Realme C21Y Quick Review: First Impression

Realme C21Y is launched in the sub-₹10K price segment. There are two models with up to 4GB RAM plus 64GB storage. Both carry a 5000mAh battery, 13MP triple camera setup, a 6.5-inch display, a familiar but slightly tweaked design, and a Unisoc T610 chipset. Realme has been among the few companies that have partnered with Unisoc for this new chip. So, in the Realme C21Y review, we will be seeing how the processor fares against its competition and generally how good the phone is for its asking price.

For now, after using the device for the past 24 hours, here’s what I feel about it.

Beginning with the box contents and specs —

These are my Realme C21Y first impressions —

Realme C21Y has got a rendition of the entry level phone design that we have seen several other recent phones including Realme’s own… The pattern is diamond cut with a two tone finish. The textured touch by the back offers nice grip and keeps smudges away.

The back also holds a triple camera setup within a square panel. Right next to it lies a well responsive fingerprint reader. Towards the lower left corner there is a Realme logo and the phone’s speaker grille.

By the bottom, there is a 3.5mm jack, a micro-USB socket and the microphone. There is only one mic hole and the absence of USB-C in a 2021 phone is a bit disconcerting.

Yeah so the top is plain. The right side has the power and volume keys. The left has got the SIM and SD card slot.

Flipping to the front.

Realme has attached a 6.5-inch panel with HD+ resolution. It is manageably bright outdoors. The bottom bezel is rather noticeable. The benefit is however better handling in landscape orientation.

Within the settings you get to tinker around the Dark Theme, Eye Comfort, Contrast and Colors, Timeout, Screensaver options.

Coming to the audio side of things, as aforementioned, there is a headphone and mic hole by the feet. A single microphone and the position of the speaker are downsides of a budget phone.

But, what about call quality, well…

Calls were loud and audible to me but not so much to the other person. This is ’cause of a single mic. So, you have to hold the bottom portion of the phone closer to the mouth. Rest, there are connectivity means like dual SIM, VoWiFi, VoLTE, GPS, WiFi, and Bluetooth 5.0.

Now let’s take a look at its internal machinery —

Realme C21Y ships with the Unisoc T610 processor which we last found within the Micromax In 2b. Unisoc, for the unversed, is a Chinese player who is trying to make inroads into the Indian market with entry-level 4G chips at first. As for T610, it’s based on a 12 nm fabrication and houses two Cortex A75 performance cores (running at up to 1.82GHz speed) and six Cortex A55 low-powered cores (also clocked at up to 1.82GHz). This setup boasts ARM’s DynamIQ technology gains in multi-core performance and energy efficiency.

The GPU is ARM’s Mali G52. Although I haven’t had time to extensively play, know that BGMI can run at up to HD Graphics and High FPS.

The internal hardware also consists of up to 4gigs of LPDDR4x RAM, 64GB of eMMC 5.1 storage, and a 5000mAh battery with a 10W micro-USB adapter. The software on top is Android 11 with a novel R Edition of Realme UI. This skin skews closer to AOSP ROM in the sense that the settings layout looks trimmed down and different from the regular Realme representation.

This should fare better on fewer resources.

Moving on…

Realme has stacked three sensors by the back led by a 13MP primary, a 2MP macro lens and a 2MP black-and-white lens. The front shooter meanwhile is a 5MP snapper. You get to record up to 1080P at 30 FPS from the back and up to 720P at 30 FPS from the front.

The camera app is quick to open and click photos. It includes features like Portrait, Macro, Night mode, Pro mode, Auto HDR, Slow-motion, Panorama, Time-lapse, and a Google Lens scanner. I look forward to test the prominent ones under varied settings.

I’ll be testing out all these before coming up with the full Realme C21Y camera review.

Anyways, it’s time for the —

Realme C21Y has got the basic ingredients of a budget centric smartphone like its big 5000mAh battery, large waterdrop notch display, essential connectivity options, and software smarts. The latter appears to be custom made for a phone of this nature. However, the new thing to take note is the Unisoc T610 chipset. Although we have experienced the performance out of this chip before, we will be putting it to test again. And we will also be back with the camera outputs, benchmark results, etc and see whether you should consider it under the 10K price bracket. So, keep an eye out for the Smartprix review of Realme C21Y, which will be here soon.