Realme interchangeable lens concept hands-on

Realme's main focus at this year's Mobile World Congress is to launch its 14 Pro series in Europe, but the company did a little side quest too.

Meet the Realme interchangeable lens concept - a Realme smartphone that can mount Leica M lenses on its back!

Before we go mounting lenses on, let's look at the underlying phone. This is a Realme smartphone running a two-year-old Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC. The back is reminiscent of Xiaomi's 15 Ultra in its dual-tone Silver Chrome.

The Realme has a glass-covered camera island with two cameras - a wide and ultrawide, along with a custom 1-inch type Sony-made sensor without optics.

The camera island's frame is a sort of special mount, which can take a Leica M mount screw-on adapter, which allows you to attach Leica M lenses.

That means that all of Leica's considerable lens options are available to you - the Leica M is the oldest actively used camera mount today.

Realme had a 73mm (around 3x) and a 230mm (10x) equivalent lenses. However, if you're supplying your own lenses, you'd need to account for the crop factor, which is around 2.47 for a 1-inch type phone sensor.

That would make a classic 50mm lens (around a 2x compared to a phone's main sensor) a 123mm, or around 5.4x.

Realme isn't first to the concept. We saw the exact same thing back in 2022, when Xiaomi showed a 12S Ultra that could mount Leica M lenses.

Anyway, concept phones are made to prove an engineering point - a bragging right more than a product the company will mass-produce and sell to customers.

So this Realme isn't coming to a store near you. But it's still refreshing to see such zest for innovation back at the Mobile World Congress ground after a few stagnant years of conventional phones.