Realme 13 Pro+ review

Android 14, Realme UI 5.0, AI this and AI that

The Realme 13 Pro+ runs the current Android 14, augmented by the in-house Realme UI 5.0, which is practically identical to Oppo's ColorOS 14 and OnePlus' OxygenOS 14. The OS/UI numbers were the same on the 12 Pro+, and for the general operation, you can read the dedicated review of Realme UI 5.0 or have a look at the video below.

There's a bit more to it this time around though, with the Realme 13 Pro+'s build introducing a bunch of AI features. Two of them are system-wide and are closely intertwined - AI Screen Recognition and AI Smart Loop.

Realme UI: Homescreen • Quick settings • AI something or other

The screen recognition thing is sort of like Circle to Search. You long-press with two fingers (there are alternative gestures if you're not fond of this one), and the phone scans the information on the screen and highlights images and text for you to interact with. You can then save the text to the so-called File Dock, or long press on images to save or share them.

You can also choose to drag them to the side, where the AI Smart Loop engages. It's a carousel of pre-selected apps where you can drop the image or text for sharing or searching or whatnot - the app selection is customizable. Some apps have sub-actions to choose from - like on Instagram you can pick between your feed, story, or DM.

AI Screen Recognition • AI Smart Loop

Two more AI features can be found in the in-house Photos app - AI Eraser (that one goes by AI Smart Removal in some of the promo materials) and AI Ultra Clarity.

AI in the Photos app

Your mileage will inevitably vary depending on the subject but we did get reasonably good results with removing a flower bouquet from the back of a Vespa (not on the first try and in sort of ideal conditions) and with enhancing detail in long-distance zoom shots (text is kinda wonky, but foliage and facades do look improved).

AI Eraser (AI Smart Removal): Before • After | AI Ultra Clarity: Before • After

Benchmarks

Just like the previous model, the Realme 13 Pro+ has the Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 at its heart. The Qualcomm chipset is manufactured on a 4nm process and ranks a little higher than the SD 6 Gen 1, but it's not as powerful as the 7+ Gen 2 or even the original 7 Gen 1. For what it's worth, it offers a performance increase over the Dimensity 7050 inside the 11 Pro+, but that sounded like more of an upgrade when we reviewed the 12 Pro+ than it does now, a 'generation' later .

Either way, the Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 features an octa-core processor with 4 Cortex-A78 and 4 Cortex-A55 cores (up to 2.4GHz and 1.95GHz for the two clusters). There is no prime core here, and the performance core design is older (2020).

The SD7s Gen 2 uses Adreno 710 GPU, which premiered on the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 SoC. It is listed to support FHD+ resolution at 144 Hz.

The available memory configurations will vary by region. Our review unit is the top-spec 12GB/512GB version. The RAM type is LPDDR4X and the storage is UFS 3.1, and these should be the same across all tiers.

In benchmarks the 13 Pro+ unsurprisingly posts essentially identical numbers to the 12 Pro+ before it. It's roughly on par with the Motorola Edge 50 Fusion and the Redmi Note 13 Pro (both with the same chip) as well as the Galaxy A35 (Exynos 1380), while the Redmi Note 13 Pro+ (Dimensity 7200 Ultra) and the Galaxy A55 have notably more powerful GPUs.

We've discontinued GFXBench graphics benchmarking as the app is often banned/blacklisted on the phones we receive for review. The graphics performance ranking in 3D Mark is just as meaningful, so we suggest you refer to that one instead.

The Realme 13 Pro+ handles prolonged loads reasonably well. The CPU can apparently maintain at least around 70% of its maximum performance, spicing things up with occasional peaks in the 80s. The 3DMark Wild Life stress test, on the other hand, returned essentially unchanged results for all 20 consecutive runs.

CPU Throttling test • 3DMark Wild Life stress test