Realme 6 Review: No more poor battery life with a 90Hz screen

Right on the heels of the launch of its flagship X50 Pro 5G, realme released its successor to the 5 series budget smartphones, the realme 6. The smartphone’s internals have been substantially upgraded, with the biggest change being the 90Hz FullHD+ display. Being the first device in this price segment to feature a high refresh rate screen, realme is leading the charge on bringing flagship features to budget conscious consumers. Has realme designed a phone that is worth the price jump from the realme 5? Read on in our review of the realme 6 and do share your thoughts about the smartphone with us and our readers in the comment section below.

Unboxing and Box Contents

We recently unboxed the realme 6 on our FoneArena Tamil YouTube Channel along with a first impressions of using the device.

In the box we have:

realme 6 8GB + 128GB in Comet Blue color

2-pin 30W Flash Charge fast charger (5V-2A/5V-6A)

USB Type-C Cable

SIM Ejector tool

Clear protective case

User guide

Design and Build

Holding the realme 6, you are greeted with a large 6.5-inch 2.5D display that is protected by Gorilla Glass 3. They opted for a punch hole cutout to house the selfie camera instead of a notched display, placing it in the top left corner. The display has an aspect ratio of 20:9 which makes the device slightly tall. Reaching the sides of the display with one hand is comfortable, but reaching the top of the display would require you to readjust your hand quite a bit. The bezels are minimal, with a chin at the bottom to give the phone a total screen-to-body ratio of 90.5%.

Coming to the ports and buttons, the left edge of the device has the volume rockers along with the slot for the tray with space for dual 4G SIM cards and a SD card slot (expandable up to 256GB). The right edge of the device has an indented power button that also houses the capacitive fingerprint sensor and the top edge is clean. The bottom edge is where realme put the 3.5mm jack, USB-C charging port, speaker grill and 2 small holes for microphones.

In typical realme fashion, the back of the smartphone features a beautiful glossy design that they have named as Comet design. It is made out of polycarbonate plastic that, as expected, can get scratched quite easily. The camera bump that houses the quad camera setup is quite large, causing the phone to rock a bit on a table. Fortunately, realme includes a clear TPU case that mitigates both the scratch vulnerability and the camera bump rocking.

Overall dimensions of the realme 6 are 162.1 mm x 74.8 mm x 8.9 mm (9.6 mm with the camera bump). It does feel comfortable in the hand but definitely not as premium as other devices in this price segment like the Redmi Note 8 Pro. Still, for its price, it would be unreasonable to not be satisfied with the build quality of the realme 6.

Display

Definitely one of its highlight features, the realme 6’s display is a 6.5-inch 20:9 LCD-type FullHD+ (1080 x 2400 resolution) panel that is capable of refreshing at 90Hz. Talking about the display alone, in direct sunlight it was just visible enough, with a maximum brightness of 480 nits. Contrast has improved with a ratio of 1500:1 and it shows, with nice colours and good viewing angles, which can be expected from an LCD screen.

The 90Hz experience however, was a mixed bag. realme offers three options for choosing the phone’s screen refresh rate; 60Hz, 90Hz and Auto select, of which the last one will let the phone automatically choose the best refresh rate based on the app. During our review, we kept the display at 90Hz constantly and our experience was, on the whole, underwhelming. Scrolling and swiping did feel slightly smoother but not as drastic as a difference found on the 90Hz screens that OnePlus offers or even the Poco X2’s 120Hz screen. We think a possible reason for this is the panel technology used being LCD and not OLED, which could mean higher pixel response times and thereby reducing the perceived 90Hz effect. During gaming however, for the games that supported higher refresh rates, the difference felt more apparent and was definitely an enjoyable experience.

Camera

The realme 6 has a quad camera setup, which includes a 64MP f/1.8 Samsung S5KGW1SP03 CMOS sensor with EIS support, a 8MP f/2.3 wide angle lens that is capable of shooting with 119.1° field-of-view (FOV), a 2MP f/2.4 Macro sensor and finally, a 2MP f/2.4 monochromatic sensor that is used for depth sensing. The front camera module has a 16MP f/2.0 Samsung S5K3P9 CMOS sensor with a 79.3° FOV. Regarding video, the realme 6 is capable of shooting up to 4K 30fps and slomo videos up to 120fps at 1080p. For stabilisation, the phone uses Electronic Image Stabilisation (EIS).

As usual, realme offers multiple shooting options like Beauty filter, HDR, panoramic view, Portrait, Timelapse, Slo-mo, NightScape and Expert.