Realme 3 Pro review

The 6.3-inch display is not bad, not bad

The Realme 3 Pro is equipped with a 6.3-inch IPS LCD display with a waterdrop notch - by all accounts, it's looking like the same panel as on the Realme 2 Pro and the Oppo F9 before that. The resolution is 1080x2340px in a 19.5:9 aspect ratio making for a pixel density of 409ppi.

We measured a maximum brightness of just over 500nits on the Realme 3 Pro and with its deep blacks (for an LCD) contrast turned out very good too. The Realme 2 Pro and the Oppo F9 were apparently tuned to go an extra couple of dozen nits higher, but it's not a huge difference. The Redmi Note 7 is slightly dimmer than the Realme 3 Pro and the Honor 8X maxes out at even lower nits. The vivo V15 Pro isn't as bright as the Realme either, but its OLED display offers superior contrast due to the technology's inherent advantages.

Outdoor visibility isn't spectacular, and it isn't aided by the 3 Pro's general tendency to get all smudged up. If you wipe it clean, however, you'd be more than okay outside - we certainly had no problems framing our outdoor test shots.

Color reproduction is decent out of the box with lively if not super accurate colors. The grayscale swatches we measured against sRGB targets were all around a deltaE of 6 and visibly shifted towards blue in the default display mode, where the overall average deltaE is 4.6 with a 6.8 maximum.

We say display mode, but it's a slider that is set to the 'Default' middle position with 'Cooler' and 'Warmer' at the extremes. The coolest position makes things even worse with the already bluish whites, but setting it to the warmest yields better results (average deltaE of 3.2 and a maximum of 6.5, grayscale around 3). We measured the lowest shift of the grays around the position in the screenshot below, but it's only a marginal improvement over the warmest setting.

Display color settings

Realme 3 Pro battery life

The Realme 3 Pro is powered by a 4,045mAh battery because 4,000 flat would have been too mainstream. The Redmi Note 7 relies on a 4,000mAh power pack, while other potential competitors like the Honor 8X and vivo V15 Pro hover around the 3,700mAh mark.

In out testing, the Realme 3 Pro clocked an excellent 15 full hours of video playback and close to 14 hours of browsing the web over Wi-Fi. We also measured more than 30 hours of 3G voice calls. The overall Endurance rating worked out to 92 hours.

Our battery tests were automated thanks to SmartViser, using its viSer App. The endurance rating above denotes how long a single battery charge will last you if you use the Realme 3 Pro for an hour each of telephony, web browsing, and video playback daily. We've established this usage pattern so that our battery results are comparable across devices in the most common day-to-day tasks. The battery testing procedure is described in detail in case you're interested in the nitty-gritty. You can check out our complete battery test table, where you can see how all of the smartphones we've tested will compare under your own typical use.

For comparison, the Redmi Note 7 did 14 hours in each of the screen-on disciplines and 32+ hours of voice calls, while the vivo V15 Pro was good for 15 hours of looping videos, 11:22h on the web browsing script and 28 hours talk time. The Honor 8X has the lowest video playback time of this bunch at (a still respectable) 12:13h, it did 11:24h in web browsing and 32+ hours on a 3G voice call.

One of the pro-est bits about the Realme 3 Pro is its VOOC fast charging capability. It ships with a 20W charger and cable that support Oppo's proprietary tech, which can fully charge a depleted battery in one hour and fifteen minutes, with the battery indicator showing 48% at the 30-minute mark.

Loudspeaker

The Realme 3 Pro has a single bottom-firing loudspeaker, which is really the norm outside of the high-end segment (and even there stereo speakers aren't guaranteed). The 3 Pro's speaker proved very loud in our testing easily making it to the 'Excellent' bowl. It's a bit louder than the Realme 2 Pro and an even bigger step up from the Realme 3. The output is also full-bodied, there's some bass too, and there's no distortion at high volume.

Single loudspeaker on the bottom

Audio quality

The Realme 3 Pro started off brightly in our audio test, posting excellent scores with an external amplifier while maintaining very high volume levels.

Plugging in the headphones caused quite a lot of damage to the audio output though, dropping the loudness to just above average. We also saw a notable increase in stereo crosstalk and some intermodulation distortion appearing. Not a bad showing per se, but nowhere near as impressive as the first part.

Realme 3 Pro frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.