Realme GT 2 Pro Review: A Fabulous Flagship Under Rs 50,000

Realme as a smartphone brand has grown from strength to strength since its inception. One of the prime reasons for its tremendous growth is its conscious effort to offer value for money products for the masses where it packs newsworthy innards while cutting costs in aspects that are not as prominent. This has helped Realme to win the hearts of value-conscious buyers.

In the recent few quarters, Realme has also started eyeing higher-margin flagship space. It announced Realme X50 Pro 5G in 2020 followed by the announcement of the Realme GT 5G launch in India in 2021. Now, the company has launched its 2022 flagship – the Realme GT 2 Pro in the country. The GT 2 Pro is Realme’s most premium smartphone to date costing less than 50K. Does it have enough to complete in the big boys league? Should you consider the Realme GT 2 Pro as your next phone? Let’s find out:

Realme GT 2 Pro Review: Design

• Polycarbonate and glass built
• Paper inspired design
• Gorilla Glass Victus protection

Realme as a brand has been making some bold design choices for a few years and it has done it once again. After offering Realme GT 5G with vegan leatherback, the company has come up with Realme GT 2 Pro in Paper White and Paper Green finishes. Designed by Japanese industrial designer Naoto Fukasawa, the rear panel of the GT 2 Pro is made of bio-polymer material which is basically plastic but with a 35.5% lesser carbon footprint. The textured rear panel looks and feels great. Though, maintaining that white colour will be a task, especially in Indian summer.

Two more things will catch your attention. The camera module and branding are placed right next to each other in the top half. The triple camera setup juts out marginally but the bundled cover can even out the hump. Realme and the Japanese designer Naoto Fukasava both get their branding on the top right corner.

The side rail of the phone is made of anodized aluminium which ensures it has the rigidity to withstand any mishandling. The power button sits on the right edge while the volume rocker sits on the left edge. These buttons feel firm and tactile offering good feedback. A dual SIM card slot, USB Type-C port, speaker grille, and microphone are placed at the bottom of the phone.

Build quality-wise, the Realme GT 2 Pro feels like a solid device. With a polycarbonate back, it won’t be a smudge magnet like glass back phones. Also comparatively, it will be less prone to damage.

What about the water resistance? Does the Realme GT 2 Pro has an IP rating? Well, officially it doesn’t carry an IP rating but folks at Realme assure me that the phone has been cascaded internally to prevent accidental splashes causing any damage. Realme has opted for class-leading Corning Gorilla Glass Victus for screen protection along with a screen guard to ensure you don’t have to worry about display scratches.

Overall, I am quite content with the effort put in by Realme to offer distinctive designs when everyone else is going nuts over gradients.

Realme GT 2 Pro review: Display and Sound

• 120Hz LTPO AMOLED display
• 1000Hz Touch sampling rate
• Stereo speakers

Realme upped its game by a couple of notches here, The GT 2 Pro offers the best display in its class. It comes with a 6.7-inch Samsung-made LTPOP 2.0 AMOLED panel with 2K resolution and 120Hz refresh rate. Since it’s an LTPO panel, the GT 2 Pro is able to offer adaptive refresh where the refresh rate is adjusted between 1Hz to 120Hz according to the content on screen.

The Realme GT 2 Pro has a 1000Hz touch sampling rate offering a snappy response time to every tap or touch, or swipe. The OLED screen source from Samsung is clearly the best display we have seen in a Realme phone. It delivers exceptional contrast levels and vivid colors. If you prefer natural colors, there is a screen color mode where there is Vivid, Natural, and Pro mode, where Vivid covers the DCI P3 gamut offering rich colors. If you prefer true-to-life colors, Natural Profile fits your bill perfectly. There is also a Natural Tone display option that adjusts color tones according to the surrounding ambience.

If you are worried about peak brightness, based on my experience with the phone, sunlight legibility is not an area of concern. Just like the Realme 9 Pro (review) this one also gets an in-display fingerprint sensor with a heart rate measurement feature.

Coming to the audio capabilities of the phone, the Realme GT 2 Pro gets a stereo speaker setup by pairing the bottom-firing speaker and earpiece together. The speakers used here are fairly loud but they fall short if you compare them with more premium flagships. The sound produced by speakers here is tiny but it delivers clear vocals but highs feel a little distorted on high volumes. The mid-tones and lows are usually suppressed.

Realme GT 2 Pro review: Performance and Software

• Powerful Snapdragon 8 Gen 1
• UFS 3.1 storage and LPDDR5X RAM
• Android 12 based Realme UI 3.0

Let’s discuss the software part first. The Realme GT 2 Pro comes running on Android 12 based Realme UI 3.0 out of the box. My initial experience with Realme UI 3.0 was a mixed bag. Well, it was fluid and performed well on most counts. Then why do I call my experience a mixed bag, you might be wondering. It’s because of junk apps that come pre-installed with the phone. Apps like Josh, Moj, Mx Takatak, Glance lock screen, PhonePe, Sloop cut, and Bookings ruin the impression that Realme manages to create with its design, display, and hardware. In my opinion, a phone that costs north of Rs 40,000 should offer a bloat-free experience to its users. Thankfully you can remove most of these bloatware apps.

Barring my issue with the bloatware, I found the Realme UI 3.0 feature-rich, smooth, and stable. Navigation gestures work well, and so does the one-hand operation mode. Realme has added Android 12 features like a privacy dashboard, Digital wellbeing, and a Material You accent color system.

Coming to the performance part, the Realme GT 2 Pro got onboard Qualcomm’s most powerful SoC to date – the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset. It’s a 4nm fabrication-based octa-core chipset following a tri-clusters design. In one cluster there is a high-performance Cortex-X2 core that runs at 3.0 GHz, while the second cluster includes a 3x Cortex-A710 performance core clocked at 2.5 GHz, and the third cluster includes 4x Cortex-A510 energy-efficient cores at 1.8 GHz for less tasking tasks. To handle the graphic load, Qualcomm pairs Adreno 730 GPU along with CPU.

In real life, the performance of the SD 8 Gen 1 driven phone offers flagship-level sustainable performance for an overextended session. The phone manages to handle everyday tasks without hiccups. Keen to find out about the gaming performance? Well, the Realme GT 2 Pro performs like a champ. In our testing, it delivered more consistent performance than its competitors like the OnePlus 10 Pro which also offers similar hardware. It seems the cooling system used by Realme is working in their favour. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is known to heat up often when pushed hard. Surprisingly, the Realme GT 2 Pro was able to handle 4K@60fps for more than 30 minutes which is no easy task for a smartphone. To give you a more holistic view, we also ran some synthetic benchmarks on the Realme GT 2 Pro, and here are the results:

Realme GT 2 Pro review: Camera

• Triple rear cameras
• 32MP selfie camera
• 8K video support

Optics-wise, the GT 2 Pro follows the standard template of packing three cameras at the back and one on the front. The rear setup includes a 50MP camera, a 50MP ultra-wide-angle camera, and a 3MP 40x microscopic lens. Upfront, there’s a 32MP camera for selfies.

The 50MP wide and ultra-wide cameras both pack a Sony IMX766 sensor which is one of the better sensors in the market. iQOO 9 is another phone which offers a 50MP+50MP setup. The primary sensor has Optical Image Stabilization which helps in better low-light photography and video performance.

The primary rear camera delivers excellent daylight images which can be comparable to other flagships. It captures good dynamic range, contrast levels, and sharpness. Indoors, we have noticed images become a little noisy but not bad by any means. It takes boosted colors in most settings making shots social media worthy.

The ultra-wide camera captures 150-degree shots that look good but somehow the shots are not as sharp as the main camera.

Both 50MP cameras deliver surprisingly good low-light photos. Images taken at night from both these cameras have a lot of details and have a good dynamic range.

Realme GT 2 Pro Review: Battery Life

• 5000mAh battery
• 65W SuperDart charge
• No wireless charging support

Realme packs a 5,000mAh battery inside the GT 2 Pro which gives excellent mileage. Based on my usage, I can confidently say it delivers more than a day’s mileage. If that’s not good enough, it ships with a 65W SuperDart Charge that can do 0 to 100 percent refill in just 30 minutes. The only thing that’s missing here is wireless charging support. Nonetheless, the 65W bundled wired charger does a fabulous job here.

Review verdict: Should you buy Realme GT 2 Pro?

After spending a couple of weeks with the phone, I can go out on a limb and say that it’s the best value for a money flagship smartphone in the market. It gets almost everything right. Yes, it has got the looks and tough build quality of a flagship. The gorgeous display makes everything look great. Performance-wise, it is at par with any other Android flagship in the market. A good set of cameras and a blazing fast charging speed are like cherry on top. What are the shortcomings?

Well, the biggest omission here is a telephoto lens which most people will prefer over a 3MP microscope. It also lacks wireless charging and IP rating.

Should you buy the Realme GT 2 Pro? Weighing the pros and cons, I wouldn’t shy away from recommending it.