Realme 9 review

Realme UI 3.0 and Android 12

Like the rest of the Realme 9s, the vanilla option also runs on the latest Android 12 with the company's Realme UI 3.0 on top. This means that all of the Android 12-intrinsic features are on board along with Realme's custom ones.

Visually, the OS hasn't changed much. Realme UI has a colorful UI with customizable UI elements and its own iconography for the notification shade and the general Settings menu. The app drawer hasn't been tweaked, too, but we did notice a bit of inconsistency with the swipe up and swipe down gestures on the Home screen when opening/closing the drawer. A small annoyance that wouldn't bother most users.

Realme also kept the so-called Icon pull-down gesture. Swiping alongside the left or right edge of the screen crams icons at the bottom half of the screen so they can be easily reached with your thumb. The gesture is pretty reliable as well. By default, the swipe down gesture on the Home screen opens up the so-called global search, but you can always set the notification shade instead.

Home screen, app drawer, notification shade, Settings menu

When it comes to Android 12-specific features, most of them are under-the-hood changes. However, the privacy-focused efforts from Google are translated into Realme UI 3.0. The so-called Privacy dashboard is one example. It's a unified view of all your permissions and user data settings. It gives you information on which apps and how often they access your information or ask for certain permissions. It looks and feels like the Digital wellbeing dashboard introduced with Android 10.

In addition to those privacy features, Android 12 lets you choose the accuracy of your location shared with certain apps. Let's say you want to share an approximate location with some apps instead of your exact location. And when a certain app is accessing your mic or camera, a green dot will appear in the screen's upper-right corner so you'd know what's going on.

Privacy dashboard

As before, Realme UI offers deep customization of the interface by letting you choose accent colors (or a combination of accent colors), wallpapers, icons, the shape of the quick toggles, and the font and size. All of these settings are found in the Personalization sub-menu.

Personalization settings

Always-on isn't a new feature, but it's definitely a rare find in this price bracket. We are happy to see that Realme didn't omit it due to the phone being in the budget class.

Always-on display settings

Under the Special features sub-menu, Realme put the Smart sidebar and Flexible windows features, both of which boost multitasking. When turned on, the sidebar offers quick access to some of your favorite apps. The system allows you to adjust the position of the sidebar, which is crucial because it might interfere with the back gesture if you are using the standard Android gestures. Anyway, tap and hold on an app icon enters split-screen mode while a single tap opens up the app in a floating window or as Realme likes to call it, "Flexible window". The supported apps can be opened in small, draggable and size-adjustable windows.

Smart Sidebar and Flexible windows

The good old screen-off gestures that allow you to launch certain apps or the flashlight by drawing letters on a locked screen are here to stay.

Screen-off gestures and motion gestures

In the Realme labs, where the company likes to introduce experimental features, there's one that caught our eye. You can stream music to a Bluetooth headset and wired headphones simultaneously. Pretty neat if you are traveling with a friend and want to listen to the same tunes.

Realme Labs

Lastly, let's talk about the fingerprint reader. It's fast, it's accurate and reliable. This one seems to be in the right spot. Two new features are now available with the fingerprint reader, though. One of them is the built-in heart rate monitor, which seems to be rather okay in terms of accuracy in the user's resting state, but it's largely inconsistent also. A Quick launch option is now available and seems to be taken straight from OnePlus' OxygenOS. You just tap on the fingerprint scanner and hold until icons for your pre-defined apps appear. Dragging your finger on one of them launches the app in question.

While the system is feature-packed and our previous experience with the OS is predominantly positive, we can't say we had the smoothest user experience with the Realme 9. Animations often lagged, and some apps take time loading. It's not something to obsess about, but it's noticeable.

Synthetic benchmark performance

On the surface, the Snapdragon 680 (SM6225) is a modern chip. It was released in Q4 2021 and is made on a current and efficient TSMC 6nm node. Once you start reading into some of its other specs in detail, though, some major compromises start to show through. For one, its four "big" Kryo 265 Gold cores are based on the ARM Cortex-A73 from all the way back in 2016, while the Cortex-A53 base for the "LITTLE" Kryo 265 Silver ones was unveiled in 2012. Both are several generations old and can't really keep up with more potent and recent CPU cores. The Snapdragon 680 has these set up in a 4x2.4 GHz Kryo 265 Gold & 4x1.9 GHz Kryo 265 Silver configuration.

Then there is the Adreno 610 GPU. We are almost wondering how it is managing 90Hz or rather, anywhere close to 90fps at all. The Spectra 346 camera ISP and Hexagon 686 DSP of the Snapdragon 680 are nothing to write home about either and are the reason why the Realme 9 is only limited to 1080p video capture. By the way, the Snapdragon 695 is even more of a disappointment than the Snapdragon 680 in this regard since it shares this limitation, while the older and "lower number" Snapdragon 690 doesn't. But, we are getting off-topic.

Continuing the list of less-than-impressive Snapdragon 680 features, we have the X11 LTE modem, rated at Cat. 13 speeds, capped at 390 Mbps down and 150 Mbps up. Quick Charge 3+ support is also a bit old.

Without further ado, let's see how the Snapdragon 680 holds up in our synthetic benchmark test selection.

AnTuTu 9

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro+ 5G
  437872
• Realme 9 Pro+
  416031
• Realme 9 Pro
  401894
• Samsung Galaxy A33 5G
  394918
• Poco X4 Pro 5G
  384646
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro 5G
  382902
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro
  319093
• Realme 9
  290097

GeekBench 5 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Realme 9 Pro+
  814
• Realme 9 5G Speed Edition
  795
• Samsung Galaxy A33 5G
  742
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro+ 5G
  736
• Realme 9 Pro
  694
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro 5G
  688
• Poco X4 Pro 5G
  687
• Realme 9 5G
  610
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro
  511
• Realme 9i
  384
• Realme 9
  380

GeekBench 5 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Realme 9 5G Speed Edition
  2753
• Realme 9 Pro+
  2335
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro+ 5G
  2225
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro 5G
  2063
• Poco X4 Pro 5G
  2063
• Realme 9 Pro
  2020
• Samsung Galaxy A33 5G
  1900
• Realme 9 5G
  1823
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro
  1729
• Realme 9
  1601
• Realme 9i
  1581

GFX Car Chase ES 3.1 (offscreen 1080p)

Higher is better

• Realme 9 5G Speed Edition
  33
• Realme 9 Pro+
  27
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro+ 5G
  25
• Samsung Galaxy A33 5G
  23
• Poco X4 Pro 5G
  20
• Realme 9 Pro
  19
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro 5G
  19
• Realme 9 5G
  16
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro
  14
• Realme 9i
  8.2
• Realme 9
  8.2

GFX Car Chase ES 3.1 (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Realme 9 5G Speed Edition
  28
• Realme 9 Pro+
  23
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro+ 5G
  22
• Samsung Galaxy A33 5G
  20
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro 5G
  17
• Poco X4 Pro 5G
  17
• Realme 9 Pro
  16
• Realme 9 5G
  14
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro
  12
• Realme 9i
  7.3
• Realme 9
  7.3

GFX Manhattan ES 3.1 (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Realme 9 5G Speed Edition
  50
• Realme 9 Pro+
  41
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro+ 5G
  38
• Samsung Galaxy A33 5G
  35
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro 5G
  30
• Poco X4 Pro 5G
  30
• Realme 9 Pro
  29
• Realme 9 5G
  25
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro
  22
• Realme 9i
  14
• Realme 9
  13

GFX Manhattan ES 3.1 (offscreen 1080p)

Higher is better

• Realme 9 5G Speed Edition
  57
• Realme 9 Pro+
  45
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro+ 5G
  43
• Samsung Galaxy A33 5G
  38
• Realme 9 Pro
  35
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro 5G
  34
• Poco X4 Pro 5G
  34
• Realme 9 5G
  27
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro
  24
• Realme 9i
  23
• Realme 9
  15

GFX Aztek Vulkan High (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Realme 9 Pro+
  16
• Samsung Galaxy A33 5G
  15
• Realme 9 Pro
  12
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro 5G
  12
• Poco X4 Pro 5G
  12
• Realme 9
  4.9

GFX Aztek Vulkan High (offscreen 1440p)

Higher is better

• Realme 9 Pro+
  10
• Samsung Galaxy A33 5G
  10
• Realme 9 Pro
  8.2
• Poco X4 Pro 5G
  8.1
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro 5G
  8
• Realme 9
  3.2

As you can see, the Snapdragon 680-powered Realme 9 falls short of the competition in pretty much all of the tests. To our surprise, even the Galaxy A33 5G's Exynos 1280 SoC is performing much better. It's quite evident that more powerful solutions can be found for the same or even lower price.

Sustained performance

To be fair, the Snapdragon 680 isn't particularly powerful and thus demanding, so we expect minimal, if any, thermal throttling in our hour-long stress test.

And that seems to be true in the first 30 minutes. There are only a few sudden drops we see on the chart before stabilizing at around 90% of the theoretical CPU performance. We then see a bigger drop as we get close to an hour and that drop represents 68% of the SoC's performance. This was just a temporary state, though, albeit non-ideal.

CPU throttling test: 30 min • 60 min

The phone didn't feel hot at any point, partially because of the plastic body, which is a bad thermal conductor.