Realme has launched yet another device that’s priced at Rs 29,999 for the base model and goes straight against its own offerings GT 6T. That confusion continues once you try the device for a few days, too, which is how my experience went:
The 13 Pro+ looks much like the Realme 12 Pro+ except for the middle crease and that Hyperimage branding on the camera setup. The right side features the volume buttons and power/lock key; while the left side is kept all plain. The top houses the secondary mic and one outlet for loudspeakers; and the bottom carries the dual SIM card tray, primary mic, USB Type C port and second outlet for loudspeakers. The phone has curved edges to compliment the curved 6.7-inch OLED display, which houses the front camera near the top and in-screen fingerprint scanner towards the bottom.
The phone has narrow sides large but not too slippery and is comfortable to carry around. I tried the vegan leather back in Emerald Green and it also comes in Monet Gold glass back. The device sports a 6.7-inch curved OLED display with support for 120Hz refresh rates. The display is bright and does a good job under direct sunlight when used outdoors. It has vivid colours and I preferred to use it in the cinematic screen colour mode, which it made videos and images appear closer to the real colours.
The display does a good job for watching high resolution videos without sacrificing on details, though the curved part does make viewing angles and colour distortion bit of an issue. Under the hood, you have Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 chipset (up tp 2.4Ghz octa core processor, Adreno 710 GPU and Hexagon NPU) along with 12GB LPDDR4X RAM and 512GB UFS 3.1 internal storage (also comes in 8GB and 256 variant for the base model). It’s running on realme UI 5.0 based on Android 14 with the June security patch in place.
There are a few pre-installed apps, as expected out of the box, such as Facebook, Agoda, LinkedIn, etc., though you can uninstall them. Realme has added some AI-related camera features, such as for the portrait shots, removing objects from the photo (not new), which we have seen on the Realme GT 6T. Again, not sure what Realme’s 13 Pro+ brings to the table when all this with a better chipset and arguably design is already available in their GT 6T.
While day-to-day performance is OK, I did see apps taking a second more when going back to an opened app before you can start using them. Gaming performance is okay at best, with the device struggling to handle GTA or Modern Combat at highest settings, something several phones at this price range can do. There are a few pre-installed apps, as expected out of the box, such as Facebook, Agoda, LinkedIn, etc., though you can uninstall them. Plus, no ad notifications and Hot Games could be disabled in one go.
Coming to the camera, this is perhaps the biggest strength of the device – a 50MP (f/1.88) main camera, a 50MP (f/2.65) periscope camera (both with OIS)m and an 8MP (f/2.2) ultrawide camera. The camera performance here is well tuned, seems Realme has continued to work on it like they did for the GT 6T. You get detailed shots with good colour production in daylight while low-light shows are also quite decent in terms of low noise.
With zoom usable to say about 5x-10x at times for things such a social gathering or outdoors in decent lighting conditions. The front-facing 32MP (f/2.45) is all good for making video calls and takes clear shots for selfies in low to good lighting conditions, though it did have a little shutter lag to capture at times. Powered by a 5,200mAh battery life, as expected, lasted me a day more often than not and the phone charged from 1 per cent to full in slightly above one hour without any heating issues.
The loudspeakers on the phone are quite loud but nothing special for gaming and video playback that we haven’t seen in this price range before. 5G reception is really reliable and so is the GPS from whenever I had to use it. All in all, the 13 Pro+ lags behind some of the competition when it comes to performance and perhaps design department, including their very own Gt 6T that I would prefer for almost everything. Also, the device’s predecessor doesn’t seem to be a step down from the 13 pro+, which once again makes it a little hard to recommend.
