Realme Narzo 50 Review: A Capable 4G phone under 16K?

Realme Narzo 50 Review Summary

Editor’s Rating- 3.5/5

Realme has made a new addition to its Narzo Series in February 2022 with the launch of Realme Narzo 50 in India. The smartphone comes with a Helios G96 processor, up to 6GB RAM, and a 5000mAh battery. It has come in a race car-inspired design and color variants are thus named Speed Blue and Speed Black. It falls in highly competitive under Rs 20,000 segment. Can the Narzo 50 become a default recommendation for under Rs 20K buyers? Let’s find out in our review.

Specs | Price & Availability | Unboxing | Design | Display | Battery | Performance | Camera | Verdict

Realme Narzo 50 Unboxing

The Realme Narzo 50 comes in a sky blue cardboard box. The box contains-

• Narzo 50 handset
• USB Cable
• SIM card tool
• Screen Protect Film
• Quick Guide
• Warranty card and other product info
• 11V3A/5V2A Adapter

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Realme Narzo 50 Review: Design

Realme has been trying out different textures and patterns with their number and Narzo series phones. While the recently launched number series phone –  Realme 9 Pro+ comes with sparkly & shines back, the Realme Narzo 50 gets to flaunt a Kevlar Speed Texture Design.

While holding it in my hand, it reminded me of the OnePlus 6 Marvel limited edition phone. The texture pattern on the Realme Narzo 50 is quite similar to one OnePlus phone. Well, at that time OnePlus presented it as inspired by Marvel’s Avengers, while Realme is claiming its Narzo phone back is inspired by race cars. Nonetheless, the back panel of the phone does texture at the center with a smooth finish on its left and right sides.

The variant I received was Speed Blue in color and I loved the shade. The right edge of the phone has a power button while on the left side there’s a volume rocker and a SIM card tray. The back has a rectangular module housing a triple camera setup and an LED flash while the front has a selfie camera lens at the top left corner.

The bottom has a headphone jack, speaker grille, and charging port, while the top side is left clean. The smartphone weighs 194 grams and feels ok in hand though I still wish dimensions could have been kept a little more compact.

Realme Narzo 50 Review: Display

The smartphone has a 6.6-inch Full HD LCD panel with a 120Hz refresh rate and 180Hz touch sampling rate. It comes with 480 nits peak brightness, 2412×1080 resolution, 90.8% screen-to-body ratio, and 401PPI. At first look, the display seemed bright and vibrant.

The touch was very responsive and switching between apps is ok as I haven’t tested any game on it till now. In my limited time with the phone, I have only managed to watch limited content on its screen. Among a handful of things, I also saw the trailer of Doctor Strange’s Multiverse of Madness and what I could see was a vibrant picture quality with lifelike colors.

Realme Narzo 50 Review: Battery

Realme Narzo 50 packs a 5000mAh battery and is paired with a 33W fast charger. When charging, the smartphone took about an hour to recharge to 100% which is long but manageable. Battery saver options like power saving mode, sleep optimization, app freezer also helped save battery.

For a person with moderate usage, the battery lasts for a day and a half. If you are a heavy user, you will have to charge it once a day.

Realme Narzo 50 Review: Performance

Like most Realme smartphones, the Narzo 50 too comes running on the Realme UI 3.0 based on Android 12. The latest version of Realme custom skin has noticeable improvements all along. It is much more fluid with a handful of customization options. It has that privacy indication that Google introduced with Android 12. The new UI 3.0 comes with fluid space design, UI Personalization, smoother animations, always-on-display, more privacy features. All these make Realme UI 3.0 a very seamless experience.

Although there is bloatware on the device the good news is that it can be removed if you don’t want it. The bloatware includes some apps like Facebook, Josh, Dailyhunt, Moj, Snapchat, PhonePe, LinkedIn, Amazon, and some apps from realme itself.

Realme Narzo 50 has a single bottom-firing speaker which gives ok sound quality. Dual speakers would have been a better choice and also upgrading normal speakers to stereo speakers is the need of the hour. The signal quality on Narzo 50 doesn’t disappoint even if you are in a low network zone.

Hardware-wise, the Realme Narzo series phones have always been pitched as performance-centric devices. Realme once again followed the same template by offering Mediatek Helios G96 octa-core processor which we witnessed in Realme 8i. The chipset is fabricated using a 12-nanometer node. It has two Cortex A76 cores performance cores clocked at 2.05Ghz and 6 Cortex A55 cores efficiency cores ticking at 2.00GHz.

Since we have experienced the Helio G96 SoC in the past, we knew what to expect even before we started using the Narzo 50. As expected performance isn’t an issue here. I was able to run several apps without any hiccup.

The smartphone has a Gaming Mode too which allows you to choose styles and notification settings for your games. Games ran smoothly on the device without any lags of phone warming up. Games like BGMI run well on default graphics settings.

The combination of Helio G96 and Realme UI 3.0 worked well and here are the results of some benchmark tests I ran. These include Geekbench 5, 3D Mark, Throttle test, and Gfx bench.

Overall, the Performance of Narzo 50 can be called decent as it performs daily tasks well. These include attending calls, browsing videos, accessing the internet, and even gaming.

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Realme Narzo 50 Review: Camera

The Narzo 50 comes with a triple camera setup on the rear. It has a 50MP primary lens with a large area and an f/1.8 aperture along with 4x zoom. In addition, it has a 2MP macro as well as a B&W lens too for more photography options. There is a selfie camera too at the front. It can record videos of up to 1080p at 30fps.

The camera setup comes with features like Portrait mode, AI scene enhancement, Pro expert mode, ultra macro, and so on. Daylight pictures that I clicked using the Narzo 50 camera turned impressive even under harsh sunlight. What impressed me the most is its Portrait mode as it gives detailed photos (close-up shots). Night mode is strictly average and might work for only casual users. Here are some camera samples I took.

The overall camera setup is decent especially because the colors in photographs clicked by Narzo 50 are vibrant and look fresh. Pictures of flowers show how the colors are popping out to give a vivid portrait.

The 16MP selfie camera does its job well too. Clicking selfies in sunlight is a problem as the face doesn’t seem to be visible many a times, but I did not face this issue with Narzo 50’s selfie camera. I clicked these selfies in bright sunlight and they came out to be as clear as water.

The only major drawback I felt in the camera department was that Realme could have given one ultrawide sensor instead of giving two 2MP lenses. Ultrawide lenses come in handy when you need a larger field of view and with Narzo 50 this was not possible.

Review Verdict: Should you buy Realme Narzo 50?

The Realme Narzo 50 seems to have solid features for a smartphone that comes for Rs. 12,999. The design is decent, the feel in hand is ok, the processor is powerful, the battery is strong and it comes with a high refresh rate screen. The camera performance is strictly average and it doesn’t have good sound quality, but the device gives a decent gaming experience. It has Dynamic RAM expansion too which is mostly found in higher-budget phones.  So if you are not someone who needs a Pro level camera and 5G connectivity, Realme Narzo 50 can be a smart buy for budget consumers.