Realme 10 review | probably the top budget phone even in 2024

Realme 10 surpassed my expectations by a huge margin. The device falls under the budget category. I have reviewed the Galaxy A14 5G smartphone, which is also a budget device. But I am particularly way more impressed with the performance of Realme 10. There is a huge difference between the two when it comes down to night-time image proce­ssing and day-to-day performance. The software optimization on Realme 10 is extra­ordinary. My friend Nazmul Hossain Anik daily drives the phone and I got to test the device. Today I am writing a review article on the Realme 10 and will share our opinions.

Inside-the-box

It is pretty surprising to me that this budget phone comes with a 33-watt super vooc fast charger while even more expensive ones don't. I have a lot of respect for brands who are still putting first-party chargers in the box. So the Realme 10 has a decent enough packaging. Other than the phone and charger, you also get a USB Type-A to Type-C charging cable, some paperwork, a SIM ejection tool and a transparent protection case. The plastic case is a bonus out of the box to give you a little bit of protection. A lot of smartphones don't even include a case. So, I have nothing but good things to say about the packaging.

By the way, the case will get discolored after couple of months if you daily drive.

Design & Build Analogy

I like the design of this phone but I don’t love it because of its 2 unnecessarily huge cameras. They are not too huge but look a little weird to me. Other than the camera design, I mostly like the design very much. There is a mic cutout on top. The 3.5 mm port, primary mic cutout, type-c port and speaker enclosure are located on the bottom of the phone. On the right side, there is the volume rocker and physical fingerprint sensor. The SIM card slot is there alone on the left side. Nothing weird about the cutouts - you’ll get used to.

I love the build though. It’s a budget low-midrange phone, which has a solid plastic frame. The back is also made of plastic, but it looks like glass. The glossy plastic back feels smooth and rigid to the touch. The white one doesn’t catch fingerprints much. The frame as well as the back has a flat surface. Gorilla Glass 5 on the front for display protection. At around 178 grams Realme 10 feels light in a good way along with 8 mm thickness.

The Display Check

This super budget phone comes with a Super AMOLED display that offers 90 Hz refresh rate - can you guys believe that ..? The display has its LED characteristics but shows its weakness against other upper-midrange phones. The colors and contrasts are great, but sometimes feel like a little bit lower resolution than what it should be. It’s a 1080p display with 1080 by 2400 to be precise with 411 ppi density. The display has a slightly cooler tone and the 90 Hz high refresh rate is optimized well. Peak brightness is at 1000 nits with the display being 6.4 inches. I like the display, also Gorilla Glass 5 protection is nice - great budget display. The bottom chin is not too much with an 84.4 percent screen-to-body ratio and 20:9 aspect ratio.

Hardware Details

The 6 nm based MediaTek Helio G99 is a very good processor for midrange phones. Even more expensive phones have that processor. The processor is working with the software really well here - more in the performance section. It’s an octa-core processor with 2 Cortex-A76 cores clocking at 2.2 GHz and the other 6 Cortex-A55 cores are running at 2.0 GHz top. The GPU is Mali-G57 MC2, which is a budget one. It has a dedicated microSD card slot and the RAM ranges from 4 to 8 GB. Internal storage offerings are from 64 - 256 GB.

Realme 10 has two cameras on the back and a selfie shooter on the front side. Two back cameras, one being a wide-angle main shooter and another is a depth sensor. There is no cheap sensor like a 2 MP macro joke. The depth sensor is 2 MP though, but the 50 MP main camera is a very good one from Samsung with f/1.8 aperture. Front selfie camera is 16 MP having f/2.5 aperture. Both the main front and back cameras have a 27 mm wide focal length. More details on camera testing are in the camera check section.

Software Details

Android 12 is the stock operating system running on Realme 10. On top of Android 12, the phone has Realme UI 3.0 skin, which offers a lot of customization. The device will get 2 years of major software / Android updates and 3 years of security updates. Realme UI 3.0 coupled with Android 12 offers a really good user experience on this device. There are a lot of features on the camera app and settings app. Home screen customization, always on display and multitasking work well on Realme 10. I liked how the UI and UX work in this phone.

The Camera Check

I have a lot of good things to say about the cameras and the image processing of this device. I never had high expectations for the cameras in a budget device like this one. But image processing, computational photography and AI have started to show their glow. From now on these types of software-based processing will become the key.

Day-time Photos

Photos taken during day time come out pretty balanced looking. The Realme 10 is doing a good enough job here if you look at it from a budget-device point of view. The 50 MP Samsung-made ISOCELL S5KJN1 sensor is a very good performer in general. The images are inconsistent sometimes. So what happens here is, most of the time the dynamic range is good and shadows are not crashed. But also some other times the photos come out to be very contrasty, crashed shadows and a bit overexposed. Highlights and bright areas are maintained well mostly. It also tends to oversharpen and overprocess from time to time.

When there are plants and green fields, Realme 10 makes the image a bit more saturated than natural. I don’t complain about these nuances but the inconsistency can give you a budget feeling sometimes. But the night mode is kinda amazing on this device. When taking photos in indoor conditions, you can enable the night-mode processing. It makes the image so much better most of the time. There is less noise and more details, and also in night mode, it captures the image pretty quickly. The experience is pretty good here.

Night-time Photos

Night-time photos are mediocre without the night mode. But in night mode it’s a hit or miss. I can say that most of the time it punches above its price, but there is a weird lens flare issue. Me and my friend Anik tested and analyzed the photos thoroughly, and the lens flare issue is inconsistent even with the same shot. Anik daily drives the Realme 10, but we are impressed with the night-mode performance. His previous phone was the Huawei Nova 5T and I daily drive the OnePlus Nord with G-Cam installed. The Realme 10 produces far better-looking images than the Nova 5T in night mode in his opinion. I agree with him totally.

Check out my OnePlus Nord review. My Nord’s Google Camera produces darker images than the Realme 10. I think most people will like the Realme 10’s image because it's more detailed, a bit brighter, cleaner, has good white balance and color reproduction is also good. In my opinion, there is also a green tint issue in night-time processing. So when there are low light and yellow colors, the processing tends towards a green tint on the yellow areas. Overall, for a budget phone, the photos look pretty promising, to be honest with you guys.

Portrait Mode

The portrait mode has a significant amount of blur in the background. But the dynamic range in portrait mode is kinda mediocre. I wasn’t able to test this mode thoroughly during my short time with this phone. I did some research about what other people think about the mode, which is similar to my experience. So this mode is not the strength.

Selfie Camera Photos

The selfie camera has very good potential here to shine under good conditions. We think the night-mode processing in this device takes it to another level despite having some weird hardware issues described earlier. In challenging conditions both indoors and outdoors, the Realme 10 struggles. Most of the time photos are decent in good daylight conditions, but in harsh and tough lighting they look overprocessed and overexposed. The HDR cannot save the quality. In terms of low-light selfies, the front OmniVision sensor falls apart mostly. The night mode kind of saves the game here. It’s way more detailed, bright and clean without looking too sharp or processed. I think the night mode is doing awesome.

Performance Analysis

The most important thing that surprised me was the real-life performance of the Realme 10. My friend purchased the device at the end of 2023 and he has been using the device for around 3 months. I had low expectations about the performance because the Realme UI is a heavy UI with a lot of additional features on top of stock Android. So I told him if you don’t do software updates, it will stay snappy for a longer period.

I was checking the device before writing this review. I was switching between apps pretty quickly, also multitasking to see if there was any lag in the app opening / closing animations. But I was kind of shocked that there wasn’t even a single stutter. The animations were very smooth and fast. I am familiar with older Realme 7 devices. The animations look more polished and refined, in some ways close to stock. Another very important thing is, the 90 Hz refresh rate isn’t any gimmick on this device. It feels like real 90 Hz and the scrolling is pretty smooth. I didn’t notice any delays, heck-ups or lags last time I checked.

Even if you are a snappy and quick user, this device can give you a very good experience outside of heavy gaming. I think if you take care of this device by restarting it at least once in a week, it will stay pretty snappy. I think I will say this to my friend, “You can upgrade to Android 13 if you want. I think it will still be pretty fast after a couple of years”. He didn’t do much gaming, but games like COD will run fine in moderate settings.

Video and Audio

Realme 10 tops out at 1080p 60 fps for the main back camera. The front camera can do 1080p video recording, but only limited up to 30 fps. There is no Optical Image Stabilization (OIS), only Electronic Image Stabilization (EIS). Videos on 1080p 60 fps look pretty good. As a budget phone, it is doing a good job in terms of video recording. This phone has a mono speaker on the bottom. One thing I clearly didn’t like about this phone is the speaker quality. They sound very thin, ear-piercing, harsh and tinny. The highs are pretty bad at max volume. If you are someone who listens at high volume most of the time, please use an EQ to tone down the higher frequencies. I am familiar with this tinny sound from Realme 7.

Features & Battery

This phone has some cool midrange features. It’s the power of budget brands to offer more for less. First of all the display is AMOLED with a high refresh rate. The touch sampling rate is 180 Hz and can be boosted up to 360 Hz while gaming. There are three gaming modes, which is crazy. The night shots are optimized well to be quick.

It has Widevine L1 support for HD streaming, but no HDR though - budget phone. It supports 60 fps 1080p video recording. The camera app has a lot of features like portrait mode, night mode, slow motion and a whole lot more filters. The camera app supports HDR but not the display. There is a 3.5 mm port for AUX-out, which supports 24-bit 192 KHz Hi-Res audio. The 802.11 Wi-Fi is dual-band. Bluetooth version is 5.3 with aptX HD support, which means Hi-Res over Bluetooth is very much possible - I like this kinda feature.

Realme 10 has a side-mounted fingerprint sensor, which reliably works well. The charging port is Type-C 2.0 with an OTG feature. The battery is reasonably big with 5000 mAh. It takes around 1 hour and 10 minutes to fully charge using the 33-watt super vooc fast charger. They claim that it will fill up 50 percent within just 28 minutes. My friend said that it lasts a full day without any problem. It offers a lot more than Samsung’s budget phones.

Conclusion - recommended

The most important thing that amazed me was, how well this budget device is optimized to handle most day-to-day tasks. I think the core OS and the Realme UI on this budget device are either a light version with a decent amount of useful features or very well-optimized. I highly recommend this phone to enthusiasts and students like us.

In my Samsung Galaxy A14 5G review, I said the performance was very mediocre. I stand by that, and this Realme 10 feels 10 times better in the performance department. I still think that the Galaxy A14 has a better overall camera outside of using night mode, but Realme 10's night mode is flattering. So I admire the work they put behind.

So I said the A14 is good for my parents, but not good for me because of consistent stutters here and there in app opening-closing animations. But I would happily take the Realme 10, and probably use both stock and G-Cam for different scenarios. This phone is a very good pick and probably one of the best budget phones in its price range for students in Asian countries. Check out the official webpage of Realme 10 - lots of details there.

IF you are interested in checking out other budget phones, please check out the Samsung Galaxy A14 5G right now. For your parents who are not that quick with phones, the Galaxy A14 is a high-quality reliable budget phone with great cameras.

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