Chinese smartphone maker OPPO has tied up with Amazon India to launch a new smartphone brand in India, Realme. The new brand will focus solely on the online segment, taking on rival Xiaomi, currently the undisputed leader of the online segment in the Indian smartphone market. What’s interesting is the that the name of the…
Chinese smartphone maker OPPO has tied up with Amazon India to launch a new smartphone brand in India, Realme. The new brand will focus solely on the online segment, taking on rival Xiaomi, currently the undisputed leader of the online segment in the Indian smartphone market. What’s interesting is the that the name of the new brand sounds quite similar to Xiaomi’s Redmi. Realme also takes on the ASUS-Flipkart partnership, which was announced last month. The brand’s first smartphone, dubbed the Realme 1, is set to be officially unveiled on May 15 th.
“ Realme satisfies the needs of online consumers through unique, exquisite design, leading specs, cutting-edge technology and overall better quality, “said the CEO of Realme India.
As we told you in our previous report, OPPO has set up a new management team for the new Realme brand and is promising to deliver to great smartphones that have been “crafted for the youth”. The company says it enforces strict quality control with 10,000 drop tests, 100,000 button tests, 10,000 USB tests, and more. In terms of service support, Realme will have 500+ authorized service centers across the country with 1-hour guaranteed service for most cases.
OPPO, just like its sister brand Vivo, has so far mainly targeted the offline segment in India by spending heavily on promotions and marketing. With the launch of Realme, OPPO is hoping to capture a greater share of the online segment as well. According to data released by Canalys, OPPO was the third largest smartphone vendor in India during the first quarter of 2018 with 2.8 million shipments. Xiaomi, on the other hand, grabbed the top spot with over 9 million units shipped during the January – March period.
OPPO’s new Realme brand will concentrate mainly on the Rs.10,000 – Rs.15,000 segment of the Indian smartphone market, which has seen tremendous growth in the last few quarters. As such, the Realme 1 is likely to be priced somewhere around Rs.12,000 at launch, taking on rivals such as the ASUS ZenFone Max Pro M1, Xiaomi Redmi Note 5, Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro, Honor 7X, Moto G5S Plus, and more. The final pricing will only be revealed on May 15 th when the smartphone is formally launched in the country.
For now, the only key feature of the Realme 1 that has been officially confirmed is its unique Diamond Black color option. Going by the image of the handset posted on the Amazon India teaser page, the Realme 1 looks very similar to the OPPO A3 that was made official in China late last month. However, we cannot be completely sure if OPPO will launch the A3 as the Realme1 without any changes under the hood. It is possible that Realme will introduce a few downgrades to help price the Realme 1 competitively.
The OPPO A3 features a 6.2-inch 1080 x 2280 Full HD+ IPS display with a notch on the top, resulting in an a 19:9 aspect ratio. It runs on an octa-core MediaTek Helio P60 12nm processor clocked at 2 GHz with an ARM Mali-G72 MP3 GPU clocked at 800 MHz. In terms of memory, the Chinese variant of the smartphone packs 4GB of RAM and 128GB of built-in storage. There is a dedicated microSD card slot for further expansion up to 256GB.
When it comes to optics, the OPPO A3 includes a 16-megapixel primary camera at the back with Full HD video capture support. On the front of the smartphone is an 8-megapixel selfie camera. Connectivity features offered by the A3 include Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac dual-band, Bluetooth 4.2 Low Energy, GPS with A-GPS, GLONASS, and 4G VoLTE. The battery under the hood is a 3400mAh unit, identical to the more expensive OPPO F7. In terms of software, the handset runs on Android 8.1 Oreo-based ColorOS 5.0 out of the box.
