You may find this brand is a stranger in the smartphone arena, Realme is a new company under the OPPO’s umbrella. It produces more budget-friendly devices without sacrificing its performance.

This year we have seen a few impressive sub RM 1,000 mid-range smartphones. It begins with the Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 636, follows by ASUS ZenFone Max Pro (M1) that offers a much bigger battery then the Android One Program Xiaomi Mi A2 that powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 660.

The sub-company of OPPO, Realme is here to join the bandwagon by releasing the Realme 2 Pro that offers a high-performance phone at a lower price tag and premium design.

Design

Basically the Realme 2 Pro is the OPPO F9 that uses cheaper materials. The rear of the Realme 2 Pro is made out of special coat plastic that gave the premium impression as if its made out of glass. The frame has shiny with shimmer, made it felt premium to touch. Overall the built doesn’t felt cheap at all.

The fingerprint scanner is mounted on the rear with the Realme logo at the bottom. On the right side is the power button, left is the volume rocker button and triple slot tray (2x nanoSIM + microSD).

On the bottom are the down-firing speaker, microUSB port, microphone, and a 3.5mm audio jack. There’s noise-canceling microphone located on the top of the device.

Display

It sports a 6.3-inch IPS LCD display with a resolution of Full HD+ and 19.5:9 display ratio. Like the OPPO F9, it features “Waterdrop” notch design that houses the 16-megapixels selfie camera that also supports FaceUnlock.

The color reproduction, brightness, and viewing angles are very good for an IPS display panel. It’s bright and vivid.

According to Realme, the Realme 2 Pro’s display is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 3 whereas the OPPO F9 gets Corning Gorilla Glass 6. Out-of-box the device is prefixed with a high-quality screen protector and comes with a protective TPU case.

Performance

Under the hood is the 14nm process Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 AIE, Quad Kyro 2GHz + Quad Kryo 1.8GHz and mated with Adreno 512 GPU. The SoC has AI Engine hardware that includes a Hexagon Vector Processor that contribute to make on-device A.I experience possible in camera, audio, security, and gaming.

Performed few benchmark tests and the device able to score 133,770 points on AnTuTu Benchmark and 5,470 points Multi-Core score on Geekbench 4. This brings the performance on par and even better over with the similar class SoC like the MediaTek Helio P60 and HUAWEI HiSilicon Kirin 710.

In a real-life test, the SoC able to handle day-to-day tasks like Social Media apps, web browsing and etc. It able to play major of the new mobile game titles like PUBG Mobile, Mobile Legends and NFS without any issue like lags or heat-throttling.

Although it only has a single down-firing speaker, I find it very loud and with 70% volume is good enough and anything above tend to get a little distorted.

Camera

It comes with a dual-rear camera like the OPPO F9, sporting a 16-megapixels (f/1.7 aperture, 1.12µm SONY IMX398 sensor) alongside with a 2-megapixels depth-sensing camera that creates a better portrait photo. To my surprise, the Realme 2 Pro get to shoot 4K resolution video whereby the OPPO F9 only limited to 1,080p (Full HD)

With the large f/1.7 aperture, taking photos in low-light is beneficial as it reduced the noise at the same time increase the shutter-speeds for better photo output.

The selfie camera was downgraded to 16-megapixels f/2.0 aperture but don’t take the spec sheet to judge. The selfie photos were good on the display, especially with A.I. beauty mode enabled.

The boasts of A.I. capability on the cameras (front and rear) is able to recognize sceneries and automatically tuned to ideal camera settings.

Overall the performance of the cameras is good. It has good details and well-saturated colors. The HDR works perfect and instant.

Here are some photos were taken with the Realme 2 Pro (click on the image for a larger preview)

      

ColorOS

It runs on ColorOS 5.2 based on Android 8.1 Oreo. It’s the same skin with others OPPO device that still has the iOS-inspired UI

Battery

As for the battery, it packed with a 3,500 mAh battery that charges through with 10W microUSB port. It doesn’t support VOOC Flash Charge that propriety to selected OPPO’s devices.

On my test usage, the device able to give me a full day usage with battery balance around 20% to 30% at the end of the day before I charge.

Pros

• Huge & Bright Display
• Powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon 660AIE
• Dual 4G VoLTE
• Dedicated microSD Card Slot
• Premium Design

Cons

• No VOOC Flash Charge
• Outdated microUSB

It will be officially announced on the 7th November 2018, 3.00pm and sale starts on Shopee Malaysia from 10th November 11.59pm. It comes with two color options; Ice Lake and Black Sea with variants; 4GB/64GB, 6GB/64GB & 8GB/128GB.

UPDATE! 7/11/2018

Realme Malaysia has announced their new phones in Malaysia and unveiled the price of the Realme 2 Pro;

• 4GB / 64GB – RM 849 / RM 799 (Shopee 11.11 Sale)
• 6GB / 64GB – RM 949 / RM 899 (Shopee 11.11 Sale)
• 8GB / 128GB (UFS 2.1) – RM 1,099 / RM 999 (Shopee 11.11 Sale)