Realme 9 Features & Specification
Realme 9 series offers a diverse range of models, including a 4G and 5G version of the standard option, a 9i, and two Pro variants. While each represents a different price category, the 4G and 5G iterations of the Realme 9 are surprisingly similarly priced. However, there are notable differences that contribute to this pricing strategy.
Realme 9 vs. Realme 9 5G: Key Differences
The Realme 9 4G variant boasts a superior display, faster charging, a better main camera, and the base model offers double the storage compared to the 5G version. As a result, the 4G version is likely to be more popular, especially among users not looking to transition to 5G or in regions with limited 5G coverage.
Realme 9 Specs Highlights
Body: Compact design at 160.2×73.3×8.0mm, weighing 178g; features Gorilla Glass 5 front, plastic back, and frame.
Display: Impressive 6.40″ Super AMOLED with a 90Hz refresh rate, reaching up to 1000 nits peak brightness.
Chipset: Powered by the Qualcomm SM6225 Snapdragon 680 4G (6 nm) with Octa-core processing and Adreno 610 GPU.
Memory: Available in configurations of 128GB storage with 6GB or 8GB RAM, expandable via microSDXC.
OS/Software: Runs on Android 12 with Realme UI 3.0.
Camera Setup: Noteworthy 108MP main camera, 8MP ultra-wide, and 2MP macro lenses on the rear; 16MP front camera.
Battery: Robust 5000mAh battery with 33W fast charging, promising 50% charge in 31 minutes and 100% in 75 minutes.
Misc: Features an under-display optical fingerprint reader, a 3.5mm audio jack, but lacks NFC.
Competitive Pricing and Impressive Features
The price of the Realme 9 in Pakistan is Rs. 74,999, the Realme 9 delivers a compelling package, including a high-refresh-rate OLED panel, substantial battery capacity, fast charging capabilities, a powerful main camera, and expandable storage, despite lacking an integrated 5G modem in its Snapdragon 680 SoC, the Realme 9 positions itself as a strong all-around performer in its price range.
Unboxing Experience
The Realme 9 arrives in a standard package, containing user manuals, a 33W charging brick, and a USB-A to USB-C cable for charging and data transfer. As a bonus, Realme includes a transparent protective case for the device.
Design and Ergonomics
The Realme 9 and 9 Pro+ share a compact design with 6.4-inch displays, likely featuring the same OLED panels. The Realme 9, with its all-plastic body and Gorilla Glass 5-protected display, offers a lightweight and slim profile at 8mm thickness.
Aesthetic Appeal
The back panel, mimicking frosted glass with a Sunburst Gold finish, adds an aesthetically pleasing touch. Despite being slippery, the design minimizes fingerprints and smudges, with a distinctive gradient under specific lighting.
Seamless Integration
The back curves meet the side frame seamlessly, providing a comfortable grip. The front panel’s slight curves contribute to overall ergonomics, creating a cohesive design.
Camera Module
The camera module protrudes noticeably, featuring metal-ringed lenses. Placing the Realme 9 on a flat surface may cause wobbling due to the module’s design.
Button Placement
Well-positioned volume keys and a SIM card tray, accommodating two SIM cards and a microSD card simultaneously, are found on the sides. The power button is on the right, while the bottom houses the USB-C connector, loudspeaker grille, and audio jack.
Fingerprint Reader
The fingerprint reader’s placement near the bottom edge may require awkward finger positioning, depending on how the phone is held.
Display and Bezels
The OLED display boasts minimal bezels on the left and right, a thin top bezel, and a thicker chin. The tiny cutout for the front-facing camera, likely facilitated by the OLED panel, contributes to an overall appealing design.
Build and Material
While budget constraints limit the use of premium materials, the Realme 9 impresses with Gorilla Glass 5 protection, absence of ridges, thin screen bezels, and a lightweight, comfortable feel.
Impressive OLED Display
The Realme 9 boasts a 6.4-inch Super AMOLED display with a 1080 x 2400px resolution and supports a 90Hz refresh rate. This feature, remarkable for a phone under €300, provides a satisfying visual experience despite lacking HDR certifications.
Display Quality
The device delivers a peak brightness of 647 nits in Auto mode, ensuring excellent outdoor visibility. The display likely shared with the Realme 9 Pro+, offers consistent performance, with similar results in various lighting conditions.
Color Accuracy
Color accuracy is noteworthy, especially in the Natural color preset, exhibiting an average dE2000 of 2.7. However, the standard mode may present over-saturation, emphasizing the need for the Natural mode for more accurate color reproduction.
Refresh Rate Management
The Realme 9 intelligently adjusts the refresh rate, reducing it to 60Hz when not interacting with the display. This optimization, common in Realme devices, contributes to power efficiency without compromising user experience.
Battery of Realme 9
With a substantial 5,000 mAh battery, the Realme 9 achieves an exceptional overall endurance rating of 156 hours. The phone excels in telephony, web browsing, and video playback, setting a benchmark for battery performance in its category.
Charging Speed
Contrary to Realme’s usual charging excellence, the Realme 9 falls short in this aspect. The 30-minute charging test results in only 50% battery replenishment, and a full charge takes approximately 1 hour and 16 minutes. While not the slowest, it deviates from the brand’s high charging standards.
Audio Quality
Equipped with a single, bottom-facing speaker, the Realme 9 provides average audio quality. Scoring -30.4, it falls under the “Below Average” category, offering a standard audio experience with limited volume and bass.
Realme UI 3.0 and Android 12 Integration
The Realme 9, like its counterparts, operates on the latest Android 12, coupled with Realme UI 3.0. This combination incorporates both Android 12’s inherent features and Realme’s distinctive customizations.
Visual Continuity
Realme UI maintains its vibrant and customizable interface, featuring personalized UI elements and unique iconography for the notification shade and Settings menu. While the app drawer retains its standard appearance, minor inconsistencies in swipe gestures may be noticeable.
Enhanced Navigation
Introduced in Realme UI, the Icon pull-down gesture remains, allowing easy access to frequently used apps by swiping along the screen’s edges. The Home screen’s swipe gestures may exhibit slight irregularities but are generally reliable.
Android 12 Privacy Features
Realme UI 3.0 integrates Android 12’s privacy-focused features, such as the Privacy Dashboard. This feature provides a consolidated view of app permissions and user data settings, offering insights into app interactions and permission requests.
Customization Options
Realme UI’s Personalization sub-menu empowers users with deep customization options, including accent colors, wallpapers, icons, quick toggle shapes, and font preferences. The Always-on display feature, typically rare in this price range, is a notable inclusion.
Multitasking Capabilities
Under the Special Features sub-menu, Realme includes a Smart Sidebar and Flexible windows, enhancing multitasking functionality. The Smart Sidebar provides quick access to favorite apps, while Flexible Windows supports split-screen mode and resizable app windows.
Gesture Controls and More
Realme maintains the screen-off gestures, and motion gestures, and introduces a unique feature in Realme Labs—simultaneous music streaming to Bluetooth and wired headphones. The fingerprint reader incorporates a heart rate monitor and a Quick launch option for predefined apps.
User Experience and Performance
Performance Overview
Equipped with the Snapdragon 680, the Realme 9 faces performance challenges in comparison to its counterparts. The chipset, featuring older CPU and GPU cores, struggles to match the performance of competing devices.
Benchmark Results
In various synthetic benchmark tests, including AnTuTu and GeekBench, the Realme 9 falls behind competitors like the Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro+ 5G and Realme 9 Pro+. The Snapdragon 680’s limitations become apparent, impacting overall performance.
Sustained Performance
During a stress test, the Snapdragon 680 exhibits minimal thermal throttling in the first 30 minutes, stabilizing at around 90% of its theoretical CPU performance. However, a more substantial drop occurs close to the one-hour mark, representing 68% of the SoC’s performance. Despite this, the phone maintains a relatively cool temperature due to its plastic body.
User Experience
While Realme UI 3.0 provides a feature-rich experience, occasional animation lags and slower app loading times may be noticeable. The user experience, while not flawless, remains acceptable for everyday use.
Camera Specifications of Realme 9
The Realme 9 boasts a triple-camera setup, with its standout feature being the 108MP main sensor, a rarity in its price range. The other two cameras include an 8MP ultrawide shooter and a 2MP macro lens. On the front, there’s a 16MP selfie camera.
Camera User Interface
Realme’s camera software remains unchanged, offering standard modes and an Expert mode for granular control over settings like ISO, exposure, and white balance. The Photo mode includes AI enhancements, HDR controls, and toggles for the ultrawide, main, and 3x zoom.
Daylight Photography
The main camera captures good quality daylight photos with decent sharpness, detail, and a somewhat conservative color reproduction. The 108MP mode, while available, shows signs of upscaling, evident in jagged edges and increased noise.
Zoom Photography
The 3x zoom, although a crop from the main sensor, performs adequately in good lighting conditions, offering usable photos for social media. Night mode significantly improves the quality of zoomed shots.
Ultrawide Photography
Ultrawide photos exhibit vibrant colors but lack the sharpness of main camera shots. The dynamic range is narrower, and shadows often appear crushed.
Low-light Photography
In low-light conditions, the main camera produces decent shots with some noise in darker areas. Night mode enhances details and sharpness, offering better overall quality. The 3x zoom at night struggles with softness and limited dynamic range.
Portrait Mode
Portraits showcase wide dynamic range, good detail, and satisfactory sharpness. Edge detection may appear slightly rough in complex backgrounds.
Selfies
Selfies are sharp with wide dynamic range and accurate colors. In sub-optimal lighting, the camera maintains decent performance.
Video Recording of Realme 9
Limited by the ISP capabilities, the Realme 9 supports 1080p@30fps video recording. Unfortunately, video quality is unimpressive, showing softness, cold color tones, and washed-out colors. Ultrawide video is softer with limited dynamic range. Electronic stabilization is available, but the quality remains modest.
Competition
The Realme 9 is a good all-rounder, which even stands out from the crowd with some features. One of them is the excellent (given the price bracket) OLED panel, and the other two are the 108MP main camera and extra-long battery life. The rest of the hardware is pretty much par for the course – a 5,000 mAh battery, three cameras on the back, and a Snapdragon 680 SoC, which in practice isn’t very different from the rest of the SoCs in the same lineup.
Realme 9 review
Its biggest omissions are the NFC feature and 5G connectivity. And while the latter might not be a big deal, the lack of NFC chip might pose a problem in most countries where contactless payments are a thing. Interestingly enough, for €280, the Realme 9 faces some in-house competition as well.
The Realme 9 Pro, for example, sells for even less – Rs. 94,999 and so does the Realme 9 5G. They both have the advantage of running more powerful chipsets and support 5G connectivity, but they definitely lack the Realme 9 4G’s viewing experience. And the Realme 9 5G has less base storage and slower charging, too. Overall, user experience isn’t much different, though, so it depends on how important NFC and 5G are to you.
Realme 9 Pro Realme 9 5G Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro 5G Samsung Galaxy A33 5G
Realme 9 Pro • Realme 9 5G • Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro 5G • Samsung Galaxy A33 5G
And in case you don’t like LCD panels but are in the market for 5G and NFC, luckily, there’s something for everyone. The Samsung Galaxy A33 5G and the Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro 5G are pretty similar solutions. They come with their drawbacks, as usual.
Samsung Galaxy A33
The Galaxy A33 5G’s Exynos 1280 might be sub-optimal but has more horsepower under the hood. Sadly, the base RAM is just 4GB, charging is just about the same, while battery life falls short of the Realme 9’s. On the other hand, the A33 5G will grant you a set of stereo speakers, IP67 dust and water protection, a slightly brighter OLED screen, and Samsung’s One UI software, in case you prefer that particular skin overlay. It also undercuts the Realme 9 by €20.
As for the Redmi Note 11 Pro 5G, it runs a slightly more powerful Snapdragon 695 (just like the Realme 9 Pro and the Realme 9) but also has a faster and brighter 120Hz OLED display. Its 108MP main sensor is bigger too. In addition, Xiaomi’s offering boasts a set of stereo speakers, basic water and dust protection, a glass build, and faster charging. Its only disadvantage is the base 64GB storage. And all of that will set you back just €250.
Verdict
Arguably, the Realme 9 is one of the sensible options in the family as it runs overall balanced hardware while being one of the cheapest of the bunch. It’s only about €20 more expensive than the Realme 9 5G and 9 Pro. Its bright OLED panel, long battery life, and somewhat decent camera performance, thanks to the 108MP main sensor, make a pretty strong case.
However, the lack of NFC, 5G connectivity and the underpowered Snapdragon 680 will most likely steer away some potential buyers, and the competition can accommodate those needs while matching the Realme 9 4G’s feature set and adding a set of stereo speakers as well as some sort of ingress protection.
Pros
- Bright enough 90Hz OLED.
- Lightweight and rather comfortable design.
- Record-breaking battery life.
- Dependable main camera performance, at day and night, nice 3x zoom.
- Feature-rich Realme UI 3.0 on top of Android 12
Cons
No NFC and 5G connectivity.
Main camera daylight photos have a strong blue tinge
Video recording isn’t up to snuff either.
There are options with more powerful chipsets.
Occasional UI lag.