Realme 5 Pro review

A familiar 6.3" display

The Realme 5 Pro packs a 6.3" IPS LCD screen with a droplet-shaped notch for the selfie camera. And if we are not mistaken - that should be the same panel we saw on the Realme 3 Pro four months ago.

The screen resolution is 1,080 x 2,340 pixels making for a 19.5:9 aspect ratio and 409ppi density.

Realme promises a maximum brightness of 450 nits but the screen exceeded the maker's specs as we measured 512nits at the far-right end of the brightest scrubber. And thanks to the deep black levels the screen's contrast turned out to be excellent with a ratio of 1875:1.

There is no Auto brightness boost under direct sunlight, but the screen does well even in the brightest of days thanks to the high brightness and average reflectivity. That is if the glass is not smudged up. If it is, then you just wipe it clean and you are good to go.

We also measured the minimum brightness for those of you keeping track of this test and it's just 2.1 nits.

The color reproduction is decent out of the box with lively though not super accurate colors. We measured an average deltaE of 5.5 and a maximum deviation of 9 at point Blue. Indeed, the white and gray hues visibly shifted towards blue in the default display setting.

There is a Color Temperature Adjustment slider in Display Settings that is set to the 'Default' middle position with 'Cooler' and 'Warmer' at the extremes. Setting this slider to the warmest option yields better results - average deltaE of 3.7 and a maximum of 6.7. If you are all about accuracy, this is the place to go.

Battery life

The Realme 5 Pro has the same 4,045mAh battery that powered the Realme 3 Pro. The phone supports VOOC 3.0 fast charging and its box contains both the 20W charger and the proprietary USB-C cable needed for VOOC to work. This pair refills 50% of the Realme 5 Pro's depleted battery in 30 mins, while a full charge takes about 80-90 mins.

In out testing, the Realme 5 Pro clocked almost 14 hours of video playback and north of 16 hours of browsing the web over Wi-Fi. We also measured more a day of 3G voice calls. And adding the efficient standby performance we got an excellent overall Endurance rating of 100 hours.

Our battery tests were automated thanks to SmartViser, using its viSerDevice app. The endurance rating above denotes how long a single battery charge will last you if you use the Realme 5 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.

Speaker

The Realme 5 Pro has a single bottom-firing speaker that scored a Very Good mark in our loudness test. The speaker was tuned for mid-tones and when playing the music you'll hear the vocals crystal clear, but the music itself will be a little bit on the quieter side.

Audio quality

The Realme 5 Pro did marginally better than the vanilla 5 in our audio quality test. Its loudness was again exemplary with an external amplifier, but while headphones dropped the 5 to average, the Pro took a smaller hit and remain pleasingly loud.

The clarity is as good as you can expect in the first case, while headphone damaged stereo separation, frequency response and caused some intermodulation distortion. Each of those was affected to a lesser degree compared to the vanilla 5 though, so the overall result was a degree better. Still the Realme 5 Pro is a phone for the casual music fan than the avid audiophile.

Realme 5 Pro frequency response

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