Realme 12+ 5G First impressions

Realme is on a roll. After introducing the Realme 12 Pro series earlier this year, the company is back with the Realme 12 5G series. Recently announced phones include Realme 12 5G and Realme 12+ 5G. We spent some time with the Plus variant, which already looks like a good budget phone. The Realme 12+ has a similar design to the more expensive Realme 12 Pro range. You get a vegan leather cover and a primary rear camera with OIS support. This is not a common feature you will find in this price segment. Before we thoroughly test the phone, here are our first impressions.

From the back, the Realme 12+ 5G looks like the Realme 12 Pro. It has a vegan leather finish on the back that is soft to the touch and doesn’t attract fingerprints. It’s much better than a plastic or even glass panel, for that matter. Realme has kept the branding to a minimum, with a simple Realme logo in the lower left corner. Besides the vegan leather cover, which costs 50 percent more than the plastic back, you also get a circular triple rear camera.

The rear triple camera design is also borrowed from the Pro series, but the gold ring is missing. However, the Realme 12+ 5G still has a watch face with sunbursts and a golden line running through the center of the back panel. What is completely different is the frame of the phone. Realme has given the phone flat sides with rounded corners. It is made of plastic, but one can easily mistake it for metal. The sides are super reflective and I prefer the square design over the curved edges seen on the Realme 12 Pro series.

Realme managed to make a good looking smartphone again. As for the button placement, the volume and power buttons are on the right side of the handset, with the USB Type-C port, speaker grill, microphone and SIM tray at the bottom. At the top, the Realme 12+ 5G has a 3.5mm headphone port, another microphone, and a second speaker. I like that Realme has included a headphone port on the handset. The phone also gets an IP54 rating.

Coming to the front, the Realme 12+ 5G has a large 6.67-inch AMOLED display with thin bezels on three sides and a chin that is slightly thicker than the others. The display is bright and offers HDR 10+ support, 120Hz refresh rate and full-HD+ resolution. Realme also claims that the display has a Rainwater Smart Touch feature that lets you use the touchscreen even in the rain or with wet hands. We will test this in the full review. You also get an in-display fingerprint scanner on the phone.

Now let’s talk about that camera setup. It’s probably the only phone in this price range to offer the Sony LYT-600 50-megapixel sensor with optical image stabilization. The main selling point of the Realme 12+ 5G is that camera, which the company claims can take really good photos. We’ll check out the camera in the full review, but in a few hours with the phone, I found that the software tends to oversaturate photos. Apart from the 50-megapixel main camera, you also get an 8-megapixel ultrawide module and a 2-megapixel depth sensor. It has a 16-megapixel front-facing selfie camera that takes decent selfies in the right lighting.

On the inside, the Realme 12+ 5G is equipped with a MediaTek Dimensity 7050 SoC, which initially struck me as fast. Obviously I’ll run some benchmarks and play some games to see how the phone performs under stress. You get up to 8GB of RAM and 256GB of internal storage on the phone. The phone supports both RAM (virtual) and memory (microSD card) expansion. For connectivity, you get dual SIM, 5G, dual-band Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2 and the usual array of GPS satellite connectivity.

Finally, the Realme 12+ 5G has a 5000mAh battery that supports 67W fast charging. Fortunately, the charger is provided in the box. Realme claims the phone can be fully charged in just 48 minutes, but we’ll have to test that. In the software department, the phone runs Android 14-based Realme UI 5.0 out of the box and yes, there is a lot of software bloat to deal with. Realme has promised two years of Android OS upgrades and three years of security patches.

Realme 12+ 5G Initial thoughts

For a starting price of Rs. 20,999, the Realme 12+ 5G looks like an excellent budget phone. I’ll be testing the camera, performance, software and battery life to see how it fares. The Sony LYT-600 sensor with OIS is certainly rare in this segment. The phone will compete with the recently launched Nothing Phone 2a ( review ), a really good budget smartphone.

Stay tuned for our full review to find out if the Realme 12+ 5G is something you should consider in your quest to buy the best budget phone.