Realme 7 5G: Parents, this is the phone you should have got your kids for Christmas

It's never been harder to buy a new phone. Five years ago flagships did everything, mid-rangers had obvious compromises, and sub-£200 handsets were trash. Now those lines are so blurry, you'd be justified in asking your ophthalmologist to check for cataracts. And it's all thanks to devices like the Realme 7 5G. I should hate …

[tiggity]

Battery

As this is the reg, how about mentioning.

Is the battery removeable? No AFAIK but would like clarification

Headphone jack? yes FAIK, but again would be nice to confirm

Dual SIM ?

SD card slot?

What's the patch / upgrade likelihood (coupled with, which version of android does it run)

As the review was quite game play obsessed, does it support ARCore (as some popular games need that e.g. Harry Potter, so lack of ARCore support could lead to grumpy young child if its not supported as last line o review mentions it for a younger child)

Disclosure - better specs than my phone, and my phone perfectly fine for normal use

BTW "Briskly scrolling through your email inbox produces none of the juddering you'd otherwise experience when using a standard 60Hz panel." - never get judder on my phone when scrolling inbox, would have to scroll so fast that you could not see the emails to achieve that (& what's the point of doing that?)

[VicMortimer]

Re: Battery

Dual SIM? Sorry, who needs that exactly?

[Spamfast]

Re: Battery

Dual SIM? Sorry, who needs that exactly?

People who don't want to lose connectivity in less well served places or when one of the carriers has a spasm?

People who spend significant amounts of the year in another country?

People who like to keep work & private communication partitioned?

[Buttons]

Re: Battery

I need dual SIMS.

Moto 6 Play dual SIM, one SIM only given to close friends and family and another disposable PAYG SIM whose number is given out to others like agencies, contracts and short term aquaintances. I replace it if any contact become annoying.

I don't know what the situation is now but I struggled to find a smartphone with dual SIM. This one cost me a bit more than £160 and by todays standards its not all that. Cost, basic functionality, dual SIMS and good battery life were my criteria then and they haven't changed. I fear that when I need to change my phone in two or three years time, I'll be struggling to get the same value or features.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Battery

I guess you've never had a work phone which is odd for people that use this site.

[needmorehare]

In other words

Drug dealers.

[Dinanziame]

Re: Battery

Depends on your country. In India, it's apparently the vast majority of people who needs two SIM cards; one for voice calls, and one for internet. That's just the way contracts are offered.

[Ralph Online]

Re: Battery

I think the India requirement is originally to do with voice - India is divided into 22 Circles, and different licenses/telecom operators in each. So there was roaming issues if you lived in one circle but regularly visited your family in another, plus also sometimes operators offered deals. I think the Indian's were generally very careful with their phone usage/billing.

[Anonymous Coward]

This review shows just how quickly we've got used to expensive phones.

Do people really consider £279 "a price band that historically housed slow, feature-crippled phones with awful cameras"? and something that's cheap enough to give to a "younger child"?

I've never in my life paid more than £150 or so for a phone, and never had any of the problems the reviewer talks about. Juddering? Performance issues? Washed out colours?

And as the other comment points out, it's kind of light on practical information such as MicroSD slot, headphone jack etc.

[quxinot]

But it's long on information about battery life when 'lightly used', which is not remotely definable.

Hell, my phone's battery is smaller than that and lasts an age if it's off. Not a useful metric. Here's a better list of the specs without the storytelling involved:

https://www.gsmarena.com/realme_7_5g-10590.php

[Danny 14]

Motorola e5 (i think, could be g5 or e6 or g6 something like that). Bought for wife, 3gb ram, 4000 battery, nice screen, sd slot and 32gb on board. Still getting updates. Was 129. Lasts 3 days on one charge. Doesnt feel particularly well made but irrelevent when in a wallet case.

[Spamfast]

I've never in my life paid more than £150 or so for a phone, and never had any of the problems the reviewer talks about.

I've payed £300 but Up Vote!

Phone screens & cameras are now better than my eyesight. CPUs, GPUs, RAM & flash have outpaced anything a phone needs to do. (I don't play games and I can only watch one video at a time using one pair of earphones.) I've yet to see a real-world use case that requires 5G. Wireless charging is fun but a USB C cable is easier to carry than a charging pad and not exactly difficult to use. (You can use your phone while it's charging too!)

I'm planning to spend £1200 on a new work laptop this year because I can justify the build time saved but for everything else I'd be happy with the £500 quid one my other half bought last year.

The idea of paying a grand or more for a phone is bananas.

[Ian Johnston]

Spot on. And as for "Five years ago flagships did everything, mid-rangers had obvious compromises, and sub-£200 handsets were trash" ...

My five year old Medion (Lenovo) phone is still going strong and does everything I need. It cost me sixty quid at Aldi.

[don't you hate it when you lose your account]

I grew up with PAL

PAL uses a screen resolution of 720 x 576 pixels and has a refresh rate of 25 frames per second. Does make me smile

[Martin an gof]

Re: I grew up with PAL

All depends on the quality of the upscaling and, of course, the original video. I have some home videos on miniDV - an SD format - which look quite good even at huge size on our living room TV. We also have quite a collection of DVDs, some of which are straight transfers of (something like) broadcast Beta to DVD, some of which have been "cleaned and restored". The latter are great for watching and in some ways better than streamed video which has been lossy-compressed to heck and back.

I remember in the early days of HD screens we had some Sharp TVs at work and an LG. When running from a computer there wasn't a lot to choose between the pictures produced, other than the fact that the LG, being a plasma device, had slightly better colour rendition and contrast than the LCD Sharps. Back then Freeview was SD only and both TVs used a signal from the same distributed aerial system. The upscaling algorithms on the LG were phenominally better than those in the Sharps and the picture was much more watchable.

M.

[Martin an gof]

Re: I grew up with PAL

Technically, PAL refers to the colour system; the image format had been around since 625 line black-and-white TV was launched. It has a "refresh rate" of 50 times per second, but each time it's only half a frame (one "field") so it does produce 25 frames per second, but effectively 50 new images per second. Interlaced video was a very clever compromise back in the day, a sort of analogue video compression system, but did cause more than a few complications when progressive - and particularly digital - video became practical.

Today my own videos are compromised because I have two cameras - one very high quality - which can only do 1080i50 (interlaced high definition) and a couple of cheaper cameras that can only do 720p60 and because editing 25/50Hz video on a 60Hz computer monitor is annoying, to say the least. It's not that monitors can't do 50Hz, it's that they don't advertise that fact to the computer, so it's impossible to select 50Hz and for 50Hz work I end up using a TV.

And don't get me started on iPlayer. If I use get_iplayer to download videos and play them from an HDD plugged into the back of the TV they look great, but live-streaming, even when the computer is connected to the same TV, seems to do some odd kind of 50Hz to 60Hz and back to 50Hz conversion, resulting in horrible jerky panning.

M.

[anthonyhegedus]

Re: I grew up with PAL

Don’t forget that the actual chrominance (colour) ‘resolution’ is very much lower than the luminance signal. You can’t really notice that on a 576 line TV picture, because the whole thing was quite bad anyway, speaking from a modern perspective.

[Tom 7]

Re: I grew up with PAL

Can people actually see any difference in what I would call normal viewing? i.e. not in the dark so the background light noise drowns out any of the supposed benefit.

[davenewman]

Re: I grew up with PAL

I can change my monitors to 30, 50 or 60 Hz, straight from KDE system settings, with the computer knowing about it.

[Martin an gof]

Re: I grew up with PAL

I do not have a "monitor" that reports 50Hz to the computer. They all report 60Hz whether connected via DVI (where that's sort of expected), HDMI or DisplayPort. My TV, on the other hand, no problem and I can set a 50Hz mode in KDE quite easily (or 24 or 25 or 30 or 60...). Likewise the projectors at work where I can force the Raspberry Pis to connect at 50Hz. Is there some kind of "try it anyway" option in KDE, even if the ability isn't advertised by the monitor?

M.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I grew up with PAL

They all report 60Hz whether connected via DVI (where that's sort of expected), HDMI or DisplayPort.

Many (most?) monitors have a setup menu where the refresh rate can be selected, perhaps they just report what's configured there?

[Anonymous Coward]

More like 768 x 576!!

[Neil Barnes]

>> but CRTs typically only displayed about 75-80%

Domestic TVs. Broadcast TVs showed the entire raster, but Joe Public doesn't like to think that all the expensive CRT wasn't being used.

[Martin an gof]

It's impossible to compare an analogue format such as PAL directly with digital video. The horizontal resolution of analogue formats depends essentially on the bandwidth of the video signal and for UK broadcast PAL this was around 6MHz which theoretically gives something like 540 "TV lines" of resolution if all conditions are ideal and my memory serves. TV lines always assume (for no apparent reason) a square screen, so the actual number of "pixels" viewable across a "540 line" screen is something like 540*(4/3) = 720. Reduce the bandwidth and you get fewer TV lines. Standard VHS with a luminance bandwidth of something like 3MHz can only manage 240 TVL or so.

Note that the vertical resolution - the number of scan lines - is fixed, so 625 for PAL, though quite a few of those are not displayed on screen, hence 576. For analogue broadcast these "hidden" lines were used to carry additional services such as teletext.

M.

[Neil Barnes]

The point about analogue lines is that if one can show, say, 720 'pixels' (i.e. 360 black-white lines) one can equally well show 719, 718, and so on. If one has 720 actual pixels, though, one can show 360 black-white lines *only* if the phase is correct; shift the phase half a pixel and you'll get a grey screen.

Try and display 719 pixels across that line and the best you'll get is lines of decreasing contrast until the last two lines are mid-grey; similar things happen all the way down to the Nyquist frequency - aka aliasing... in practical terms, 720 pixels will give you significantly worse resolution than the original analogue display.

The same effect applies vertically: where an analogue TV camera can show a line across parts of two scan lines (and the scanned CRT can display it the same way), the digital camera is constrained by the optical low pass filter required to avoid aliasing at source.

There ain't no way around Nyquist's limit.

[Zola]

Wireless Charging is a real deal breaker for me

Honestly, I'd be all over this if it had wireless Qi charging.

The only budget/mid-range phone with decent specs (ie. better than 720p display) and built-in wireless charging I've found is the Ulefone Armor 7 for £211 (current price on banggood.com) - I've ordered one even though physically it's a bit of a beast. It should even come with Android 10, once it arrives from China (ordered 21 December, tracking suggests a late January/early February delivery to the UK).

I hope Qi charging starts to become a standard feature on more mid-range devices in the next 12 months. Withholding Qi - which is pretty much the last means of market segmentation other than in terms of individual component quality - isn't going to magically cause me to drop an extra £400 (or more!) on a higher-end device that does have Qi charging (which in reality is a $2 BOM cost). Instead, I'll find cheap alternatives, even if they are beasts from the previous year, or stick with my current phone.

[Chris G]

Re: Wireless Charging is a real deal breaker for me

I have got an Armor 2 I bought 4 years ago specifically because it was tough and had a for then huge battery. I have used it constantly since then with zero problems, no wireless charging but it had NFC, OTG, a decent 13MP main camera and huge RAM. Price? €189.00, recently I have notice the charge is running down a little faster but still get a full day's use out of a charge. It is such a good phone in general that I may get a battery and swap kit from AliExpress rather than hunt for a new model with comparable reviews.

As far as the article went, I think phone reviews have more value when written by the average Joe who knows enough but is not a nerd who isonly looking for technical excellence, that way you get a somewhat more real world impression of the kit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Wireless Charging is a real deal breaker for me

Wireless charging is still horribly inefficient and incredibly bad for the environment.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Wireless Charging is a real deal breaker for me

Wireless charging is still horribly inefficient and incredibly bad for the environment.

Predictably, there always someone ready to trot out old misinformation as hysterically as possible.

Modern Qi is almost certainly not as inefficient as you think it is since most people's opinion on this subject tends to be based on outdated information collected while testing original implementations from many years ago. Current implementations of Qi charging are now up to 80% efficiency of cable charging.

As for "incredibly bad for the environment" there are a number of reasons why that also isn't true, not least the reduced need for multiple wall warts (with associated reductions in waste electricity and materials) as a single Qi pad can charge multiple devices.

And at the end of the day, if you don't want to use wireless charging (because it kills kittens, or whatever) then nobody is forcing you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Wireless Charging is a real deal breaker for me

80% efficiency? That’s just plain awful. Technology for the sake of it, not for advancement.

[DavCrav]

Re: Wireless Charging is a real deal breaker for me

"80% efficiency? That’s just plain awful."

It's not 80% efficiency. It's that you lose 20% of the electricity compared with a charging cable, which is worse than 80% efficiency.

[Roland6]

Re: Wireless Charging is a real deal breaker for me

>Modern Qi is almost certainly not as inefficient as you think it is since most people's opinion on this subject tends to be based on outdated information collected while testing original implementations from many years ago. Current implementations of Qi charging are now up to 80% efficiency of cable charging.

Yes, but if you look at the implementation to get these efficiency levels you aren't using a mat, but a male-female plug of some description so that the coils in the phone are aligned properly with the coils in the charging pad...

[Anonymous Coward]

It has everything most normal people would want and costs £279

It has everything most normal people would want but costs £279

[Richard Tobin]

Not cheaper than Moto

"We'd recommend it over more expensive models, like the OnePlus Nord and Motorola's Moto G 5G Plus." But the Moto G 5G Plus is actually cheaper, at £249.99.

https://www.carphonewarehouse.com/motorola/moto-g-5g-plus.html#!colour=blue&capacity=64GB&dealType=sf

[Blackjack]

LCD vs AMOLED

Isn't AMOLED less lasting? As someone who tends to use Smartphones as long as possible I prefer LCD since I just don't see the point of switching Smartphones more than once every five years.

[Danny 14]

Re: LCD vs AMOLED

I gave a grandkid a 2015 galaxy note 3. Its in its 3rd battery and works just fine. That has an AMOLED screen and its as bright as it should be with no oddities.

They love it because its hacked to bits so they can fake gps pokemon go. It was an excellent phone and still runs well. SD slot, 3gb ram and replaceable battery. The downside is that it only runs for just over a day of good use hence why the grandkids got it.

[Anonymous Coward]

supply chain concerns

If I'm not mistaken the Realme is made by OPPO out of China and there are some concerns regarding supply chain issues.

CheckPoint did an article about several Android devices that had preinstalled malware that used virtualization to run apps to commit advertising fraud and what appeared to be the start of of botnet activity:

https://research.checkpoint.com/2018/rottensys-not-secure-wi-fi-service/

Another major concern is that several of these inexpensive Androids come with a preinstalled rootkit disquised as the firware update app that can install apps remotely using LUA scripts:

https://wuffs.org/blog/digitime-tech-fota-backdoors

Many third-party mobile antivirus engines are now able to detect if this rootkit is installed:

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/fc6fc94efd928eed68f6a5addfe57e183d8def134b4b6eacf72983693f300da8/detection

[cioldarai]

Re: supply chain concerns

First thing I looked up is where does BKK Electronics come from. Stopped reading at that point.

[Smirnov]

48MP sensor

"High megapixel counts are just a marketing gimmick designed to sway those who incorrectly believe that "more" is the same as "better". For starters, you almost never end up with a 48MP photo — and, for that matter, nor would you want to."

Nor can you take real 48MP photos. Because these Samsung sensors can't produce pictures at native resolution - a 48MP image taken with the S5KGM1ST sensor is always a 12MP picture, and if you select 48MP then all you get is that very same 12MP photo upscaled again to 48MP (which will look pretty much the same as the 12MP image but uses much more storage).

This is different to Sony's IMX582/682 sensors which can actually produce true native resolution photos and which can be found in some similarly priced competitor phones.

[Mike 137]

Re: 48MP sensor

"different to Sony's IMX582/682 sensors which can actually produce true native resolution photos"

Depends what's meant by "native resolution". With only one exception (the Foveon sensors) all these sensors use a Bayer matrix filter, so they basically use the output of four adjacent differentially filtered monochromatic photo sites to define a single (colour) image pixel. Lots of fancy math is performed to correct for edge effects and loss of detail, but for any Bayer n-photosite sensor you only get an n/4-photosite native image pixel count.

The Foveon sensors are unique in that they stack the R, G and B photo sites vertically, delivering an n-pixel native image from an n-photosite sensor without an external filter. Unfortunately they haven't gained significant market traction, partly because of marketing confusion over the relationship between pixel count and photosite count.

[Lord Elpuss]

Re: 48MP sensor

” Unfortunately they haven't gained significant market traction, partly because of marketing confusion over the relationship between pixel count and photosite count. ”

Plus the fact that despite the groundbreaking tech, the results weren’t markedly better in real terms than the ‘normal’ competition.

[fnusnu]

Which version of android does it come with and how many years of updates does it get?

I thought this was a technical website...

[Danny 14]

TBH i more care if the bootloader is locked and how easy it is to root and firmware flash with something else.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Is there going to be a lot of alternative systems out there? Not to mention the increased amount of root/custom detection available? Sure, it may be your phone, but it won't be your OS or apps, will it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Is there going to be a lot of alternative systems out there?

I have a 2016 (or so) phone that I bought for 70 quid 2nd hand (strictly speaking, 3rd hand, off online re-seller) and AD 2020 / 2021 it's great, really fantastic. BUT the bootloader is locked, so the phone's crippled (in many, daily, small and large but fucking annoying ways) Never mind the bye-bye to OS updates (including those "essential security ones", here's a finger - from your phone manufacturer to your phone user). Never mind the "bye-bye shitty software" hardbaked courtesy of "carefully selected business partners". If the bootloader were unlocked, as the phone is really good and those who use it are, generally, enthusiastic about it, it'd be a good incentive for people to produce mods. But locked means locked. Not that I find it strange - there's nil incentive for phone manufacturers and network providers to unlock the bootloader. In fact, there's a dis-incentive. With open bootloader, people would buy FEWER new handsets. Well, people buy fewer handsets anyway, but no business would knowingly deepen its fall. Also, there's this issue, often overlooked by the rooting enthusiasts, that unlocking a bootloader does compromise security, and promotes compromising security in general, and promotes learning how to compromise security. Many happy returns for the owners of the rooted phones, but some, sharply painful unhappy returns to those that get hacked by less scrupulous "tinkerers". Which business would want to be in the firing line for a mass lawsuit that, regardless of the result, would be costly, and cause reputational damage?

In the meantime... I think there's some drive in the EU towards making phones serviceable, and I think I heard it mentioned, some ideas to make the bootloader unlockable. That said, "ideas" v. lobbying - we know how it's going, and secondly, it might take the EU another 20 years to turn it into law, by which time the phones might have morphed into something much worse anyway...

[Anonymous Coward]

TBH i more care if the bootloader is locked

TBH it would be highly unusual if it was unlocked. Not that this is important technical information worth mentioning, is it :(

[ibmalone]

As someone with an android enterprise device I can say that any such numbers wouldn't be worth the paper they were printed on anyway.

[Mage]

Spoiled

Stupid obsession with minimising length. Notches and holes in screens are STUPID.

Another asks:

"Is the battery removeable? No AFAIK but would like clarification

Headphone jack? yes FAIK, but again would be nice to confirm

Dual SIM ?

SD card slot?"

Or is battery easily replaced?

It's not a proper review.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Spoiled

I was going to berate the original poster of these questions for being a dim half wit that can’t do a bit of research for themselves. Then I found the realme website... How is it possible to get website design so wrong in this day and age?

[Nick Ryan]

Re: Spoiled

That's easy - employ clueless, talentless web "developers" who think that by kludging together multiple JavaScript libraries and seeing something render that they have a site. Nope, they have a JavaScript piece of bad SEO, accessibility failing nonsense. Decent web developers know the HTML first practice, then to enhance with minimal CSS and even less JavaScript. This leads to much less design and render issues, considerably less weirdo support issues and has the added bonus that at random times in the near future the site won't stop working or require breaking JS library updates due to all the security issues in them. KISS - always a good principle and always has been.

[DavCrav]

Re: Spoiled

"I was going to berate the original poster of these questions for being a dim half wit that can’t do a bit of research for themselves."

Isn't reading reviews of products on independent websites the type of research you would be expecting the OP to do? Like, for example, The Register?

[Xyra]

Honor 20 pro?

So how is this better than the Honor 20 pro is 20quid more (bought one for my wife at Christmas), wondering what is better here other than a marginal price difference. On the face of it the honor 20 pro seems a lot higher spec. Faster processor I think, 256GB storage, 8GB ram, spectacular camera. Still no wireless charging, also a IPS led screen and I know some people aren't keen on the Huawei/honor UI, but not sure what is actually worse on that phone?

[Peter X]

Does it have NFC?

[nautica]

A Tecnical Editor is sorely needed here.

...And then there is the Nokia 5.3, which puts this device to shame, in spite of this device's superficial--seemingly better (more memory; higher resolution)--specifications.

The "5.3" has a much better display, an 8-core processor, much better battery life, AND...

...-the Nokia 5.3 costs just $199.95 (£148), after a Christmas low of $160.00 (£118.50).

I'll take the Nokia 5.3, thank you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: A Tecnical Editor is sorely needed here.

The Nokia 5.3 has a 720x1600 (268 ppi) display, while the Realme 7 5G has 1080x2400 (405 ppi).

So no, the Nokia does not have a "much better display", unless you don't care about visual detail. The Nokia actually has a significantly lower resolution display, which - along with the lower 4000 mAh capacity battery, half the flash storage and lower resolution cameras front & back - explains the lower price.

And, for the record, both devices have 8 core CPUs.

That's not to say the Nokia 5.3 is not a nice phone for the price, but as a display device it is severely lacking in 2020/2021.

[Richard Tobin]

Re: A Tecnical Editor is sorely needed here.

I'm very doubtful that most people can tell the difference once the resolution is over about 200ppi. Things like contrast and colour gamut are much more important. Just being able to read the display in bright sunlight would outweigh any amount of resultion for me.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad you think so many reg readers spend so much on their children at Christmas. My children are obvioulsy deprived with their second hand Galaxy S8 and iPhone 8 they had for Christmas 2019.

[Roland6]

5G - So what?

Given the status of 5G and the expected extent of rollout achievable in the next 5~10 years, I don't see the point of rushing out to buy a phone carrying the '5G' marketing tag.

"the Realme 7 5G sits in a price band that historically housed slow, feature-crippled phones with awful cameras."

Clearly not been in the market for a mid-priced phone some years, with technology getting cheaper and trickle-down etc. that's not been the case for some years now - unless you've been wedded to manufacturers who like to charge a premium for their name and thus want you to purchase their £flagships...

Now take a look at the circa £279 price point, or even the £200 price point - eg. Huawei P30 Lite New Edition...

[Drew Scriver]

The phone you REALLY should have bought your kids for Christmas... is one they can eat

The phone you REALLY should have bought your kids for Christmas is the one from the candy store. Just a chunk of milk chocolate wrapped in tin foil with buttons and a screen printed on it.

No monthly fees, no text-neck, no anti-social behavior (other than refusing to share the chocolate), no issues with Snapchat, Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram, or stupid games.

On the negative side, they may increase their attention span, have real conversations at home, learn independence, read an actual book, play an actual board game, build something tangible, cook a meal, or learn to move about without an instant parental safety net.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The phone you REALLY should have bought your kids for Christmas... is one they can eat

Thanks Grandad.

Real life is considerably different from when you were a child.

If you were their age, you would behave exactly the same as them. Unless you wanted to be treated like a leper.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The phone you REALLY should have bought your kids for Christmas... is one they can eat

...Or you may end up getting a visit from Child Protective Services when the kid goes the other way and tears down parts of your domicile in a tantrum...