In this heated smartphone market, X2 Pro is realme’s latest effort to gain further market share, offering a blend of premium features and price-friendly sacrifices. With X2 Pro, realme has entered into the flagship segment in India. Can it dethrone OnePlus in the sub 30K segment? Take a look at our review to know more about this device.
Why you should buy?
Top-notch build with premium vibes.
The newest offering from realme is built to impress, with some seriously out of paper specifications. realme X2 Pro oozes premium vibes all over with metal and glass sandwich design. We had the Neptune Blue color, but the Lunar White variant would have been great. It’s worth mentioning that both front and rear are protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 5. The weight distribution is proper but slightly weighted towards the top.
In terms of dimensions, X2 measures 8.7mm in thickness and weighs around 199 grams. Due to glass build, it attracts fingerprints and smudges on both front and back. Since its slippery, using it in one-hand without any protective case is not recommended. On the rear, realme’s logo is placed in an awkward horizontal orientation near the camera module.
90Hz AMOLED display is brilliant
The realme X2 Pro sports a bit bigger display — 6.55-inch (2400 x 1080 pixels) Full HD+ 20:9 aspect ratio Fluid AMOLED display with 90Hz refresh rate. Just like OnePlus 7T, the device also features the same 402ppi. It also supports HDR10+ and DCI-P3 color gamut.
Notably, the trimmed bezels on the sides give the device an impressive 91.7% screen-to-body ratio. In real-world usage, blacks are deep, the color reproduction is average with saturation thrown all over, and viewing angles are good; it has a perfectly readable display under bright sunlight too.
Under settings, we have two presets – Gentle and Vivid. Further, it has ‘Low-Brightness Flicker-Free Eye Care,’ Night shield, and OSIE Vision Effect as well. The OSIE Vision effect boosts the color even more, but it works in select apps. Overall, a great display for the price.
Quad-cameras, but!
On the back, we have a quad-camera setup stacked vertically.
- Primary lens: 64MP with f/1.8 aperture (supporting native pixel-binning)
- Telephoto lens: 13MP with f/2.5 aperture, support up to 2X optical zoom
- Ultrawide angle lens: 8MP with f/2.2 aperture 115-degree field-of-view, 2.5cm macro
- Depth sensor: 2MP
It is one of the very few devices in the market to have a versatile camera with lots of sensors. Talking about real-world usage, there are no complaints as such. The 64MP primary camera captures some images with better detail and sharpness. The dynamic range is excellent, capturing as much detail in shadows and highlights. Upon enabling the Chroma Boost, the colors are a bit over the top in some photos with increased color vibrancy. But, the details in the shadowed regions were very well preserved compared to the competition out there. The device was quick to lock focus, and we didn’t face any issues with usability as such.
The 13MP telephoto lens captured the right amount of details, 5X hybrid zoom worked pretty well in daylight. On the other hand, the wide-angle camera kept the distortion on the side to a minimum, but the details were very average. The wide-angle lens can also be used to capture macro shots. But again, you’ll need a steady hand and decent lighting as well.
The 2MP depth sensor does a good job when it comes to portrait. Edge detection works the best here, giving a clean background separation even in low light. The Nightscape works very well by brightening and sharpening the image without losing details up to a certain extent. Notably, the Nightscape works with the selfie camera as well. The 16MP selfie camera is decent.
In terms of videos, the realme X2 pro records at 1080p at 30fps by default with an option for 60fps, also it can go up to 4K at 60fps as well. In real-world usage, the quality of videos are good, and the EIS works reasonably well. However, there’s no optical stabilisation on any of the cameras, but you do get EIS.
Smooth performance!
The realme X2 Pro is powered by the latest Octa-Core Qualcomm Snapdragon 855+ 7nm Mobile Platform with 675MHz Adreno 640 GPU under the hood.
Unsurprisingly, the X2 Pro is incredibly fast and continues to do what it is best at. The read/write speed is more rapid, with UFS 3.0 storage. In our experience, we experienced zero lag, zero hitches, and it’s just pure speed and raw power.
In technical terms, the Snapdragon 855+ mobile platform, boasting upgraded CPU speeds,15% faster graphics rendering, and multi-gigabit 4G connectivity. On a day-to-day usage, finding the difference between the Snapdragon 855 and Snapdragon 855+ is just tough. Check out the synthetic benchmark scores below.
Good battery life
The realme X2 Pro is powered by a 4035mAh battery with VOOC 3.0 fast charging technology. VOOC is one of the most important reasons why I’ll recommend the realme X2 Pro, which ships with a 50W charger inside the box. It charges freaking fast, yet there is no sign of overheating.
The battery life is nothing less than promising in this flagship device! On a casual usage, the device offers more than a day usage, and when challenged with demanding tasks, the battery provides quickly around a day or so.
In our One Charge rating, the realme X2 Pro achieved 17 hours and 48 minutes in 60Hz display refresh rate, which is good. Furthermore, it took approximately 12 minutes for 0 to 50% and just 30 minutes to reach 100% using the bundled Super VOOC charger.
Why you should not buy?
ColorOS needs further refinement
The realme X2 Pro is shipped with ColorOS 6.1 based on Android 9.0 (Pie) and has an Android security patch for November 2019. It comes with loads of pre-installed apps, including Amazon Shopping, UC Browser, Paytm, Helo, Facebook, and many more. Most of the apps can be uninstalled, which is a good thing. The ColorOS 6.1 has been customised a bit with some visual tweaks, and the optimisation is good as other custom ROMs but not as good as vanilla Android. The company already promised ColorOS 7.0 update with Android 10 along with its own realme UI skin will come in March 2020 after best testing, but that’s a long wait.
Other mentions
It supports connectivity options including 3.5mm audio jack, Dual 4G VoLTE, WiFi 802.11 ac (2.4GHz + 5GHz), Bluetooth 5, GPS + GLONASS, USB Type-C. Furthermore, it doesn’t support FM Radio. It also lacks microSD slot. The realme X2 Pro comes with a stereo speaker setup. It is loud and offers good details at a higher volume. The call quality through headsets and loudspeakers was good too.
The realme X2 Pro is available in Lunar White and Neptune Blue exclusively on Flipkart starting at Rs. 29,999 for the 8GB + 128GB version and is also available in 12GB + 256GB version at Rs. 33,999. The Master Edition in Red Brick and Concrete colors is priced at Rs. 34,999 for the 12GB RAM with 256GB storage version and will go on sale during Christmas.