realme’s latest number series phone—the realme 11—has been officially launched and it brings with it a new design and several updates that young, tech-savvy users will love.
We had a great first impression of the realme 11, but if you want to know our experience with this P13,999 phone after using it for several days, read on.
Design & construction
The realme 11 has a design reminiscent of its predecessor, the realme 10. But while it has a familiar form factor, the phone flaunts a few updates on the design that gives it a fresh look.
Take the Glory Gold variant, which has a similar glossy and textured appearance. realme changed it up by giving it an S-shaped reflective design. It looks more premium in this colorway and is an easy choice for stylish users. A more classic option is the Dark Glory variant.
We’re not a fan of the plastic rear and frame, but it’s also not a deal breaker given this phone’s price and other features. It still feels solid and looks chic.
Another big design change in the realme 11 is the circular camera module at the back. We’ve already seen this in the Pro and Pro Plus versions, but it’s an entirely different look if you’re coming from the realme 10 or other older series. Overall, we like this update on the realme 11. Although, we wish realme had stuck with having the camera housing at the center—like on the higher-level models—versus the realme 11’s upper left corner placement.
Other thoughtful designs that we appreciate here: the triple card slot and the availability of a 3.5mm jack.
Display & multimedia
The realme 11 features a 6.43-inch display with a Corning Gorilla Glass 5 protection. With a 1080 x 2400 FHD+ resolution and an AMOLED panel, images and videos come out great with vivid colors and enough details. The screen is also bright, so viewing content or reading text on this realme phone is not a problem even under extreme lighting conditions.
The display also features up to 90Hz refresh rate and 360Hz touch sampling rate, which we think is enough for users who want to use this for casual to mid-competitive gaming.
The single down-firing speaker is loud, but the quality is just average. There’s a tendency to accidentally cover it when watching on landscape mode. You are better off using headphones connected via Bluetooth or the audio jack.
Camera
One of the biggest selling points for the realme 11 is its rear camera—a combination of a 108MP main sensor and a 2MP depth lens.
As expected, the pictures taken with the main shooter come out nice and detailed outdoors or under good lighting. They are sharp and have good contrast. It does foreground-background separation smoothly, especially for the Portrait mode. At 3x zoom, the images are still good. Beyond that, you’ll see some decline in the image quality as expected.
The Street mode is our personal favorite. Aside from allowing you to shot in 24mm and 72mm settings, the available filters allow you to play with colors.
Low-light photos are a mixed bag. There are times that I found the images lacking in detail, while other times they come out decent. A big tip here: use the Night mode extensively when you don’t have enough light in the room or when shooting at night. The quality improves greatly when it is activated.
The 16-megapizel front camera is also decent. The beautification feature can be off-putting at default settings. Good thing that you can easily adjust it via the camera app.
Check out some of the photos we took using the realme 11’s main camera:
Performance
Powering the realme 11 is a 2.2GHz MediaTek Helio G99 paired with an ARM Mali-G57 MC2 GPU. It’s also equipped with 8GB DRE RAM, which can be increased to up to 16GB via Virtual RAM Expansion.
For basic and day-to-day use, the processor does its job well. We were able to watch videos, browse social media sites, and run several tasks simultaneously without any problem. This phone runs Android 13 with the realme UI 4.0 on top. There are several bloatware on start up, but you can easily uninstall these apps.
For gaming, it can run the usual titles like Asphalt 9 and Mobile Legends:Bang Bang smoothly at the highest graphics settings. We lowered some of the graphics quality for games like Genshin Impact and Call of Duty: Mobile. For more resource-intensive games, we suggest that you close other running apps for a better experience.
The realme 11 also offers a huge internal storage of 256GB out of the box. Thanks to the dedicated card slot, you can pop in up to a 1TB microSD card. Connectivity-wise, you’ll get the standard Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth 5.2, and GPS, among others. Sadly, there’s no 5G capabilities here.
Of course, we can’t forget about the battery and fast-charging capability of this phone. The large 5000mAh battery lasted us more than a day and a half of basic smartphone use. When we threw in hours-long binge-watching and gaming sessions in between, the battery life is up to around 10 hours in our experience. But it shouldn’t matter that much because the 67W fast-charging feature ensures that it won’t take you long to recharge. During our test, we were able to get the battery percentage from zero to 50 in under 20 minutes.
Speed says
Considering its sub-P15K price, the realme 11 already offers decent to great features, including a stylish design, a capable 108MP camera, and a huge and fast-charging battery. It shows good performance that allows users to be productive while enjoying activities like watching their favorite shows or playing popular games.
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