The latest realme GT 6 flagship is so well-balanced that it’s not easy to find fault with it for any little things with reasoned criticism. The phone has fast and safe charging, a luxurious camera, a bright screen (with nuances), a huge amount of ROM/ RAM, but not everything is as smooth as it seems at first glance.
Content
| Technical characteristics | |
| Display | 6.78″ AMOLED LTPO |
| 2780×1264 450 ppi | |
| 120 Hz 1000-1600 nits | |
| Processor | Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 |
| Graphics | Adreno 735 |
| RAM | 16 GB |
| ROM | 512 GB UFS 4.0 |
| Communication | 5G / 4G LTE |
| Wi-Fi 6 | |
| Bluetooth 5.4 | |
| NFC | |
| IR port | |
| Interfaces | USB Type C 2.0 |
| Main camera | 50 MP Sony LYT-808, 1/1.4″ |
| 50 MP Samsung S5KJN5, 1/2.8 | |
| 8 MP Sony IMX355, 1/4″ | |
| Front camera | 32 MP Sony IMX615, 1/2.74″ |
| Housing material | Plastic |
| Protection against moisture | IP65 |
| Battery | 5500 mAh |
| Charging | 120 W |
| System | Android 14 realme UI |
| Dimensions | 162×75.1×8.65 mm |
| Weight | 199 grams |
As a flagship, the realme GT 6 has an unusual package because in addition to the smartphone, the box contains a 120 W charger, a USB Type C cable, a case, a paper clip, and paper documentation. The screen already has a protective film on it.
The charger is powerful and does not get too hot during the charging process. The bundled case is simple, thin, and obviously not premium, but such a gift will not hurt. Some flagships don’t come with a charger or cable at all, not to mention other accessories.
Visually, realme GT 6 does not stand out among dozens of other high-end Android smartphones. The front panel is covered with a curved waterfall screen, the front camera is in the center, and the bezels around the display are small.
The body is plastic and assembled in an exemplary manner. It does not feel as premium as an Apple iPhone or Samsung Galaxy S, but there are no complaints about the build quality.
The surface gets dirty quickly, collecting fingerprints. The camera unit protrudes, like any flagship. Due to the offset position of the cameras, the phone wobbles on the table when you put the screen up.
Near the camera unit is a mirror surface that allows you to take selfies with the main module. A very clever engineering solution, and it looks good. The case is slippery, the dimensions are large, and the thickness is not the smallest.
The bottom has a speaker, a microphone, a SIM card slot, and a classic USB Type C 2.0 connector. This means that you can’t display images on monitors, and the data transfer speed to a computer is within 40 MB/s.
The right side has a lock button, and above it is the volume key. The left side is «clean», without any connectors or buttons. The top panel has a speaker and an infrared port for controlling household appliances. Fingerprint scanner under the screen, in case the smartphone for some reason refuses to recognize faces in the dark.
The realme GT 6 smartphone has an AMOLED matrix with rounded edges. The screen resolution is 2780×1264, which gives 450 pixels per inch. The refresh rate is up to 120 Hz, and the brightness, as the manufacturer writes on the box, is «6000 nits».
In fact, this is an absolute lie because the colorimeter recorded 600–650 nits on white with maximum brightness, which is 10 times less than the nonsense of marketers. realme GT 6 also has an extreme brightness mode that allows you to raise the indicator to 900 nits.
This is more than enough for comfortable use in the sun, but after tests with professional equipment, a negative mark remains. It seems that a large manufacturer BBK wants to promote its flagship product like cunning sellers of Flash drives on Aliexpress with a capacity of «512 GB», where in fact 32 GB is at best.
In addition to high brightness, the screen has good color reproduction, but by default, the settings are set to «bright». It distorts the color palette, so we immediately change it to «natural». In general, the display can be praised, although there is one serious caveat.
Many AMOLED matrices suffer from poor viewing angles, especially in white. The screen of the realme GT 6 shows a pure white color, but at an angle it turns sharply green. From the side, bottom, top — from different angles, light colors give off green tones.
The system interface works smoothly with a frequency of up to 120 Hz, but sometimes there are software microfreezes related to system optimization. The minimum brightness was a pleasant surprise because it is lower than in many OLED flagships of previous years. This allows you to use the phone comfortably at night.
The smartphone is equipped with three Sony cameras and one Samsung camera. The 50 MP Sony LYT-808, 1/1.4″ main module produces excellent pictures in different lighting conditions, and in addition there is a 50 MP Samsung S5KJN5, 1/2.8 telephoto lens and a wide 8 MP Sony IMX355, 1/4″.
The hero of the review, the realme GT 6, takes beautiful and very realistic pictures. Only the green shades are a bit oversaturated, too light, but no more so than those of competitors. It feels like the sharpness is overstated, but the detail is good. This smartphone maintains a balance between realistic photos and their compliance with Asian (brighter = better) standards.
While the main module takes pictures instantly and always with consistent quality, some pictures taken with the telephoto lens may be blurry if you move the camera away too quickly. This suggests that it is recommended to hold the device still for at least half a second after taking a photo with the x5 zoom. The result can be seen in a few of the blurry photos.
The selfie camera takes good pictures both at night and during the day. I especially liked the implementation of artificial blur — the portrait mode is worth praising because it works well not only on the front camera.
Despite the not-perfect blurring of the edges of the main object (if you look closely, you can see minimal defects), it works surprisingly well on the selfie camera. The main module takes much better photos, and we couldn’t fool it with a tricky test with a mirror surface.
Most smartphones get lost when you try to take a picture of the Motorola Moto Z3 on a sunny day. As a result, the edges are blurred incorrectly and some parts of the screen are smeared, but not in this case.
Unlike other BBK smartphones (OPPO Reno12 Pro and realme GT 6T), the reviewer made no mistakes. The owner of the realme GT 6 is guaranteed not to be disappointed with the quality of photos for social media and beyond.
The wide lens is great for landscapes during the day, but it’s better not to use it at night – the photos lack detail, as if they were taken on a budget smartphone rather than a flagship.
The main lens shoots well at night, and the algorithms aggressively brighten the image, sometimes too much. The almost black sky turns light blue, and 10 p.m. of a poorly lit city turns into 7 p.m., relatively speaking.
While in terms of photography, the realme GT 6 is a worthy competitor to Apple smartphones, the video shooting is not so clear. During the day, the quality is excellent, only a little better stabilization is missing. If you hold the smartphone steady or use a tripod, the videos are great.
At night, the realme GT 6 shoots terribly if you move even a little. We hold the smartphone steady and the static video is not so bad, but when you move the Ultra HD 4K video turns into mush. In such conditions, the hero of the review can only compete with the Apple iPhone 2015-2016, unfortunately.
The realme GT 6 is powered by the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 processor. This is a simplified modification of the flagship chip. It is also interesting that the Chinese version of the realme GT 6 has a full-fledged Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and costs less for the China than the GT 6 in Ukraine.
The comprehensive Geekbenh 6 benchmark shows a slight gap between the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 and the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3, which is in the younger version of the realme GT 6T. We managed to get almost 5000 points, which is not bad, but it’s far from the most powerful Android flagships, not to mention Bionic processors.
Web applications work at a satisfactory speed. Lightweight and optimized mobile versions of websites open with lightning speed, but if there is a lot of content on the page, scrolling is no longer as smooth. The result of 6.6 points in Speedometer 3.0 is not surprising because in current Apple iPhones this figure is four times higher thanks to the Safari browser.
Not the best processor performance affects stability. The realme GT 6 smartphone was tested in stress tests when it was summer heat outside and in the room, so you can see a twofold drop in performance in the throttling test, but only after 17 minutes of full load.
In cooler conditions, there will be no such failures, and in real-world scenarios, the processor is rarely loaded to its full capacity. Worse results were expected, so the trotting test was not failed, but passed with a B-minus. The phone body heats up to 45 °C.
The RAM is as much as 16 GB, which is enough for everything, and at the same time. You can run a dozen programs, several video games, and nothing will reboot, though for a while. Sometimes it happens that some program «crashes» from the RAM overnight, but this is the nuances of the operating system, not the fault of the hardware.
The 512 GB drive is UFS 4.0, with a read speed of 1800+ MB/s and a write speed of 1600 MB/s, but this is provided that another 370 GB is available. As the memory fills up, the speed will decrease. There is no support for micro SD cards, which has already become the norm for high-end smartphones.
There are no complaints about the quality of the realme GT 6 connection. Wi-Fi and 4G are as good as an average smartphone, so there’s nothing to praise or find fault with.
Any video game is within the power of such a productive chip. No wonder the realme GT 6 can handle the most demanding projects. In Genshin Impact, there is no stable 60 FPS all the time — the smartphone heats up and the frame rate drops from 60 to 40.
Call of Duty Warzone and Fortnite are also enjoyable and easy to play, and with a smooth picture, we also get an advantage over opponents who play at 20-30 FPS. The only problem is the poor version of Warzone for Android because the resolution is very low, like 480p, although the graphics settings are maximized.
Other mobile games work all the more easily with such powerful hardware. That is, games on the realme GT 6 work well, or very well. The smartphone does not position itself as a gaming solution, but rather a universal solution for a little bit of everything, but with such a large amount of storage and a powerful processor, it can interest mobile gamers.
The smartphone runs on Android 14 with the proprietary realme UI interface. The firmware is the same as that of other BBK smartphones, including the branded app store and other branded features.
For example, there is a proprietary overlay for gamers to display game statistics, the ability to clone programs, built-in utilities, and more. You can download programs from the Play Market or App Market. Surprisingly, there were no advertising offers in the main menu.
The system is heavier than pure Android, but has a lot of useful software. No serious bugs or problems were found during testing. It’s still hard to say how long the manufacturer will send updates for the realme GT 6 because it updates its smartphone series very often.
The only caveat concerns the inaccurate display of the charge level. The fact is that after reaching 100%, the realme GT 6 takes a long time to charge, and it takes almost 40 minutes of active use to discharge it from 100% to 98%.
The main feature of realme GT series smartphones is fast charging. The hero of the review comes with a 120W charger out of the box. Unlike the brightness of the screen, the manufacturer did not lie here — the realme GT 6 is charged with a power of 120 watts, but with one caveat.
The charging speed is highly dependent on the temperature of the device. After prolonged stress tests, the realme GT 6 heated up, so a completely discharged smartphone received 70-80 watts at the beginning of the process, and if you turn on the screen, the power drops even more.
The algorithms prevent «from pushing» energy into the battery too quickly to avoid overheating it. This preserves its health. If the phone is cold, the wattmeter shows 100-115 watts for the first few minutes, and then the power drops to 40-60 watts. The power supply heated up to 50 °C, and the smartphone itself in stress tests up to 45 °C.
From 2% to 100%, the realme GT 6 charged in 24 minutes, and it took 15 minutes to reach 71%, but there is one caveat. After a seemingly full 100% battery, the smartphone continued to consume 20+ watts from the power supply, meaning that the process was not complete.
The realme GT 6 took at least another 6-8 minutes to charge in such conditions. Perhaps this was done on purpose to show beautiful numbers, saying that the smartphone charges in 20 minutes, not 28-30. Pure marketing, just like «6000 nits» brightness.
The 5500 mAh battery allows you to play Genshin Impact with a high level of screen brightness (it decreases slightly if you play for a long time, it will not be maximum) for 5 hours and 15 minutes.
The PC Mark 10 test showed 10 hours 7 minutes with maximum brightness, 15 hours 49 minutes with 50% brightness, and 17 hours 53 minutes with the minimum level of screen backlighting. Thanks to the additional 500 mAh, the battery life was good in most usage scenarios, although in games the GT 6 holds 30% weaker than the OPPO Reno 12 Pro.
Flagship devices are always a pleasure to use, so there were a minimum of negative moments during the testing of the realme GT 6. If you put aside the poor video recording at night, the camera of the review hero is quite good.
After pure Android, it was interesting to use the branded features provided by BBK smartphone firmware, and I also liked the option of an infrared remote control.
Despite the plastic body, the realme GT 6 feels good to hold, and the glass surface on the back brings you back to the days of button phones, where you always put a selfie mirror near the camera module.
It is not surprising that Chinese manufacturers are pushing out European and American ones, as they have long learned to make high-quality flagships that are strong competitors to the Korean giant. If the cost of the realme GT 6 were even lower, it would be one of the best Android smartphones on the market for the money.
Would I trade in my Moto Z3 for the realme GT 6? Despite the technical advantages of the new device, no. Heavy weight, thicker thickness, amateurish design, high cost, and strong white color greening at an angle are enough arguments for me to ignore the GT 6, although the smartphone itself is very successful/
Legal realme GT 6 is not yet sold in Ukraine in the 16/512 GB version. There are three versions available: 8/256 GB, 12/256 GB and 16/512 GB. For the latter (like the one in the review), you’ll have to pay from 31,000 to 35,000 hryvnias.
But it is officially on sale realme GT 6 12/256 GB for 23,000 UAH. We will compare competitors with this version, because it looks much more favorable than the top version in terms of the review, and it is also easier to buy, officially or unofficially.
Despite the large amount of memory, it’s still a lot because the GT 6 has climbed into the territory of Apple, Samsung, and Google with its price, so it has plenty of competition from AAA brands.
The bestseller Apple iPhone 13 has a compact size and better video recording, but the amount of ROM is much smaller for the same money.
Samsung Galaxy S23 offers IP 68 protection in a compact body, although the memory is noticeably smaller.
Google Pixel 8 – is an exemplary Android smartphone for fans of a clean shell. Mediocre processor, high-quality camera, slow charging, great screen.
Motorola Edge 50 Pro – is a distant competitor to the realme GT 6 with a huge storage capacity. For the 12/512 GB model.
