The Realme 2 Pro goes all out as an affordable mid-range smartphone.
It’s been exactly a month since I reviewed the Realme 2, a phone that isn’t seen as a successor to the Realme 1 but rather a variant or an alternative that offers a notched display at under Rs 10,000. Realme is a brand that’s around four months old, but the company has seen a pretty positive response from the market. So much so that it feel pretty confident about launching its third smartphone in such a short period of time. The Realme 2 Pro is in all ways a true successor to the Realme 1, and it is also a more disruptive smartphone compared to the Realme 2.
The Realme 2 Pro goes all out as an affordable mid-range smartphone. It brings an edge-to-edge dewdrop design, packs a powerful Snapdragon 660 chipset, offers up to 8GB of RAM and a trio of 16MP cameras, all at a price starting at Rs 13,990. At this price, the Realme 2 Pro brings a lot of segment-first features. But does the Realme 2 Pro deliver the goods? Read on to find out.
Realme started off as a sub-brand of Oppo, and while the brand may be an independent company now it still shares some of the same design philosophies as Oppo. It also shares the same manufacturing plants as well, at least for now. This is why one look at the Realme 2 Pro will bring back to mind the Oppo F9 Pro that launched in India last month. It brings a similar waterdrop display as the F9 Pro, only Realme is calling it a ‘Dewdrop’ screen. The idea is the same, really — a notched display where the notch is tiny and shaped like a waterdrop.
So, the Realme 2 Pro offers a lot of screen in a pretty compact footprint. It’s about the same size as the Realme 1 so working with it with one hand will not be too difficult. The back of the Realme 2 Pro also comes with what the company calls dewdrop arc. It’s basically a fancy way of saying the panel on the back curves around the edges. The curves are slight and yet almost seamlessly meets the rounded frame, giving a sense of uniformity and smoothness. The panel itself will make you believe it’s glass the moment you feel it, but it’s not. It is a smooth, thick and transparent-like plastic shell that Realme says is made with 13-15 layers of sectional lamination bonded together. All of it sounds technical, but the important thing is that the panel does not feel like cheap plastic.
But plastic is plastic at the end of the day and the Realme 2 Pro will be susceptible to scratches and wear within a few weeks. My review unit showed a few scratches after a week, but nothing major to cause concerns. Overall, the design is pretty, subtle and sweet. The unit I received was a Black Sea colour, but you can also get it in Blue Ocean and Ice Lake which look equally good. The curved frame makes it easy to hold a device with 8.5mm thickness. It’s also pretty lightweight at 174 grams
The power and volume buttons are all easy to reach without adjusting your grip. The tray on the left will keep two nano SIM cards and a microSD card (upto 256GB). The phone supports simultaneous dual 4G VoLTE, which is great to see, but will likely affect battery life as well. On the bottom, you’ll find a 3.5mm headphone jack, a micro-USB port and a speaker grille. The fingerprint sensor goes on the back and is also perfectly situated for your finger to reach in one go.
Waterdrop displays are becoming increasingly common among sister brands Oppo, Vivo, Realme and soon OnePlus with the upcoming OnePlus 6T. I am on board with more companies adopting this kind of notch over the iPhone X-like notch. It’s small, barely visible and easy to forget. The Realme 2 Pro offers a pretty great edge-to-edge display. You get a 6.3-inch display with FHD+ (1080×2340) resolution, 90.8 per cent screen-to-body ratio and a 19.5:9 aspect ratio. The curved droplet-like notch on top and a narrow chin on the bottom are the only notable bezels you’ll find on what is otherwise a pretty immersive display.
I’m not fond of notched displays, but I have grown to appreciate phones that have good notch implementation like the Nokia 6.1 Plus. By this I mean if a notch does not cut into any content, it becomes easier to get used to it. Now Oppo (and Realme) phones with notches do eat up some content because the software and apps aren’t optimised. This is why I am totally on board with the dewdrop notch on Realme 2 Pro, simply because it’s small and barely intrusive. It becomes easy to ignore its presence after a while, which is great because you get to really appreciate the rest of the display.
The Realme 2 Pro’s display panel is quite impressive. Colors on board look deep and punchy, especially the reds and blues. There is a good white balance as well and the display gets plenty bright, making sure outdoor visibility is not an issue. Viewing angles are good and the FHD+ resolution is quite sharp. Now, many of you might be wondering about something that’s been in the news quite a lot these days — Windevine L1 certification. It became a talking point after reports that the Poco F1 does not support this standard that lets you watch content on media platforms like Netflix in 720p resolution or higher. The Realme 2 Pro also does not support the L1 standard, in case you were wondering. But unless you’re really looking hard for those jagged lines and pixelation, content even on Netflix will look just fine on this display.
When the company announced Snapdragon 660 chipset for the Realme 2 Pro, I was quite excited because I’ve had a pretty good experience with this chipset while reviewing the Nokia 7 Plus earlier this year. And then Realme adds that this will be paired with up to 8 gigs of RAM, which is pretty insane and it’s a configuration we haven’t seen before for this chip. That’s the unit given to us for this review, but I reckon the 6GB variant should be offer a similar experience and will likely be the go-to option for most. The cherry on top is that the Realme 2 Pro is the cheapest phone with this chipset, which makes it pretty disruptive indeed.
Let’s get it out of the way, the Realme 2 Pro is a beast. It’s fast, snappy and a delight to work with. Apps are quick to open and load and the processor will handle pretty much anything you throw at it during the day. Whether it’s messaging, browsing through social media apps, gaming or multitasking, the Realme 2 Pro will deliver without breaking a sweat. Games like PUBG will run by default on medium graphics which is pretty smooth sailing, but even if you crank it up to high graphics, you won’t find any noticeable lags. The phone does get warm after about 20-30 minutes of gameplay, but it never got uncomfortably hot. Even fast-paced games like Asphalt 9 ran smoothly without any noticeable stuttering.
The Realme 2 Pro ships with Android 8.1 Oreo with Oppo’s ColorOS 5.2 on top. The unit I received was on the September security patch, but we’ll have to see how consistent the company is with rolling out security updates. Oppo’s skin comes with some heavy customisations, some of which are useful while some can be plain annoying. There is some bloatware here like Opera, UC Browser and Amazon. But most of these can be deleted if you don’t need them. The general UI is all ColorOS with large icons, a stuttery drop-down notification panel and no app drawer. One of my biggest annoyances is the inability to swipe to remove a notification.
You’ll find some useful features as well in the Setting menu such as gesture navigation if you don’t want on-screen nav buttons, Kinds Mode that can be enabled if your child is playing with the phone and Smart Driving Mode which will mute notifications and calls while driving, among other things.
The fingerprint sensor on the back has a good placement and is easy to reach. It’s extremely snappy and mostly accurate. The device also offers face unlock which is extremely fast as well. By default, the facial recognition will unlock the device even with your eyes closed, but you can enable the option that will make sure it doesn’t unlock if your eyes are closed in Settings for some added security.
I’m not a big fan of the placement of the speaker on the bottom left side.
