Realme XT review

Design

The Realme XT is arguably the best looking smartphone the maker has done to date. The XT has a sleek design with no complications, sturdy build, and with minor highlights where it maters the most.

The Realme XT is the first dual-glass Realme - the maker has used two pieces of Gorilla Glass 5 by Corning. The front one is completely flat, while the rear is bent towards the longer edges. Few mid-rangers get Gorilla glass panels for protection, let alone two of them.

The only potential weak point is the frame that's made of plastic. Realme has made the sides look metal, painting them in aluminum-like gray and adding a frosted finish, but they are still plastic and as such might scratch fairly easily if left unexposed.

The Realme XT has a 6.4" Super AMOLED screen at the front with quite thin bezels. This is a departure from the 6.53" AMOLED panel on the Realme X for two reasons - it's a bit smaller and has a waterdrop-like cutout. Those used to the uninterrupted viewing experience as on the Realme X might be disappointed, but those still unconvinced by the durability of pop-up modules might be happy with the trade-off.

The AMOLED screen looks bright and punchy, and while its flatness might take away some of the premium looks compared to flagships it actually offers better grip.

As we said, the display is covered by a Gorilla Glass 5 piece, but Realme also puts a screen protector during manufacturing, so the XT is double shielded out of the box.

The Realme XT has an optical under-display fingerprint sensor that is speedy and nicely accurate. The sensor lights up upon picking the phone or when you take it out of your pocket or purse, and it unlocks in a flash upon successful recognition. Without the screen protector the reader couldn't be slowed down even when the glass was all smudgy, but a smudged protector does take away from its reliability, so you should consider peeling it off if you find the performance inadequate.

The selfie camera got a nice upgrade, so we may forgive Realme for that notch after all. The company has opted for the 16MP Sony IMX471 sensor - that's the same camera behind the OnePlus 7 series front snappers. We've already seen it does great, so we have high expectations for the XT, too.

Now, let's turn the Realme XT over - the curved Gorilla Glass 5 on our Pearl While model looks really impressively. It has a predominantly white hue, but thanks to some additional layers the whole thing reflects light and changes colors in a very cool way, rainbow-like is probably the closest way we can describe it.

The quad-camera sits on a giant hump in the upper left corner. The vertically aligned setup contains the 8MP snapper with ultrawide lens, the 64MP primary shooter, the 2MP depth sensor (a.k.a. portrait camera), and the 2MP macro cam - in that order.

Once again, just like on the Realme 5, the maker put these cool yellow rings accompanied with the 64MP inscription on the wrong camera. It does look better on the top, sure, but it still doesn't make sense.

Next to the camera mountain, there is the AI camera logo, next to the LED flash, with four aperture icons. While this was totally unnecessary, some might appreciate the Half-Life vibe it provides.

The Realme XT wobbles a lot when left on a flat surface, but this is inevitable with such a big hump. On the upside the bundled case goes a long way to alleviating the issue.

Finally, let's talk about the plastic frame. It's quite busy - the left side has the triple card slot and the volume keys, the bottom is where the USB-C port and audio jack are, while the right side has the power key with a nice yellow accent to match those on the back. We really appreciate the dedicated microSD slot and not giving up on the audio port.

And thanks to this plastic and very grippy frame, the Realme XT is actually not a nightmare to hold. On the contrary, the phone and its frame provide more than enough grip to compensate for the glass design and we felt it safe when handling in naked no matter what we did.

The Realme XT measures 158.7 x 75.2 x 8.6 mm - just 1mm taller and wider than the Realme 5 Pro, but 2mm shorter than the Realme X. The phone weighs 183g - about the same as 5 Pro and 8g lighter than the X model.

Well, the notch might make its looks second to the original X, but the Realme XT indeed feels like the most premium Realme we've had so far. The dual Gorilla Glass build is an excellent choice and works fantastic with the grippy plastic frame, while the chameleon paint does make for some stunning view at the back. Overall, an excellent body and handling experience we had with this Realme XT.