Realme 14 Pro+ review: The battery experience is the best part about this smartphone

Competition in the sub-30k range of smartphones has gone up with Realme recently launching its 14 series in the Indian market. Available at a base price of Rs. 29,999 (before any offers) the Realme 14 Pro plus has some distinct looks to it, let's see if it is worth it:

 The device sports a polycarbonate back with an added material on the 'Pearl white' colour, that changes colours as per the temperature, with it becoming blueish in between in lower temperatures. Also, available in suede grey colour with a vegan leather back and an India-exclusive Bikaner purple colour option. It's IP68 and 69-rated dust and water-resistant. The front has a quad-curved 6.83-inch display with Corning Gorilla glass on top. It has symmetrical and slim bezels all around the display. The back also houses the triple camera system plus triple LED flash on a protruding circular golden cutout. The phone is slightly slippery but not too bad for carrying around – weighing under 200 grams and nearly 8mm in thickness.

 The device sports a 6.83-inch full HD plus (2800x1272) AMOLED display with support for refresh rates of upto 120Hz. This is a sharp and bright display from Realme that's usable outdoors under direct sunlight. For watching videos, it does a good job at handling details and retaining colours (using natural model from display settings), and for images, too, it generally shows good details and sharpness that you aren't missing out. The one issue I faced was, at times, it didn't register taps at the corners, (next to the curve) especially in the YouTube app despite having no other tap registered at the same time.

 On the back, you have a triple camera system – a 50MP (f. 1.8) main camera, a 50MP (f/2.65) periscope camera, and an 8MP (f/2.2) ultra-wide camera. The first two support OIS and it does come up handy in low-light shots where realme seems to be tweaking its tuning. There are also triple LEDs and you can adjust the shade of each depending on the scene and your personal preference. The front-facing 32MP (f/2.0) camera is generally snappy and can take detailed shots in good to medium light shots.

Powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 7s Gen. 3 chipset (up to 2.5Ghz octa-core processor, Adreno 810 GPU) along with 12GB LPDDR4X RAM and 256GB UFS3.1 internal storage (also comes in 8GB RAM with 128GB or 256GB storage options). The phone runs on realme UI 6.0 based on Android 15 with the December security patch installed. It handles day-to-day tasks such as messaging, watching YouTube videos at high resolutions, video calling and scrolling through social media apps without any trouble. I found it didn't heat up much either while using WiFi hotspot or over 4G on the go for over a couple of hours. 

Realme seems to have made fewer animations in its UI compared to previous generations, something noticeable if you have used realme UI from a while back. During my usage, the phone received these OS updates and seems to make navigation smoother than what how it was early on. Out of the box, you do get a lot of third-party apps and push notifications, including hit games, but most of these can be disabled and uninstalled.

 Powered by a 6,000mAh battery unit, the phone lasted a whole day almost every time in a full charge. With display brightness set at 40%, using a lot of 4G and some 5G on the go, the phone didn't show any battery drainage issues at all. The bundled 80watt SuperVooc charger can charge the device from 1% to full in under an hour.

 5G network reception on the phone is quite good and reliable though can be spotty when indoors, which is expected. GPS and WiFi performance is top-notch. The dual stereo speakers are sufficiently loud and clear for multimedia use.

In brief, the Realme 14 Pro plus is a balanced yet not the best performer in every department for phones priced around Rs 30,000. While the display is nice, the battery experience is the best part about the phone; the software experience out of the box remains as it is—needing some improvement.