realme had been busy over the past years in making feature-packed smartphones at an affordable price. The realme 5 series last year is compelling evidence that the company nailed it in this regard. That series alone was one of the most sold in the Philippines. Now, Realme is keen to capitalize on its success with the new realme 6 series.

The first device in the series is now officially available in the country. realme 6i builds on the popularity and success of realme 5. Almost everything that made the realme 5 successful makes a return 0n the 6i. There are some aspects too that got improved. But is it enough to be a worthy successor to the realme 5?

That question alone bears a significant impact on how successful this device. realme 6i is once again competing for a spot on one of the best budget smartphones list. Let’s find out how the device 6i fares against the competition.

A polarizing design on the back

Right off the bat, the design of the realme 6i stands out like on the realme 5. This time around, the gradient pattern on the back is different. When hit by light, the back of the device gives a grill-like pattern. The new design pattern is surely polarizing. Some will love it, but others may not. I fall in the latter.

It comes in two colors: Matcha Green and Milk White. Sure enough, if you saw the realme 6i in press renders, you’ll be forgiven for imagining your favorite drink too. In real-world usage though, the colors are much more subdued than what Realme wants you to see. I have the Matcha Green on hand and it looks more like the color of a leaf to me.

It is easy to handle the device despite its large size. Also, you won’t feel that the device is made out of plastic. realme 6i is well-made, and it can trick you into thinking that it’s made from aluminum.

Moving over to the front, you still get a waterdrop notch up top and narrow bezels all-around. The power button is still on the right, and the volume controls are on the left. If there’s one big change this year, that will be the new USB-C port on the bottom. Finally, a budget device with a USB-C. And, there’s still a headphone jack on this device!

Vibrant but dim screen

There’s nothing to write home about realme 6i’s display. It carried over the display from its predecessor. As such, you still get a 6.5-inch 1600 x 720 IPS LCD screen. You won’t notice the individual pixels on this phone and the colors are vibrant enough for HD videos. However, it can’t compare to an OLED screen. On my OnePlus 6T, colors are much more vibrant and saturated. Granted, this is a lower-res screen, but putting an OLED there could have helped in making the display much more true-to-life.

The notch above the display is small that you don’t notice it on day-to-day usage. Plus, the display is almost near the sweet spot of 21:9, so you can use two apps side-by-side comfortably if that’s your fancy.

There’s a major problem with the display though. The maximum brightness of this device is not enough for a comfortable outdoor viewing experience. On a sunny day, I can’t even read the text and see the content on my screen. I don’t know if this is a software or a hardware issue. realme has to fix this problem urgently in the future.

Zippy performance for everyday use

The realme 6i flies through daily tasks. There’s a Helio P90 processor powering the device which is more than enough for day-to-day use. I didn’t notice any lag while browsing the web, peeking through Reddit threads, and viewing my Messenger conversations. Suffice to say, it’s more than capable and can confidently handle any task you throw at it.

Gaming’s a mixed bag, though. For graphics-intensive tasks, the device struggles a bit. When I played the relatively-obscure but polished clone of Minecraft — Survivalcraft — the frame rates dropped to an unacceptable three FPS after setting off multiple explosions. I recommend toning down the graphics a bit if you want to play modern graphically-intensive games.

realme’s own twist to Android 10 is a bit polished, but you can’t help but notice its similarity to iOS and OneUI. However, to distinguish its own OS, it added a few niceties that anyone will surely appreciate in their day-to-day usage. You can customize the navigation gestures and even tweak the icons if you like. Realme UI has come a long way, and overall, I like the coherent design of the icons and the system.

However, that’s where the good side ends. Personally, there’s a lot of performance drawbacks that I experienced on the realme 6i. Chief among them is loads of bloatware on this thing. Right out of the box, I get the Agoda, Opera, Lazada, Facebook, Trip.com, and Webnovel app. I don’t need these apps, along with realme’s own app store that annoyed me every time I install an app from the Google Play Store. Fortunately, I can disable or uninstall these apps.

There are gesture bugs and touch input delays too. I can’t count the times I had to double-tap or even triple-tap a button at the bottom of the screen because the screen can’t recognize my touch.

Decent all-around cameras

Now onto the tricky part: the camera. realme 6i’s camera takes decent photos if there’s enough light. The photos taken on this thing showed punchy colors and enough details to make it usable for day to day use. On the photos below, I can commend Realme 6i for getting the colors of the foliage right. What I liked most about this photo is how it gets the bokeh right:

And since pizza’s one of the comfort food we miss during the lockdown, we had a pizza delivered right into our house. Look at how the realme 6i nailed the colors green and red bell peppers, white onions, and the bits of meat.

However, I put the emphasis on decent photos: if you really are nitpicking, you will notice that the photos are a bit muted and dull. Take this photo, for example:

The leaves on the tree turned out nice. However, looking over to the house, I can definitely tell that the color is washed out. In real life, the color is much more vibrant than what realme 6i wants you to believe. The house has a much vibrant pink to it. The issue here could be blamed on getting the white balance wrong.

Turning on the HDR helps to boost the colors a bit. Some details are also recovered too. I recommend turning on the HDR on shots with contrasting scenes like this one to make the photos a bit nicer to look at.

The camera of the realme 6i starts to show its limitation on dimly-light environments too. There’s a night mode on this device to help it capture better photos at night. However, just avoid taking a photo at night since it tends to capture blurry photos.

The camera also had different shooting modes to meet your needs. There’s Panorama mode and Ultra Macro mode so you can take landscape and close-up shots. Personally, I find them useful in certain scenarios, but photos taken with these modes sometimes lack detail with washed-out colors and blurred details.

The shots taken on the front-facing camera of the Realme 6i is fine for social media posts. However, when you look closely at the photos below, you’ll see that the colors are a bit washed-out. The camera tends to smoothen out my face, which is a result of the beauty filter turned on by default. The camera app itself has settings to “beautify” and tweak your face appearance, which is nice for people like me who always have pimple break-outs.

Humungous battery that charges quickly

The battery on this device remains at a massive 5,000mAh. That alone will give you solid two-day battery life for normal use cases. However, if you heavily game on the realme 6i, expect to last only a day. Either way, it is a solid battery champ.

Even better, this device now has a quick-charging feature. realme 5 doesn’t have that feature and as a result, you have to wait for hours just to recharge. With the quick-charging feature, I can just plug the Realme 6i and wait for two hours to go from 20% to 80%. It’s not exactly the fastest, but other devices in the budget segment don’t have this feature yet. So, this is a win-win for users and Realme itself.

Is the Realme 6i your GadgetMatch?

The realme 6i really tries its best to offer the features that made the realme 5 a fan-favorite. In some aspects, it even tried to one-up its predecessor by including new features that really matter to consumers. And I love what realme did this year: they offered fast-charging on their budget device and they even bundled a USB-C. Granted, there are some drawbacks to this device, but they are minor complaints that you won’t notice or can be remedied in future software updates.

Perhaps the one thing that will make you consider this device is the price: the 3/64GB storage retails at PhP 7,490 while the 4/128GB storage retails at PhP 9,490. Combined with the features it has, the realme 6i can be your next GadgetMatch.