Realme GT3 hands-on review

Design and handling

As we said earlier, the design is a big departure from last year's GT2. The phone now adopts the usual glass sandwich chassis, so there is no paper-like back this year. Instead, we have a frosted, silky-smooth glass finish, along with a huge camera piece. The surface feels nice, but it's slippery as hell. We had the chance to see both colors, the Pulse White and also the Booster Black. In terms of feel, they are both identical.

The camera piece reminds us of the Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra's, but this one's made of a metal piece surrounding the three cameras and a glass sheet covering the LED light. This LED light isn't very visible outdoors but makes for a good show indoors as long as you keep your phone face-down on the desk. Of course, the LED can be used for notifications and a charging indicator.

Under the right angle and lighting, you can catch a glimpse of the Snapdragon logo and the chipset itself. We suspect it's the real thing, but it could be a sticker too. It's not the first time we have seen such an implementation.

The front houses a huge 6.74-inch display with a centered punch-hole for the selfie camera and razor-thin bezels all-around. And with a big screen like this one, the GT3 is a phone that's hard to handle with one hand. Surprisingly enough, the device doesn't feel as hefty as we expected, tipping the scale at just under 200 grams.

Hardware and performance

Perhaps the biggest upgrade over the previous generation is the screen. The new display is larger, runs faster (144Hz), supports 10-bit color depth and has a bigger 1240 x 2772px resolution. It also officially supports HDR10+ and it's supposed to be brighter, reaching up to 1,300 nits peak spot luminosity. It's undoubtedly the best display Realme has used to date, at least according to the specs. We will put that to the test our upcoming full review.

Last year's top-tier Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 SoC sits behind the wheel, which isn't a big surprise given that the vanilla GT2 launched with a 2021 flagship chipset - the Snapdragon 888 to be exact. This time around, however, the device leverages the improved Plus version of the chip. We ran a couple of benchmarks and it seems that the GT3 is making good use of the SD8+ Gen 1. Here's how it stacks against the top-tier SoCs in the last two years or so.

GeekBench 6 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi 13 Pro
  5323
• Realme GT3
  3950
• Google Pixel 7 Pro
  3828
• Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra
  3564

GeekBench 6 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi 13 Pro
  1987
• Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra
  1472
• Google Pixel 7 Pro
  1467
• Realme GT3
  1398

AnTuTu 9

Higher is better

• Xiaomi 13 Pro
  1281666
• Realme GT3
  1074427
• Realme GT2 Pro
  966251
• Realme GT2
  810512
• Google Pixel 7 Pro
  796369
• Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra
  794016

Either way, the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 is a perfectly capable SoC in 2023 and if that helped Realme cut down on some costs, we are all for that. The device will run pretty much everything you throw at it.

All the hardware is powered by a 4,600 mAh battery, which is a step down from the 5,000 mAh unit on the Realme GT2 and that's probably due to some technical limitations regarding the 240W charging. We put the latter to the test on the next page.