As the year ends, Realme has expanded its number series to 10. Under the latest 10 series of phones, the company launched the Realme 10 Pro and the 10 Pro+.
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For our review, we have the Realme 10 Pro which succeeds the previously launched 9 Pro. The 9 Pro received mixed feedback in the market, which the company looked to overcome by launching an upgraded version.
In the Box
We received a 33W adapter, USB-C to USB-A wire, a transparent silicone plastic case, SIM ejector pin, and documentation.
Design
Straight out of the box, the new Realme 10 Pro looks very beautiful with a flat design which offers more space. The phone is very light and easy to carry around, which is mainly due to the plastic body. The rear side of the phone comes with an interesting design which is very catchy. The hyperspace variant which we got to review comes with a hue pattern; as your angle changes, the pattern also seems to change. One can also spot two rear camera sensors placed at the back, independent of any frame.
Display
The rectangular metal frame separates the rear and the front of the power button which has an integrated fingerprint sensor. The volume rockers are on the right side, whereas on the left side lies the hybrid SIM tray allowing you to use a microSD card. At the bottom lies a 3.5mm headphone jack (which we think is a nice move from the company), a USB Type-C port, and the speaker outlet. The overall design is attractive, but with a minimal aesthetic and a flat look which we liked.
The new Realme 10 Pro comes with a 6.7-inch IPS LCD display with a screen resolution of 1080 x 2400 pixels. The display supports a refresh rate of 120Hz. When the display is still for a longer period, it tones down to 60Hz. Being an IPS display, you won’t find HDR support but the company has used Widevine L1 to upscale the content quality. The colours reproduced are bright and vivid but the screen lacks a shade of deep black to make the content in the videos more exquisite. The brightness level is good as you can comfortably view the screen.
OS
The latest Realme 10 Pro is one of the first smartphones to run on Android 13 out-of-the-box and has the company’s UI 4.0 on top of it. The upgraded UI offers a clean look and comes with some new features - but nothing major to make it look more distinctive than the Realme 9 Pro.
Realme 10 Pro 5G Review: A worthy successor | Photo Credit: Haider Ali Khan
Processor
The Realme 10 Pro is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 695 5G chipset with eight cores where two cores are clocked at 2.2 GHz Kryo 660 Gold (Cortex-A78) cores and other six cores are clocked at 1.7 GHz Kryo 560 Silver (Cortex-A55).
The processor is based on a 6nm manufacturing process by TSMC. It manages every assignment efficiently, be it multitasking or playing games. The phone comes with 8GB RAM which assists the processor to manage tasks quickly, and has 128 GB of ROM storage. The gaming experience is seamless as the 120Hz refresh rate allows you to play the games more smoothly. It will be right to say that in the price segment under which the phone falls, it is one of the better-performing devices and it clearly beats its predecessor in the performance section.
Camera
The camera of the Realme 10 Pro has seen considerable improvement. The company has opted for a simple camera configuration by incorporating just two rear camera sensors, with the main camera being 108MP with an aperture of f/1.8 and the secondary sensor being a 2MP depth sensor with an aperture of f/2.4. Unlike its predecessor, the company has chosen to go without ultrawide and macro lenses. For selfies, there is a 16MP lens with an aperture of f/2.5.
The Realme 10 Pro captures beautiful daylight images with a high degree of clarity, pleasant colours, strong contrast, and an adequate wide dynamic range. Another one of the phone’s strengths is its sharpness. We liked how well-rendered images were, as even items with a lot of fine detail were faithfully captured. Additionally, no excessive noise is introduced. The portrait images are great too but for that, you need to have patience and good lighting conditions to capture detailed images with good dynamic range. The images captured at night were of high quality as well. They had an accurate contrast and colour balance but we noticed some noise effects while capturing the images. Also, the image sharpness at night was very average.
One can also choose to capture images in the full 108MP resolution, which does nothing special other than occupying a lot of space.
The selfies captured were very detailed with the right colour balance and sharpness. The portrait mode does a good job with the selfies as well, by separating the background more precisely.
Battery
The Realme 10 Pro ships with 5,000mAh battery power which was present in the Realme 9 Pro, so there is no change in the battery specs. The battery lasts a day very easily and the processor assists the phone to keep the power consumption in check. To charge the phone there is a 33W fast charger which charges the phone from 0-100 percent in almost one and a half hours.
Verdict
The latest Realme 10 Pro surpasses its predecessor with a better main 108MP camera, a slightly better display, and the latest Android OS.
It ticks all the boxes under its price segment to be a worthy competitor, but we feel that as the successor of the 9 series phones, the company could have used an OLED panel to make the 10 Pro more desirable.
Published - December 27, 2022 03:55 pm IST
