Two weeks with Realme 3 Pro and I am impressed
This is my two week experience with Realme 3 Pro. This is not one of those review posts. This is not based on a review unit. This post is based on a retail unit that I purchase after checking various options. I was using Galaxy S7 and I was too tempted to upgrade to phones with tiny bezels cum long battery life and I ended up with Realme 3 Pro. I almost got the Poco F1 but Flipkart made a mess of that order (another story to narrate on another day).
I was casually checking Flipkart and then I saw this interesting exchange offer. When I applied my Samsung Galaxy S7 for exchange, Flipkart shows Rs.12,749/- as amount to pay to get Poco F1. Till then, I was not that much interested in buying a new phone. I felt that this is the best deal I could get for Poco F1 and for Samsung S7. Ended up placing order. Then, Flipkart made a mess of the order and I started searching for other options.
Realme 3 Pro vs Redmi Note 7 Pro
Under 17k rupees, there are two phones that are extremely good. One is the Realme 3 Pro and the other is Redmi Note 7 Pro. Here are few reasons why I picked Realme 3 Pro over Redmi Note 7 Pro.
- Plastic rear panel (can be used without a back cover), cheaper to fix.
- No OS level ads like those on MIUI 10.
- Crazy fast VOOC 3 charging with bundled VOOC 3.0 fast charger.
- Better GPU.
- Better front facing camera.
- Nightscape.
In case you want to know, here are Redmi Note 7 Pro advantages over Realme 3 Pro:
- Far superior rear camera setup.
- Better CPU.
- More onboard storage (6GB+128GB for 16,999/-).
- Premium look, thanks to glass rear panel.
- USB Type-C port.
- IR Blaster.
The defining factor for me was OS level ads. This one factor alone made me go with Realme 3 Pro.
Was wrong about size
Whenever I see someone using these new phones with notch and 6″+ displays, I used to say ‘How do you use such big phones, I am very happy with my phone with 5.2″display’. Once I started using the Realme 3 Pro, I had no such feeling. Even though Realme 3 Pro has 6.3″ display, it has very similar thickness and width compared to S7 and is just over a cm taller than S7. Thanks to tear drop notch on top and 83% screen to body ratio, I did not feel much difference using Realme 3 Pro.
Charging at speed of light, discharging at snails pace
A 4000 mAh battery is big, very big. Yet, thanks to VOOC 3.0 ultra fast charging, this massive battery gets 50% of charge in under 30 minutes.
With the Galaxy S7, there was this constant paraonia about battery getting drained. I used to charge my phone atleast twice between 6am and 9pm. Even if I charge at around 5pm before leaving to home, I end up charging again before going to bed. The S7 is from the time when focus was less on battery backup and SoT, more on producing super slim phones with stunning looks.With Realme 3 Pro, I barely charge once a day. One of the key reasons is that the Snapdragon 710 chipset is lot more efficient when compared to Exynos chipsets that Samsung uses on their phones. Also, this phone comes with a massive 4000mAh battery while Samsung Galaxy S7 came with a 3000 mAh battery.
The icing on the cake here is VOOC 3.0 ultra fast charging. The bundled charger of Realme 3 Pro can charge the 4000mAh battery from 0% to 50% in just 30 minutes. A quick 30 minute charge would give more than 12 hours of battery life. Unlike the fast charging on Samsung Galaxy S7 that heats up battery, Rm 3 Pro stays cold while charging at that high speed.
Advantages of edge to edge large display
This is what I use my phone for:- Read e-books.
- Play games like PES Club Manager, Motorsport Manager.
- Feedly news reader.
- Twitter.
As you can see, majority of my work takes very good advantage of large screen displays. Books and news show more content on large displays. On Twitter, I can view more tweets/content than that on my good old Galaxy S7. The large screen display also makes watching videos much better. Though S7’s Super AMOLED has superior color reproduction, the large size of Realme 3 Pro display makes it better to watch videos.
Another advantage is that the on-screen keyboard wont take too much of screen space and gives you more options to add (dedicated number row etc) and give you better typing experience.
Conclusion
I am impressed at the quality of the Realme 3 Pro. The build quality is great, display is among the best (<20,000/- phones), the notch is tiny. The best part though is the ultra fast charging and slow battery discharge. I was holding on to my Galaxy S7 thinking that it was superior to any midrange phones of 2019! Boy, how wrong I was!
You can purchase Realme 3 Pro for 13,999/- from Flipkart here. The higher specced variant costs around 16k and I would highly recommend to get the 6GB RAM variant. If you want to know best smartphones avaialble for purchase in India, go to out Smartphone Recommendation List.
