You must have heard of the fable where an ant was busy saving food for the incoming winters and the grasshopper went about merrily chirping and hopping and doing everything grasshoppers do, including buying expensive smartphones. People often heard the grasshopper say, ‘I’ve just bought the latest most expensive phone guys.’
His friend, the ant, looked at him and said, ‘Collect food for the winters, buddy. If you don’t wish to store for winters at least save enough to buy food then.’
‘Ha! Ha!’ said the grasshopper, ‘My expensive smartphone is magical. It will work wonders for me.’ The ant always replied, ‘My RealMe 3 is good enough for me. It does everything I ever want to do and connects me during emergencies without hiccups.’
We know how the grasshopper perished during winters. The moral of the fable is that expensive smartphones don’t save lives. A corollary to this fable is that people must choose smartphones carefully and in ways that leaves them with enough money to last through difficult times.
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The RealMe 3 has most of the features that any user would want for an enhanced experience and begins with the smartphone having a a 3D Gradient Unibody Design that is powered by a MediaTek Helio P70 processor that rivals the 10nm chip as the P70 comes with multi-threaded APU (AI Processing Unit), which includes multi-core processors and smart control logic processors. Navigation gestures that have become so sought after are supported and all that a user needs to do is to swipe upward from the Home key to call out multi-tasking, or swipe to the left/right to quickly switch between apps. The phone has a 4230mAh high capacity battery that lasts even longer through optimization by smarter software.
For those users who wish to get under the skin of design, this smartphone with a 6.22 inch water-drop screen has a 88.3% screen to body ratio, a super-wide view for a complete display.
So far as the camera goes, the RealMe 3 comes with a combination of a 13MP primary camera and a 2MP secondary camera with the primary camera’s single pixel size being 1.12um. a large f/1.8 aperture and 5P lenses with the phone employing AI scenes recognition technology is sufficient to give a shoot output that gets the best exposure strategy with a dynamic range and contrast ratio. In simple terms, the photo-experience of the user isn’t compromised in any way. Besides this, the smartphone supports 90fps/720P slow-motion video-shooting, has a robust nightscape mode that has the ability to increase exposure and reduce noise, and even has something that the manufacturers call the chroma boost mode for better imaging effect, colour, and style. And yes, this mode does light-up dim parts to show more details as well. The chroma boost mode is a great partner when shooting scenes with great light variation (such as backlight scenes), with diversified colors (such as flowers, grass, and food), and with cloudy or foggy weather.
All that a user needs to do is to go to any store and click a few pictures in different light conditions to see if all that is said in this review stands the test of a personal experience or not. As I do not have a review device with me, I cannot possibly give a comparison with other competing brands like the Honor 8c, Samsung M20, Redmi Note 6 Pro. However, the superiority of RealMe 3 in tolerance, highlighting details, dim part details, and color restoration appeared to be reasonably fine in my short interaction with the device during the launch.
If all this can be had for less than a third of the cost of even the mid-range phones, the logic of spending more stands defeated. Quite obviously, the more expensive brands remain out of reckoning.
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Arvind Passey
13 March 2019
