The Oppo Realme 1 is the newest budget device and it comes at a crazy low price, somehow it has a 6 inch screen, a good battery and the build quality of a device that should cost at least twice as much, but you know specs can be deceiving and so can looks. This is our Oppo Realme one review.
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Oppo Realme 1 |
This phone has excellent design and build quality, it feels sturdy and it seems like it can take a beating, just don’t get it wet since it doesn’t have any IP protection, the device is mostly made of plastic to drive down cost but it certainly doesn’t look like it. The back for example has the diamond inspired design that Oppo is very proud of, it’s quite eye catching but it’s clean of fingerprints and smudges but that usually doesn’t last long, so it’s good that there’s a case included.
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Oppo Realme 1 Backview |
The biggest feature missing on the Oppo Realme 1 is the fingerprint reader, but despite that there is a super fast and accurate face unlock, but while you can’t fool it with a picture it’s not very secure and it works even if your eyes are closed, so you’ll still need to use a password for more sensitive content.
The six inch 1080p LCD panel is larger than on most budget devices, however the bezel trend that started last year practically foretold that larger screen sizes will trickle down to mid-range and budget phones, of course this being a budget device brightness and contrast are decent, but not spectacular. It’s in the same ballpark as the Redmi 5 and the Redmi 5 Plus. In a way audio performance is similar while it can easily get loud enough for you to hear it ring in a crowded bar. The audio quality itself is rather mediocre, you want to listen to your favorite music through headphones or a Bluetooth speaker instead thankfully there’s a headphone jack on board so any old pair will work.
The Realme 1 Helio P60 chipset is a mid-ranger that easily beat out the Redmi lineup and the Moto G6 plus as well as mostly any other smartphone with the Snapdragon 6 series chipset. In fact we can easily say this is the best bang for your buck if you’re chasing the best mobile performance or super cheap and because some of you were wondering graphics were automatically set to medium when playing Pub G and frame rates for a study, the phone didn’t heat up while playing either.
Best of all, although power doesn’t come at the expense of battery life, the Helio P60 seems to be quite power efficient too and combined with the 3400 milliamp battery the real me one yielded a very good 84 hours of endurance, screen on times are respectable too.
The only real irritation is the lack of fast charging, there isn’t even any support for it so you’re stuck with a Glacial charging pace no matter what charger you use, you won’t find wireless charging either but that’s to be expected at this price point.
The Realme one features Android 8.1 with color OS on top, if you love stock Android this really isn’t the phone for you, but if you like Oppo user interface you’ll feel right at home, color OS also comes with a bunch of features that pure Android lacks for now and it sometimes comes with a design that looks a little too close to iOS. Some things are easy to find like the phone manager that helps you optimize your phone or the theme store, other features and options are buried in a maze of sub menus but at least there’s a search option in settings that helps alleviate some of the confusion, for example if you want to replace the navigation buttons with swipe gestures just search gestures, speaking of which those offer a lot of options and they’re easy to get used to while saving some precious screen space.
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Oppo Realme 1 Single Back Camera |
The Realme 1 sports a 13 megapixel camera and it performs pretty well, there’s plenty of detail closer good despite being a bit muted and noise suppression works well, of course it has its weaknesses dynamic range isn’t great there’s a general softness around corners and we spotted a bit of over sharpening here and there. The HDR mode helps a dynamic range so you can just leave it on auto, portrait mode though is where it really falls flat, edge detection is poor and the effect as a whole is rather unconvincing. Surprisingly there isn’t a 4k video option despite the capabilities of the chipset and sadly no IRS or OIS that we can see, still it can shoot decent video at 1080p at 30 frames per second.
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Photoshoot on Oppo Realme 1 |
As for the front camera selfies are good despite their limited dynamic range, but my eyes were enlarged even when the beauty option was turned off.
The Realme 1 is a budget device and sacrifices have been made to get it to this price point, there is no water protection, there’s no fast charging, there’s no wireless charging and the camera is not really stellar but even so the chips at performance is great, the battery life is very good and the screen is large and modern looking.
So the Realme 1 delivers all the features that you might need on a modern smartphone, while outperforming much of its competitors at a lower price, it looks like Oppo really wants to get market share, so they’re undercutting Xiaomi which were normally rules this price segment and as such the Realme 1 seems like a really good deal and it’s an easy recommendation.