Realme has been launching a range of new smartphones in the first quarter of this year and the latest one is 12 series – realme 12+ and realme 12. The realme 12+ follows a pretty similar design to the recently launched realme 12 Pro+, which was priced at Rs. 29,999, but this one is Rs. 20,999. The phone has a vegan leather back with a watch-like dial for the triple camera setup while a stitching line runs across the middle vertically. The curved corners and frame, though, unlike the realme 12 Pro+’s, is made out of plastic and the faux paint done on it to give it a metal look is quite clear once you hold the phone. The right side has the volume buttons and power/lock key, while the left side is all plain. The top locates the 3.5mm audio jack one outlet for loudspeakers and secondary mic; while the bottom houses the dual SIM card tray, USB type C port, another outlet for loudspeakers and primary mic. The phone measures about 7.9mm in thickness and weighs about 190 grams, and feels comfortable to hold. The 6.67-inch display has the front-facing camera in a punch-hole design and with the ear-speaker grille tucked in next to it, while bezels around it are slim they aren’t symmetrical, which is not surprising.
The 6.67-inch full HD+ (2400x1080) AMOLED display supports up to 120Hz refresh rates and is sufficiently bright to be used outdoors. It supports HDR10+ content though output isn’t too great compared to standard video, where it delivers punchy colors without much sacrifice to the contrast and shadows. The display has decent viewing angles and is sharp to read text and vibrant on and watch videos or view images.
Coming to the triple camera system – there’s a 50MP (f/1.88) main camera; an 8MP (f/2.2) ultra-wide camera, and a 2MP (f/2.4) macro camera. The main camera that’s a Sony LYT-600 camera with OIS is the highlight here, something we haven’t seen much of in this price range. The phone takes pretty sharp shots with very little shutter lag in good lighting conditions. The daylight shots showed decent dynamic range and didn’t appear to lack on depth of color range, including from the ultra-wide camera. Portrait mode is also something you might like on this phone, giving pretty good bokeh effect for a phone priced at this point, though at times the subject tends to be a bit oversaturated. Low-light shots do leave a bit on the table with some grainy shots and blurry subjects so you would have to retake your shots. The front-facing 16MP (f/2.45) camera is a fine performer for taking selfie shots for your social media use or making video calls.
The realme 12+ is equipped with MediaTek’s 7050 chipset (up to 2.6Ghz octa-core processor, MaliG68 MC4 GPU) along with 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 256GB UFS3.1 internal storage (also comes in 6GB + 128GB option). The phone can handle regular tasks of playing high-resolution videos on YouTube, browsing web pages in Chrome, scrolling through social media apps, switching between messaging apps, and calling without any hiccups. You wouldn’t have a problem with that performance part, but what might irk some users is its experience out of the box. Running on realmeUI 5.0 based on Android 14 with the February security patch, the phone has a lot of third-party apps, some not popular ones, pre-installed. You can uninstall and remove notifications first, though it doesn’t take very long, it still seems like a required step to make the software experience better in what’s otherwise a feature-rich skin. For gaming, something like Asphalt 9 did fine but you might notice the phone warming up a little after playing for about half an hour. And don’t expect to play any further graphic-intensive games on the smartphone at high settings. Also, realme UI seems to be a little extra aggressive in closing background apps and processes on this phone, where you would have to wait for a slight bit when you switch back to an app and start from where you left off.
Powered by a 5,000mAh battery unit, the phone lasted me a full day frequently and didn’t show any battery drain issues. With the bundled 67-watt SuperVooc charger, you can charge the phone from 1% to full in about 60 minutes.
