Realme’s market share last quarter took a bit of a hit compared to the same quarter last year. The company has seen quite a few changes among its top leadership in the past two months or so. Whether Realme will be able to find its mojo in the market again we will have to wait and see. Meanwhile, the company is targeting the 15k price segment with new 5G devices, one of which is the realme 11x that I have been using for a few days now. Let’s try and check what it gets right and what it doesn’t and if it packs enough to justify the price tag of Rs. 15,999 (or Rs. 14,999 for the base model).
Design: One of the better things about the realme 11x seems to be its build quality and familiar design that we have been seeing from the company for a while now, including its 11 Pro series. The phone comes in Midnight Black and Purple Dawn colour options. I tried the Purple Dawn colour that features a shimmery, glittery back with the dual camera system placed in a protruding circular module near the top left; while also having the realme branding towards the bottom. The back and sides are all made from polycarbonate material and do not feel cheap at all. The right side houses the Power/lock (mounted with a fingerprint scanner) and volume keys; while the left side carries the dual SIM card plus microSD card tray near the top corner. At the bottom, you get the 3.5mm audio jack, primary mic, USB type C port and the lone outlet of loudspeaker; on the top you just have the secondary mic. Near the top of the display, you get the ear-speaker grille next to the front camera. The bezels around the 6.72-inch display (20:9 aspect ratio) are thin except for the chin. which is noticeably thicker than the other three. The phone weighs around 190grams and measures about 7.9mm in thickness. Its corners are curved while the frame around the body is all flat, and the never felt slippery to carry around.
Display: The phone sports a 6.72-inch full HD+ (1080x2400) IPS LCD display with support for refresh rates of up to 120Hz. The display is sufficiently bright to be used outdoors under direct sunlight provided the brightness has been set high. The display us quite sharp and decent for viewing for images or watching hgih resolution videos on YouTube. It’s not the most well calibrated display on a realme device or one with rich blacks and reds in place, but it’s still good enough for the price tag.
Camera: The back of the phone has a dual camera system – 64MP (f/1.79) main camera along with a 2MP (f/2.4 portrait camera). The main camera can take sharp and punchy shots in daylight, but perhaps oversharpened at times. It can keep focus quite well with a subject not moving too fast. The camera app is quick to load and there’s very little shutter lag to report, too. The front has an 8MP (f/2.05) camera, which, with beauty modern and filters off, can take decent shots for your social media needs, but don’t expect very well stitched shots under not-so-ideal lighting.
Performance and software experience: The device is powered by MediaTek’s 6100+ chipset (up to 2.2Ghz octa core processor, Mali G57 MC2 GPU and 5G modem) with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of UFS 2.2 storage (base variant has 6GB + 128GN configuration). The phone does fine in handling day to day tasks and it can handle multiple apps, if not too media heavy, okay. I wish realme gave a better UFS storage for internal use, but it’s perhaps the sign of the price tag. For using two apps in floating windows, you can see the phone struggle with scrolling for apps such as YouTube and telegram, but otherwise it does just fine when having only one app on your screen. Gaming performance on the phone is nothing to boast about, giving 60 to 80Hz on not to heavy games at medium settings, so don’t expect to get any smooth playback for games like BGMi or Genshin Impact on medium to highest settings. The phone runs on realme UI 4.0 based on Android 13 with the July security patch. As mentioned earlier, you would have take a few minutes off while setting up a realme device to get rid of unnecessary pre-installed apps and notifications out of the box. Once done, you can customise a lot of things here as per your need, including having an app launcher or not, icons, colour palette for UI, dual apps, and so on. The phone doesn’t do 120Hz refresh rates and was more or less around 90Hz most of the time when using third party apps. For things like Hot Games and Hot Apps, these cannot be uninstalled but only disabled by the user from the phone.
Battery life: Equipped with a 5,000mAh battery unit, the phone lasted a day more often than not, giving a little over 24 hours on a single full charge most of the times even when used with WiFi hotspot turned on for 3-4 hours connected to two devices at times. The bundled 33 watt SuperVooc charger that comes in the box (along with a protective case) charges the phone from 1% to full in just a little over an hour, which is absolutely okay.
Other bits: I found the single loudspeaker just okay in terms of loudness for gaming and videos, and it clearly lacks having stereo output with another outlet. WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS performance of the phone is nothing to worry about. I also liked the phone’s 5G reception, latching onto 5G without jumping back to 4G/LTE in areas where 5G is generally available, which is nice to see for a phone priced so. The side-mounted physical fingerprint scanner is not the quickest you would have seen but it’s still fine for every day use for reliability.
Verdict: To sum up this device, you get great battery life, decent combination of display and cameras, while having a good build quality and familiar design in place. The realme 11x comes out as a value for money 5G device that has its pros and cons, but the pros seem to outweigh its cons given the price tag, making it an option worth consideringif you’re looking for an Android device prioritising its battery life and large display for around Rs. 15,000.