching and in some ways better than streamed video which has been lossy-compressed to heck and back.
I remember in the early days of HD screens we had some Sharp TVs at work and an LG. When running from a computer there wasn't a lot to choose between the pictures produced, other than the fact that the LG, being a plasma device, had slightly better colour rendition and contrast than the LCD Sharps. Back then Freeview was SD only and both TVs used a signal from the same distributed aerial system. The upscaling algorithms on the LG were phenominally better than those in the Sharps and the picture was much more watchable.
M.
Re: I grew up with PAL
Technically, PAL refers to the colour system; the image format had been around since 625 line black-and-white TV was launched. It has a "refresh rate" of 50 times per second, but each time it's only half a frame (one "field") so it does produce 25 frames per second, but effectively 50 new images per second. Interlaced video was a very clever compromise back in the day, a sort of analogue video compression system, but did cause more than a few complications when progressive - and particularly digital - video became practical.
Today my own videos are compromised because I have two cameras - one very high quality - which can only do 1080i50 (interlaced high definition) and a couple of cheaper cameras that can only do 720p60 and because editing 25/50Hz video on a 60Hz computer monitor is annoying, to say the least. It's not that monitors can't do 50Hz, it's that they don't advertise that fact to the computer, so it's impossible to select 50Hz and for 50Hz work I end up using a TV.
And don't get me started on iPlayer. If I use get_iplayer to download videos and play them from an HDD plugged into the back of the TV they look great, but live-streaming, even when the computer is connected to the same TV, seems to do some odd kind of 50Hz to 60Hz and back to 50Hz conversion, resulting in horrible jerky panning.
M.
More like 768 x 576!!
Actually, I believe the maximum possible PAL resolution is 702 x 576, but CRTs typically only displayed about 75-80% of that area.
It upscales very slightly - almost insignificantly - when converted to a standard 704 x 576 digital format.
>> but CRTs typically only displayed about 75-80%
Domestic TVs. Broadcast TVs showed the entire raster, but Joe Public doesn't like to think that all the expensive CRT wasn't being used.
It's impossible to compare an analogue format such as PAL directly with digital video. The horizontal resolution of analogue formats depends essentially on the bandwidth of the video signal and for UK broadcast PAL this was around 6MHz which theoretically gives something like 540 "TV lines" of resolution if all conditions are ideal and my memory serves. TV lines always assume (for no apparent reason) a square screen, so the actual number of "pixels" viewable across a "540 line" screen is something like 540*(4/3) = 720. Reduce the bandwidth and you get fewer TV lines. Standard VHS with a luminance bandwidth of something like 3MHz can only manage 240 TVL or so.
Note that the vertical resolution - the number of scan lines - is fixed, so 625 for PAL, though quite a few of those are not displayed on screen, hence 576. For analogue broadcast these "hidden" lines were used to carry additional services such as teletext.
M.
Battery
As this is the reg, how about mentioning.
Is the battery removeable? No AFAIK but would like clarification
Headphone jack? yes FAIK, but again would be nice to confirm
Dual SIM ?
SD card slot?
What's the patch / upgrade likelihood (coupled with, which version of android does it run)
As the review was quite game play obsessed, does it support ARCore (as some popular games need that e.g. Harry Potter, so lack of ARCore support could lead to grumpy young child if its not supported as last line o review mentions it for a younger child)
Disclosure - better specs than my phone, and my phone perfectly fine for normal use
BTW "Briskly scrolling through your email inbox produces none of the juddering you'd otherwise experience when using a standard 60Hz panel." - never get judder on my phone when scrolling inbox, would have to scroll so fast that you could not see the emails to achieve that (& what's the point of doing that?)