Realme's new 15 series was launched in India recently, with the 15 Pro priced at Rs. 31,999 for the base model. I have been using one for a couple of weeks, and here's how my experience has been:
The first thing you notice about the device is its familiar vegan leather-textured back and a curved display in the front. The phone comes in Velvet Green (the one I tried), Flowing Silver, and Silk Purple.
The right side carries the volume buttons and power/lock key, while the left side is all plain. The top carries secondary mics and an infrared port. The bottom houses the dual SIM card tray slot, USB Type-C port, one outlet for loudspeakers and the primary mic. The back is a little more interesting with the dual camera setup and a flicker sensor with an unnecessary cutout.
The circular light in the module of the ultra-wide camera that lights up in case of a notification (or you can choose to have it turned on at other times), very similar to what we used to see in Android phones many years back, but of course, those used to be on the front. This is an IP69 dust and water-resistant device that weighs just under 190grams with decent weight distribution.
The 6.8-inch 1.5K(2880x1280) AMOLED display supports up to 144Hz refresh rates and is quite bright, making it suitable for use outdoors in direct sunlight. The curve around the sides is not very heavy but is still a little reflective at certain angles.
The display handles high-resolution videos well, giving good details and popping colours in the default Vivid mode, though I prefer its Cinematic mode. It also handled HDR content quite well, with shadows and contrast looking good in darker scenes, too.
The dual camera setup—50MP (f/1.8) main camera (with OIS) and a 50MP (f/2.0) ultra-wide camera—gives well-stitched and detailed shots with still subjects and decent to medium lighting conditions. OIS does seem to help in low-light shots, but you would get grainy photos in challenging lighting conditions indoors or outdoors. It can shoot 4K videos at 60FPS, which can provide good results outdoors with good lighting. The front-facing 50MP (f/2.4) camera is nice for selfie shots, including portrait shots, capturing good details and making out the subject and background.
The phone is equipped with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 chipset (up to 2.8 GHz octa-core processor and Adreno 772 GPU) with 12GB LPDDR4X RAM and 256GB UFS3.1 internal storage. It's running on Android 15-based Realme UI 6.0. The day-to-day performance of the device is nothing to complain about. It can handle multiple social media apps, scrolling while listening to music in the background, and split-view for multiple apps well.
Animations are generally quite smooth, and you would rarely see any stuttering happening. Animations themselves could be a little better in terms of how they behave, go about when in action, such as a blurring effect or a swivel effect. For heavy gaming, you can expect to get 60 FPS gameplay at the highest settings, but you can see some rendering issues in heavy games like GTA San Andreas every now and then. There are some nice AI features to remove unnecessary objects from your photos or give instructions to add something. You can use AI Edit Genie to add some things, like another background or changing the scene in your image; it works well at times. There's also AI for writing and summarising notes.
Powered by a 7,000mAh battery unit, the phone lasted me a whole day comfortably, almost every single time. The bundled 80-watt charger can charge it from 1% to full in a little over an hour without any major heating issues.
Dual stereo speakers on the phone are loud but not the loudest or deepest we have seen from realme at this price range. WiFi and GPS performance are trouble-free, and 5G network reception was also quite reliable outdoors for working on the go.
All in all, the Realme 15 is a good performer, but not the best across various departments. It has a nice camera, but not the best in the segment, decent design and great battery life. Software performance isn't bad, but it's not the most gaming-friendly device in this price range.
