Realme X50 Pro 5G Review: Is this 5G smartphone the true flagship and worth buying?

Realme brings along the flavor of 5G with the X50 Pro.

Realme, the one manufacturer that gave all other manufacturers their run for the money with a handful of smartphones which provided very good specifications at a good price. Last year Realme X2 Pro was launched that established it as one of the top premium brands in the market.

It seems to carry all the features of its predecessor, the Realme X2 Pro and improves in certain areas. Now the brand has launched its first 5G smartphone in India with a flagship chipset of 2020 i.e. the Snapdragon 865, a good set of cameras, and much more.

OnePlus 7T, Samsung Galaxy S10 Lite has been around in this segment for quite a long time. So the Realme X50 Pro is aiming itself to establish as a perfect flagship and builts the 5G moniker and is all set to take the competition. Launched at a base price of Rs.37999, is the Realme X50 Pro 5G worth buying?

Let's head to the complete review.

Realme X50 Pro 5G Design:

The Realme X2 Pro had an aluminum-glass sandwich design and it's nothing different from the Realme X50 Pro. But in the Realme X50 Pro, this time at the back is the matte-finish which is seen on the OnePlus 7T. Both the front as well as the back are protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 5.

On the front, the screen is almost bezel-less providing a good screen to body ratio. This time instead of the teardrop notch, the Realme X50 Pro sports a dual punch-hole cutout for the cameras which is found on the POCO X2. The smartphone is curved to the sides making it easy to hold in hand.

Coming to the sides, the power button is placed to the right with a gold accent on it, and below lies the volume controls.

The earpiece combined with a secondary microphone is placed on top of the screen and at the bottom, there is a USB Type-C port, a loudspeaker grill, a primary microphone, and a dual SIM card slot.

On the back, you get the same camera layout which is seen on most Realme smartphones except its predecessor which had a camera layout in the center.

The back of the smartphone feels premium with the matte-finish and gives a solid grip while holding it. The camera hump is slightly felt but does not feel that much and at 207gms, the Realme X50 Pro feels slightly heavier due to the huge battery as Realme has packed in a 4200mAh battery inside which we will discuss in a later section.

But the disappointing factor is that at this price point, the smartphone lacks an IP rating but Realme has provided P2i coating which means it is splash-proof. Now the 3.5mm headphone jack has also been removed. The Realme X50 Pro is available in two colors - Moss Green and Rust Red.

Overall the Realme X50 Pro seems to look good and is built solid.

Realme X50 Pro 5G Display:

In terms of display, the Realme X50 Pro sports the same 6.44 inches Full HD+ AMOLED screen the same that we found on the Realme X2 Pro. This screen like its predecessor also supports the 90Hz refresh rate and you can select either 60Hz,90Hz, or Auto refresh in the settings.

  

As with an AMOLED, there are deep blacks and blues and the viewing angles are also good. There is a Gentle and Vivid mode to change the color temperature of the screen. Under the display, like its predecessor, the Realme X50 Pro gets an optical in-display fingerprint scanner which is fast and accurate. The face-unlock also works pretty well.

The display has support for HDR10+ content and also supports Widevine L1 to stream HD content from third-party applications. The 90Hz display makes scrolling and viewing the screen much easier and also helps in gaming.

Under direct sunlight, the screen is visible up to a good extent as the auto-brightness calibration has been done very well. During the night, the screen can go very low thus not putting a strain on your eyes but still, there are the reading modes and Blue light filter that works perfectly well.

The screen also has a DCI-P3 color gamut range so often the screen flickers which is most common with AMOLED displays. The display continues to be the strong point for the Realme X50 Pro with that 90Hz refresh rate.

Realme X50 Pro 5G Performance:

In terms of performance, the Realme X50 Pro is a beast as it sports the flagship Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 chipset which is powered in many flagships like the Iqoo3, Samsung Galaxy S20 series. It is the first smartphone to use this chipset. 

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 has an X55 Modem with it which ensures a 5G connection. So it supports the sub-6Ghz band and 5-millimeter wave for network connectivity.

This is the similar octa-core chipset that was seen on Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 but now the Prime core which is clocked at 2.84GHz has the newer Cortex A77 cores and similar to the other 3 cores which are clocked at 2.42GHz and have the Cortex A77 cores. The other 4 cores which are clocked at 1.78 GHz have the Cortex A55 cores remain similar.

However, with the newer Cortex A77 cores, the CPU performance has been increased to 25 percent, and similarly, on the GPU front, there is an Adreno 650 GPU which also receives a 25 percent increase.  It is built on the same 7nm fabrication process as its predecessor.

The Realme X50 Pro ships with 6/8/12GB LPDDR5 RAM which supports UFS 3.0 storage which is faster. However, the iqoo3 uses the slightly faster UFS 3.1 storage but there isn't much of a difference.

The Realme X50 Pro can handle all heavy games like PUBG Mobile, Asphalt 9 Extreme, Call of Duty very easily and the 90Hz refresh rate does come into the picture with games supporting higher refresh rate enabling smooth gaming.

Coming to benchmarks, like Antutu, the smartphone scored 592447 which is the highest in an Android smartphone to date. In Geekbench 5.1, the single-core score is 906, and the multi-score remains at 3205 which also very good for this smartphone.

Realme has also equipped the smartphone with a Vapor cooling system to dissipate heat while playing heavy games which is a good feature as seen in many smartphones nowadays.

Realme X50 Pro 5G Software:

The Realme X50 Pro runs the Realme UI out of the box built on top of Android 10. Last year all Realme smartphones had the ColorOS, so Realme has updated all of its smartphones to its own RealmeUI this year.

Like the ColorOS 7, you get a system-wide dark mode, and then there is the screen available called Screen Off which shows the clock, date, notifications, battery, and some more. It is almost similar to the Always-On display found in Samsung smartphones.

There are some very good features like Dual Music Mode Share, customized icon pack and the best of all is the smart sidebar option that lets users add shortcuts for actions and also favorite applications. The edge lighting is a good addition around the edges of the screen when a notification arises.

The RealmeUI's look almost resembles Stock Android and is a lot cleaner as compared to ColorOS. Even there is less bloatware as compared to the ColorOS as it had many unnecessary pre-installed applications. The experience is almost near to Stock Android. Then the app drawer is much cleaner and easy to use.

Overall the RealmeUI feels young and will surely give a very good appeal to the X50 Pro.

Realme X50 Pro 5G Camera:

The Realme X50 Pro sports the same camera setup as its predecessor which means it has the same 64MP main camera, an ultrawide, a telephoto, and a depth sensor.

• Primary camera: 64MP f/1.8 Samsung ISOCELL Bright GW1 sensor
• Ultrawide: 8MP f/2.2 with 119-degree field of view and can take macro shots.
• Telephoto: 12MP f/2.5 which can do 5x hybrid zoom and 20x optical zoom
• Depth camera: 2MP for portraits. 

The camera layout remains the same as its predecessor, the X2 Pro. The main camera by default saves all photos in the 16MP with crisp and clear detail. The contrast during the day is good and the dynamic range is also good, colors look natural and pop out well.

With the ChromaBoost, a feature found in the camera of all Realme smartphones, the X50 Pro tends to add more color into the picture which somehow looks good but seems to increase over sharpness in the photos. With HDR on, the photos come out pretty good. The dedicated 64MP mode also takes nice and clearer photos.

At night, the camera does struggle a little bit as the photos come out a bit noisy and the lack of OIS does hurt the camera. When switching to the night mode, things change drastically as the new NightScape 3.0 has better image processing where the colors look punchier and the level of details in the shadows improves.  

Switching to ultrawide, the 8MP sensor does a decent job of taking photos. The 119-degree field of view is good that helps in better dynamic range and the photos come out good and the colors look punchier. But there is some amount of noise and here smartphones like OnePlus 7T, Samsung Galaxy S10 Lite take much better photos with the ultrawide camera.

At night, the ultrawide camera takes good photos but there seems to be a lot of noise. With the NightScape turned on, it does improve the dynamic range but the level of details that you get from the main camera is simply not so good. The ultrawide camera can also take macro shots with a good amount of detail.

The 12MP telephoto camera takes really good photos with punchier colors, good dynamic range and since there is support for 5x hybrid zoom, the level of details come out nice and it can also go to 20x optical zoom where the photos do struggle with some noise and the quality of the photos does take a hit. However, this functionality seems to be a good addition.

2x zoom

At 10x zoom

Similarly during the night, with the Night Mode turned on, the telephoto camera takes brilliant shots but quite a bit of noise is present. Though this a flagship smartphone, there is no OIS which is a sore miss as many of its competitors like the OnePlus 7T, Samsung Galaxy S10 Lite has.

The 2MP depth sensor does a pretty good job of taking photos as the level of detail is good, skin tones are a little bit cooler and in some cases, there is a little bit of skin smoothening which isn't prominent much.

Coming to portraits, the subject separation from the surrounding works pretty well.

On the front, here the Realme X50 Pro gets dual cameras which include: 32MP f/2.5 main and an 8MP ultrawide camera for those wide selfies. The photos come out really good as the contrast and dynamic range works pretty well. 

The 8MP ultrawide camera additionally provides a good field of view and the selfies have very good color saturation. The beauty mode does enhance skin tones. 

You can also adjust the background blur by using the bokeh mode which is seen on most Realme smartphones.

The portraits come out excellent with good edge detection and proper separation of the human face from the surroundings.

Coming to videos, the Realme X50 Pro can capture 4k @ 60fps and 30fps as well. The lack of OIS hurts but the EIS helps it to achieve good stability. However, these video enhancements have been done extensively as there is the Ultra Steady and Ultra Steady Max modes present. 

These do add some stability to the videos as the videos have a good amount of details and the color in the videos doesn't look washed out. 

The video footage at 1080p comes out excellent with a wider dynamic range and much better stabilization. The colors look natural. 

Similarly, with the ultrawide and telephoto camera, the videos at 1080p come out good and at night, the videos take a hit due to lack of OIS which results in some loss in detail, and the photos look grainy a bit.

With the night mode, the videos do improve a little bit.

There are other modes like Hyper-Text, Slow-mo, etc. Another new feature that the Realme X50 Pro is that it can shoot Slow-Mo videos from the front camera. However, the video footage is restricted to 1080p from the front camera. 

On an overall basis, the Realme X50 Pro doesn't seem much of an improvement from the Realme X2 Pro in the camera department but some additions to the camera do make it an appealing one.

Realme X50 Pro 5G Battery life:

The Realme X50 Pro comes with a 4200mAh battery which is a good 200mAh capacity more than the Realme X2 Pro. The battery life on the smartphone is above average, not so exceptional as the 90Hz display and the X55 5G modem with the Snapdragon 865 consumes more battery. 

However, the smartphone can easily last for a day with normal browsing. heavy gaming like playing PUBG for two hours continuously with the display set to 90Hz.

With the display set to 60Hz, the screen on time is about 5.5-6 hours which is good compared to 4-4.5 hours when set to 90Hz. The smartphone can easily stretch up to one and a half days with normal usage and RealmeUI has a tone of battery optimizations to improve the performance with battery life.

Like the Realme X2 Pro, the Realme X50 Pro gets a 65W SuperDart Charging solution which is one of the fastest charging solutions in this price segment. The smartphone charges from 0 to 50 percent in the first 15 minutes which is very fast. The complete charge takes around 40 minutes from 0 to 100 percent which is quite fast.

This seems a little bit slower compared to the Realme X2 Pro but here the 65W charger charges 0 to 90 percent takes 30 minutes and then another 10 minutes, the charging becomes slightly slower and completely to 100 percent. This slow charging maintains the temperature of the battery.

The Realme X50 Pro also supports 18W USB PD charging and can also charge quickly using the 30W VOOC 4.0 Flash Charge.

Realme X50 Pro 5G Audio Quality:

The Realme X50 Pro sports dual stereo speakers i.e. earpiece on top of the smartphone and the loudspeaker at the bottom  The sound is very good and there is support for Dolby Atmos which enhances the sound quality. 

There is also a new feature called Dual Music Mode Share which enables the simultaneous use of two headphones at a time.

The biggest disappointment being the removal of the 3.5mm headphone jack in the Realme X50 Pro which isn't a big concern as most of the flagship smartphones have ditched the 3.5mm headphone jack.

Many wireless earphones and the Realme Earbuds are available in the market and you can pair either of them with the Realme X50 Pro.

Verdict:

Overall the Realme X50 Pro seems to be a good flagship smartphone with some very good specifications. It offers a good build & design and sports a 90Hz display which is amazing and supports the HDR10+ content thus providing an excellent display to use. The Snapdragon 865 chipset is the fastest and one of the best when it comes to gaming and overall performance.

All heavy games run smoothly on the smartphone. The 5G support makes it future-proof and it is the cheapest 5G smartphone in India. The great hardware is combined with a good-sized 4200mAh battery. Coming to charging, there is the 65W SuperDart charging which quickly charges the smartphone.

The cameras are on par with many flagships but there isn't seem to be much of an improvement from the Realme X2 Pro. The front camera takes very good portraits and selfies. However, the ultrawide camera lacks details, then the lack of OIS hurts during the night, though you have the new NightScape 3.0 mode.

Many of its rivals like the OnePlus 7T (Review), Samsung Galaxy S10 Lite have better low light performance compared to the Realme X50 Pro. In terms of the camera still, the Realme X50 Pro performs well. It does lack an IP rating but still, most of the smartphones lack this feature in this price segment.


The Realme X50 Pro is priced at Rs.37999 for the 6GB RAM and 128GB storage, Rs.39999 for the 8GB RAM, and 128GB storage, and Rs.44999 for the 12GB RAM and 256GB storage. (all variants come with UFS 3.0 storage) which seems to be priced well and makes it worth buying with the blend of 5G.