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realme narzo 30A Hands-On

Written By Justine Basco
Published • March 17th, 2021
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Last year’s realme narzo 20 was definitely a success. With its budget-friendly price and gaming capable hardware, a lot of people, including us, found it worth the price. Now, realme’s sub-brand narzo just launched their second addition to the line, which is this narzo 30A. Its got a lot of similarities to the narzo 20, but definitely expect it at a lower price.

Before we get into it, just a quick note that the narzo 30A is a Lazada-exclusive deal for the Philippine market, so it will only retail through realme’s official flagship store on Lazada.

Starting with design, the realme narzo 30A features a polycarbonate rear panel with a similar camera module and fingerprint scanner placement to the narzo 20. That’s a square cam module on the upper left and the rear fingerprint scanner on the upper middle.

There’s a bit of a twist in design as this narzo 30A flaunts a diagonal stripe textured pattern, that makes it less prone to smudges. Having it in this Laser Black color makes it look smart and tough. By the way, it’s also available in Laser Blue if you’re interested.

Located on the left is its dual-nano SIM tray with a dedicated microSD card slot that can accommodate up to 256GB capacities.

Meanwhile, on the right side sits the power button and volume rocker that are both easy to reach.

There’s nothing on top, while at the bottom are its loudspeaker, USB Type-C port, the primary microphone, and the 3.5mm headphone jack.

On the front-facing side of things, we get the same 6.5-inch HD+ Mini-drop IPS display as the narzo 20, with a pre-installed screen protector on top. We do get the front camera on the upper middle, a front speaker on top of it, slim bevels and a slightly thicker chin.

Scrolling through, the narzo 30A runs on Android 10 skinned with realme UI 1.0, but it is expected to get an upgrade to realme UI 2.0 that’s based on Android 11 in the 3rd quarter of 2021.

Under the hood, it’s equipped with a MediaTek Helio G85 processor that’s paired with a Mali-G52 GPU, and locally we get 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. Additionally, it also packs a whopping 6,000mAh battery with 18W fast charging and support for reverse charging.

This configuration is similar to the narzo 20 that we reviewed last year, so you can pretty much expect the same performance.

With last year’s narzo 20, we did not encounter any issues, and the performance is smooth throughout for casual gaming. If you’re curious, here are the benchmark scores that we got from the narzo 20, and we’ll update you on our full review of the results we’ll get with this narzo 30A soon.

• AnTuTu – 202,580
• Geekbench – 330 (Single-core), 1,298 (Multi-core), 1,151 (OpenCL)
• 3D Mark – 1,401 (SSE – OpenGL ES 3.1) 1,390 (SSE – Vulkan)
• PC Mark – 5,891 (Work 2.0)
• AndroBench – 313.2 MB/s (Sequential Read), 180.16 MB/s (Sequential Write)

As for cameras, we get a dual set-up at the back consisting of a 13MP main shooter with PDAF and a 2MP B&W portrait lens. Meanwhile, on that small notch is an 8MP front camera.

We took it for a quick spin and here are our sample photos so far:

This seems like a toned-down version of the realme narzo 20 with a few updated features. We’ll update you guys with the official price soon, but to give you an idea, in India it starts at 8,999 rupees. Again, the realme narzo 30A is a Lazada-exclusive deal for the Philippine market, so it will only retail through realme’s official flagship store on Lazada.

And that’s it for now, stay tuned for our full review soon. Don’t forget to share with us what you think about this realme narzo 30A in the comments.

realme narzo 30A specs:
6.5-inch HD+ Mini-drop fullscreen IPS display
MediaTek Helio G85 1.8GHz octa-core CPU
ARM Mali G52 MC2 GPU
4GB RAM
64GB storage
microSD card (dedicated slot)
Dual-rear cameras:
• 13MP F2.2 main PDAF
• 2MP F2.4 B&W Portrait
8MP F2.0 front camera
Dual-SIM (nano)
4G LTE
WiFi 802.11 b/g/n/a/ac
Bluetooth 5.0
GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS, BEIDOU
Fingerprint scanner (rear-mounted)
USB-C
realme UI (Android 10)
6,000mAh battery w/ 18W wired fast charging
164.5 x 75.9 x 9.8 mm
207 g
Laser Black, Laser Blue