realme C3 review

Since launching in the Australian marketplace last year, BKK Electronics brand realme has taken a position of chasing budget buyers aggressively with colourful phones that match up specifications that generally overshoot expectations.

Its latest handset, the realme C3, uses a curious mix of some parts that are exceptional for its price bracket, along with others that are a touch behind the curve or that simply don't work quite as well as you might think. It's still a very good value phone within its price point, however.

Design

Design

• 6.52-inch display
• Only 720p quality
• Headphone jack

• Read more about the realme C3's design

  One of realme's calling cards for its phones, despite the focus on low cost, has been its colourful designs, and the realme C3 is no different in this respect. My review sample was the "Blazing Red" model, but realme also sells a "Frozen Blue" variant. Before you get too excited, those are just marketing words, not a sign of a potential Disney+ tie-in promotion.

  Either way, they're both very bright and colourful phones that measure in at 164.4x75x8.95mm with a rear plastic chassis. On the plus side, the outer shell has a matte finish, which gives it a small amount of grip compared to a glass-backed phone, but it also can't help but feel a little bit cheap when you pick it up. It's one of the compromises of a lower-cost model that often comes with the territory.

  At the front, there's a 6.52-inch display with a simple teardrop notch, which is reasonably large for a phone in this price category. The downside here is that it has a 720x1600 resolution and a 720p display – somewhat low resolution in an era when we're all addicted to watching videos on our phones.

  Controls on the realme C3 are simple enough, with a right-hand-side power button, left-hand-side volume controls and a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor that sits to the right of the camera array. There's a pretty noticeable camera bump in play, so the realme C3 will never sit quite flush on a table when it's placed down.

Camera

Camera

• Triple lens array isn't as exciting as it seems
• Very slow software shutter response

• See sample photos and read more about the realme C3's camera

  On paper, and in the technical specifications, the realme C3 seems like an impossible bargain, offering up a triple rear camera array on a phone that costs under $300, which is almost unheard of. There's a primary 12MP lens, a secondary 2MP portrait lens and a tertiary 2MP macro lens to play with, along with a front-facing 5MP selfie camera.

  That should give the realme C3 a lot of photographic muscle, but the reality is somewhat different, and sadly a little bit disappointing. The focus isn't particularly quick on the primary lens, and, as is common with most dual-lens cameras with a portrait lens, you never shoot with that secondary lens, it's just there for depth effects, which often end up looking rather artificial anyway.

  While there's no optical zoom lens on the realme C3, the camera app does offer up 2x and 4x dedicated zoom buttons, but this is purely digital and predictably comes at the cost of clarity.

  Here's a sample park photo at a native 1x zoom resolution:

  

  The same framing at 2x zoom, with loss of detail already apparent:

  

  And then at 4x zoom, where everything is starting to look decidedly blocky:

  

  There is a dedicated mode for shooting with the macro lens, which is great at this price, but the results are often lacking in the finer details that you'd actually want from a true macro camera.

  The front-facing selfie camera can deliver reasonable shots, but by default, they're AI-enhanced with some very fake looking bokeh:

  

  None of these issues is particularly crippling for a budget phone, because if you want cracking visuals, you've at least got to step up into mid-range prices these days, but the realme C3 also has another problem. It's just plain slow at taking shots, and especially so if you prefer to use the software shutter button within realme's camera app. More than once, I totally missed a shot because the shutter button simply wouldn't take a photo when I pressed the button.

  You can get past this problem via the age-old method of using the volume buttons as the shutter, but the arrangement of the volume and power buttons on opposite sides can make it difficult. I often found that in setting up my shot and holding the realme C3 horizontally, I'd nudge the power button, switching the screen off as I went. There's no fast shortcut to the camera via a quick double-tap of the power button, so you've then got to unlock the phone to get back to the camera and start all over again. If you're looking at a moving subject, you've just lost your photo.

  It's not that the realme C3 delivers terrible photos at the end of all that. At this price point, they're fine in good light, and you can have some fun with that macro lens. However, you do have to work a little harder to get those shots than I'd really like.

  realme C3 sample photos

  

  

  

  

  

Performance

Performance

• MediaTek Helio G70 isn't fast
• realmeOS can be kludgy
• NFC on board, but not tested

• View test results and read more about the realme C3's performance

  To keep the cost of the realme C3 down, realme has gone down the well-trodden path of using one of MediaTek's Helio processors. They're cheap, low-power processors that are absolutely built for the budget market. The realme C3 runs on a Helio G760 processor with 3GB of RAM and 64GB of onboard storage in the model sold in Australia, although the review sample that I tested with only had 32GB on board. It's probably worth keeping that in mind if you were looking at buying from a grey importer, because 32GB in 2020 simply isn't enough storage, even for a budget phone.

  In straight-up benchmark terms, the realme C3 appears to do very well indeed, but with a huge caveat over that actual performance number. Here's how it compares using Geekbench 5's CPU test:

  And here's its performance running 3DMark's Slingshot Extreme test:

  So what's the caveat? It turns out that those figures might be horribly tainted by the way that MediaTek juices its processors specifically to maximise benchmark results. As Anandtech reports, select MediaTek processors and phones – and it specifically calls out the realme C3 among its findings – use a "sport" mode when a benchmark is detected, upping processor performance in a way that's not actually representative of real-world performance. That does rather sink the value proposition of using a benchmark as a comparative tool because you're no longer comparing real usage.

  The reality with the realme C3 is that it performed in the real world almost exactly as I'd expect a cheap MediaTek-based phone to do, which is to say that it can be very slow indeed under even moderate usage. Again, that's perhaps expected of a cheaper phone, but it's not something you'd expect given its benchmark results.

  When realme first launched its phones in Australia, they ran on Android overlaid with Oppo's ColorOS launcher. That's not as weird as it sounds when you understand that both realme and Oppo both share the same corporate parent, BKK Electronics.

  For its newer generation of phones, realme is trying to stake out its own identity with realme UI, which is a weird hybrid of ColorOS and some of its own UI tweaks, although most of these appear to be pretty cosmetic. While ColorOS shamelessly started life as an iOS homage, realme UI doesn't quite have that baggage, but it's still a bit of a distance from a plain Android OS. It is at least running Android 10, and during the review process, a couple of software updates did flow down to my test device, which bodes reasonably well for future updates. As always, if updates matter a lot to you, you should opt for an Android One phone.

  One feature not often seen in budget phones that will be present on Australian models of the realme C3 is NFC, which means that it will be compatible with Google Pay. My review sample didn't have NFC on board, so I wasn't able test its particular workings.

Battery life

Battery life

• 5,000mAh battery is great at this price

• View test results and read more about the realme C3's battery life

  Many cheaper phones skimp on battery capacity to keep the cost low, but this is one area where realme has provided the goods. The realme C3 has a 5,000mAh internal non-removable battery, putting it in some pretty elite company. The obvious competitor in this space is Motorola's Moto G7 Power, but that's far from a new phone these days.

  5,000mAh can easily enough run through a full day's work and then some, and it's an area where that lower-resolution 720p display will also help battery consumption stay low.

  Using our standard battery test, streaming a YouTube video at full brightness and moderate volume for an hour saw the realme C3 perform adequately well, maybe a little poorer than expected. That's especially true, as the current YouTube limitations around the COVID-19 pandemic meant I could only run the test at 480p rather than the 1080p that it would usually run at – or in the realme C3's case, 720p at best. Here's how it compares against a range of affordable handsets:

  Here, if MediaTek and/or realme are "cheating" the benchmarks, it really doesn't matter, because it's a real-world scenario where dialling down performance to save battery life is exactly what you'd want your smartphone to do.

  Day-to-day usage of the realme C3 certainly backed up its stamina, with plenty of power left at the end of any given day, and multi-day usage a real possibility for more moderate users. Charging is only via micro USB, which is a little dated, and Australian models of the phone should ship with a 10W charger. My review model had an international charger so I can't comment on charging speeds for the model that you'd be buying.

Verdict

Verdict

How we score our reviews

• Great battery life and a fair price

Should you buy it?

If you just ran a specification sheet comparison of the realme C3 versus other similarly priced handsets, it might seem like an absolute knockout of a phone.

It's not quite that, with a few rough edges that do take some of the shine off. Still, it's another very good phone in the realme stable, and a sign of how good even affordable phones are getting. If you have patience for its slightly slow performance and camera, it's a very good prospect.

Pricing and availability

Price

RRP: $269.00

Where to buy

Check price at eBay

Check price at Amazon

Alternatives

The realme C3 replaces the older realme C2 but that's a phone that would only be worth considering if you could find end-of-life stock at a significant discount.

Within the realme family, you could consider the realme 5, which only costs $30 more, comes with the same 5,000mAh battery and a quad-camera array.

In the wider phone space, you could go for a more pure Android experience with the Nokia 2.3 or you could find a similar large battery in the Motorola Moto G7 Power.

Specifications