The mid-range smartphone market in India is becoming interesting day by day, thanks to a wide range of smartphones available from various OEMs in this segment. Especially, there is stiff competition in the sub-Rs. 15,000 segment lately and now, there is another new entrant in this segment by realme- the realme 7. Realme 7 is the successor of the realme 6 that was launched in India in March this year and I’ve been using the phone for quite some time now, and have thoughts to share. Let’s get started with the realme 7 Review.
Table of contents
| Box Contents |
| Display |
| Performance |
| Gaming |
| Software |
| Cameras |
| Connectivity |
| Battery |
| Conclusion |
Box Contents
- Realme 7 (8GB+128GB) in Mist Blue
- 30W Dart Charger
- USB Type-C cable
- SIM ejector tool
- Quick Start Guide
- Clear protective case
- Safety and Warranty Information
Design and Build Quality
Realme changed the design language of its smartphones recently starting with the C11 and has done the same with the realme 7 as well. The realme 7 has a completely refreshed design on the back with a dual-tone finish and redesigned camera module. This time around, realme has gone for a matte finish for the back panel of the realme 7 compared to the glossy finish on the realme 6. There is a vertical strip right below the rear camera module and the realme branding is present on the vertical strip. Speaking of which, the camera module has been refreshed as well and this time, the quad-rear cameras are stacked vertically in a rectangle-shaped module.
Notably, the thickness of the camera module remains almost the same as the realme 6 despite the change in shape. Although the back panel has a soft-touch finish, it doesn’t feel slippery and offers a pretty decent grip. Similar to the realme 6, the back and the frame is made of plastic, but it looks like glass at first glance, thanks to the color combination and the finish. It does attract fingerprints and smudges.
Moving on, while the design on the back is a major departure from the realme 6, the front has not changed. We get the same 6.5-inch FULL HD+ 90Hz Ultra Smooth display with a hole-punch on the top left corner that houses the 16MP front-facing camera. Just like the realme 6, the bezels are thin on the sides with a slightly large chin, and the location, size of the earpiece is also the same. On similar lines, the button placements and ports haven’t changed as well. The volume rocker buttons, Dual SIM + microSD tray is located to the right, the power button cum fingerprint scanner to the left, 3.5mm audio jack, microphone, USB Type-C port, speaker grille to the bottom, and the top part is left empty.
Coming to the build quality, this is where I was not satisfied and the experience was completely different compared to realme 6. In our review sample, the back panel felt hollow, and specifically, the area around the side-mounted fingerprint scanner/power button felt weak compared to other areas. The glue holding the back panel came out in some instances whenever I pressed the power button/fingerprint reader to unlock the smartphone, and I was able to hear a creaking sound on applying gentle pressure around that area, and further, a fair bit of dust got accumulated as well which was disappointing. This seems to be a quality control issue, and I am not sure if it is isolated to our unit. Hopefully, such issues don’t occur in future realme devices.
Display
On the front, the realme 7 flaunts a large 6.5-inch Full HD+ 90Hz Ultra Smooth LCD display with a resolution of 2400 x 1080 pixels and a 90.5% screen-to-body ratio. For protection, realme has used Corning Gorilla Glass 3 on this one and the refresh rate on this one is 90Hz with 120Hz touch sampling rate.
The display quality of the realme 7 is quite good for the price. It is sharp, has good viewing angles and the colors are well-balanced on this one. The peak brightness on this panel is 480 nits and in real-world usage, the outdoor legibility was just fine, albeit the auto-brightness could be better. While this is not the best display in this segment, it is quite good and I hardly noticed any quality difference when compared to the realme 6.
Moving on, as this phone sports a punch-hole at the top left corner of the display, realme has added a new ‘Punch-hole Light Effect’ where the edge of the camera lights up when you use the front-camera or face unlock. The animation looks cool and is a nice addition by realme. Similarly, realme 7 also gets Android 10’s ‘Adaptive Sleep’ mode that essentially keeps your screen awake when it detects your present attention and will not dim and go to sleep.
Apart from this, as usual, you can tweak the screen color temperature, change the screen color mode, and lock the refresh rate to either 60Hz or 90Hz or let the system automatically select the best refresh rate for an app. More specifically, there are three screen color temperature — Cool, Default, Warm, and two screen color modes — Vivid and Gentle. You can play around with the display settings according to your preference, but the saturation is not overdone by default which is a good thing.
Further, I used this phone at 90Hz for most of the time and I browse a lot and scroll through social media feed constantly. The 90Hz experience was pretty good and with the new ‘Smooth Scrolling’ option in realme Lab, the scrolling experience has elevated further. Thankfully, the occasional stutter/freeze that occurred during continuous scrolling in other realme devices with a 90Hz/120Hz refresh rate is not present on this one. I also performed jank test on a few popular apps to check for dropped or delayed frames and will discuss more on that in the later part of the review. The battery life did not take a hit either on 90Hz (more on that in the battery section).
Performance
The realme 7 is the first smartphone in the world to be powered by the MediaTek Helio G95 gaming processor. It is an Octa-Core processor built on a 12nm architecture with 2x high-performance Cortex-A76 cores clocked at up to 2.05GHz and 6x high-efficiency Cortex-A55 cores clocked at up to 2GHz. The graphic duties are handled by the Mali-G76 GPU clocked at 900MHz. On the memory front, the realme 7 comes with 6GB LPDDR4x dual-channel RAM + 64GB UFS 2.1 storage and 8GB LPDDR4x dual-channel RAM + 128GB UFS 2.1 storage. The primary difference between the MediaTek Helio G90T on the realme 6 and MediaTek Helio G95 on the realme 7 lies in the overclocked GPU [900MHz on the Helio G95 and 800MHz on the Helio G90T].
Coming to real-world performance, the Helio G95 handles casual, day-to-day tasks with ease. During my usage that involved continuous browsing, juggling between social media applications, watching videos on YouTube, editing documents, etc, the realme 7 did not show any signs of stutter/lags or whatsoever. Thanks to the UFS 2.1 storage, apps were fairly quick to load, although not as fast as it would be on a UFS 3.0 storage and that too is reserved for flagship smartphones, at least for now. Similarly, multitasking was smooth as well and I did not face any issues, thanks to the ample 8GB LPDDR4x RAM and optimizations in realme UI.
In intensive tasks like photo/video editing in InShot, Snapseed, Lightroom, the realme 7 held up quite well here too. I edited and exported a 600MB video in InShot and the export completed in 2 minutes 34 seconds, which is pretty good. Similar performance was observed in Snapseed and LightRoom as well where the edited photo with multiple adjustment layers exported fairly quickly. However, Adobe Premiere Rush did not work properly on this phone, and in multiple instances, the playback failed. This might be an issue with the app itself rather than the phone. Nonetheless, it is something I noticed.
As this phone has a 90Hz display, I performed a jank test on popular apps to check for dropped or delayed frames at a 90Hz refresh rate. The apps used for testing were Google Chrome, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and here are the test results.
- Google Chrome – 28.41% Janky frames
- Instagram – 21.07% Janky frames
- Twitter – 21.06% Janky frames
- YouTube – 12% Janky frames
Based on the results, the realme 7 was janky when using Google Chrome and least janky when scrolling through YouTube feed. Check out the benchmark scores below.
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