realme GT6 Hands-On, First Impressions

Set for global launch this June 20, 2024, the realme GT 6 is positioned to challenge top ranked flagship smartphones in the market today. What it means to be a challenger in a very competitive and expensive segment is what we are going to find out in our hands-on and first impressions of the realme GT 6.

Right off the bat, we ca see that the realme GT 6, in this silver colorway, is such a beautiful and elegant device. I think it is best-looking smartphone realme has even made ever.

It has this slim profile, solid build, not too hefty and just right to the grip with one hand. It has a simple yet very polished look, akin to expensive silverware, with a two-tone glossy finish.

The curved display at the front and tapered edges at the back make the device easier to hold and thinner than it actually is (it’s actually 8.7mm thick buy feels like it’s under 8mm).

You have the power button and volume rocker on the right side, nothing on the left side; while, at the top, you have the secondary noise-canceling microphone, an IR blaster and an air vent hole (for testing water resistance and pressure inside the device).

At the bottom side, you have the USB Type-C charging, primary microphone, main speaker grill and the SIM card slot. It supports dual 5G from the two nano-SIM cards with no more room for microSD expansion card.

It also has WiFi 7 support, Bluetooth 5.4, GPS, NFC and an IR remote for pairing to home appliances.

The large 6.78-inch LTPO AMOLED has one of the brightness displays we’ve ever seen. It’s crisp, clear and very vibrant with a punch-hole at the top to make way for the front camera. We’re still unsure with the glass protection used here but noticed it comes with a pre-installed screen protector already.

At the back, we have a triple camera system with the main camera using a 50MP Sony LYT-808 sensor with built-in optical image stabilization. This is complemented by another 50MP telephoto and 8MP ultrawide cameras, both capable of going from 0.6x (ultrawide) to 2x optical and 4x hybrid zoom.

From our initial sample shots, it’s a very good camera but we still have to do some more testing before we can go in any detail. For the meantime, you can check out the sample shots below:

For video recording, the main camera can shoot 4K @ 60fps. We took a few sample clips from the rear camera and the selfie camera as well in this sample clip:

We’ll look further into the cameras in our full review next week.

As mentioned earlier, I really liked that back panel which is made of glass in a two-tone silver colorway. We realized later on that the area surrounding the three camera lenses, which has a mirror-like finish, is actually very useful when taking Gen-Z selfies (the mirror works like a viewfinder!).

Under the hood, the realme GT 6 is powered by a Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chipset which is part of the flagship series from Qualcomm. This is composed of a single high-performance Cortex-X4 running at 3.0GHz, a quad-core Cortex-A720 @ 2.8GHz, and a triple-core Cortex-A520 running at 2.0GHz.

The chipset also comes with an Adreno 735 GPU and paired with 12GB of LPDDR5X RAM with an extra 12GB of Expanded RAM. The base model, which is our review unit, comes with 256GB of UFS 4.0 storage.

As expected, the device packs a punch in terms of performance with benchmarks scores that truly reflects the engine running behind it.

In our synthetic benchmarks, the device scored over 1.5 million in Antutu Benchmark. It was originally slightly below that mark but after a software update, we re-did the tests and got better scores instead.

Another surprising feature of the realme GT 6 is the battery life — with a sizable 5,500mAh battery, the device magaed to get very impressive results in our tests.

Our unit managed to score an impressive 17 hours and 16 minutes with PCMark Work 3.0 Battery Test running at 50% brightness, zero volume and in airplane mode.

In our video loop test, the device lasted 35 hours and 47 minutes playing a full HD 1080p movie at 50% brightness, zero volume and in airplane mode. These are very good results so far and something we very rarely see in other flagship devices. We’ll look more into how realme managed to optimized the GT 6 to perform this good.

The device comes with 120W SUPERVOOC charging so we expect it to juice up in under or around the 30-minute mark in our final test.

The unit runs on Android 14 right out of the box with realme UI 5.0. There were a few unwanted bloatwares that came with it (Lazada, Shopee, Temu) but some are very interesting and useful too. We’ll discuss more about the software, UI and related features.

We’ll be sure to answer everything else in our full review next week, once realme launches the GT 6 in Milan, Italy this June 20 (we’ll also be there to cover it).

For now, maybe the most important question remains — how much is the realme GT 6 going to cost you? We’ll find out soon!

realme GT6 specs:
Qualcomm Snapdragon 8s Gen 3
1x Cortex-X4 3.0GHz, 4 Cortex-A720 @ 2.8GHz, 3x Cortex-A520 2.0GHz
Adreno 735 GPU
12GB LPDDR5X RAM (+12GB RAM Expansion)
256GB UFS 4.0 internal storage
Triple rear camera system:
• 50MP Sony LYT808 OIS Camera
• 50MP Telephoto Camera
• 8MP 112° Wide Angle Camera
32MP front camera
WiFi-7 support
5G, dual nano SIM
Bluetooth 5.4
NFC
GPS
IR Blaster
realme UI 5 (Android 14)
5,500mAh battery, 120W SUPERVOOC wired charging