Realme’s X50 Pro has a Snapdragon 865 and 5G for $600
Realme is continuing its push into the high end today with the announcement of the Realme X50 Pro, its first 5G phone and one that the company will push as a legitimate flagship contender in more markets than ever before. It was intended for reveal at Mobile World Congress this week in an attempt to make a global splash; Realme is going forward with the announcement despite the event’s cancellation.
The X50 Pro is a pretty hefty phone at 207g and 9.36mm thick, and its design doesn’t do much to step beyond other devices from the company. The colorway on the device you see here, though, is pretty cool — Realme calls it “Rust Red”, and it’s kind of like a copper-brown frosted-glass matte finish on the back. Realme is yet to blow my mind with hardware engineering, but it continues to put out some of the most interesting colors and textures of any phone maker.
The X50 Pro has the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 processor as the Samsung Galaxy S20 and the majority of premium Android phones that will be released this year. Realme says the phone supports all “mainstream” 5G bands around the world. RAM goes up to 12GB, while there’s a max of 256GB of storage. There’s no microSD slot, a little surprisingly.
The display is a 6.44-inch 20:9 1080p OLED panel with a refresh rate of 90Hz. Realme says it supports HDR10+ and covers 100 percent of the P3 color gamut. There’s also a built-in optical fingerprint reader and a dual hole-punch cutout that houses a 32-megapixel selfie camera and an 8-megapixel ultrawide.
The main camera uses the same 64-megapixel Samsung sensor we’ve seen on other recent Realme phones. It’s supported by an 8-megapixel ultrawide macro, a 12-megapixel 2x telephoto, and a monochrome depth sensor. Realme is claiming 5x “optical hybrid zoom” and 20x “hybrid zoom,” which probably doesn’t mean all that much in practice given the hardware.
The X50 Pro has a 4,200mAh dual-cell battery and supports 65W “SuperDart” fast charging, which can supposedly get the phone to full capacity in 35 minutes, or to 60 percent charge in 20. That sounds similar to technological stablemate Oppo’s class-leading SuperVOOC 2.0, which I’ve found to fill a 4,000mAh battery in under 32 minutes. Realme’s bundled charger looks basically identical to Oppo’s, too, using GaN to keep the size down.
Realme is including solid stereo speakers and a decent haptic engine on the X50 Pro, two features that you can’t always count on finding in Chinese phones. Unfortunately, though, there’s still no wireless charging or waterproofing rating, and I believe this is also Realme’s first phone to omit a headphone jack.
Realme is releasing the X50 Pro in Europe, China, and India at first, and while pricing details aren’t yet final, the company tells The Verge it should come in between €550-650 (roughly $600-700) in Spain and cost less in China. That still makes it by far the most expensive Realme phone yet, but one that gets the company onto the list of those producing high-performance 5G devices for 2020. And with Samsung setting the floor for its new Galaxy S20 range at $999, Realme still has room to provide a significant discount in the 5G space.
Realme is continuing its push into the high end today with the announcement of the Realme X50 Pro, its first 5G phone and one that the company will push as a legitimate flagship contender in more markets than ever before. It was intended for reveal at Mobile World Congress this…
