The Realme GT Neo 2 was still a great mid-range gaming phone because it had a Snapdragon SoC in the 800-series, a strong cooling system, and a price that started at just Rs. 31,999.
The GT Neo 3, Realme’s new phone, is its follow-up. It has a better main camera with OIS and a new processor. There is also a special 150W model for fast charging, which is the one we will look at today. Is the Realme GT Neo 3 (150W) a step forward for the GT Neo series? Does it offer good value like its predecessor? It’s time to see how it stacks up against other high-end smartphones in this market.
Realme GT Neo 3 price
The GT Neo 3 (150W) from Realme costs Rs. 42,999 in India. This model comes with a 150W charger and a 4,500mAh battery. The phone comes with an 80W charger and a 5,000mAh battery in the 80W model. This model comes in two different versions. Both models come in three colors: Asphalt Black, Nitro blue, and Spring White. The last two have racing stripes on the back panel, while the black one has a plain finish for people who don’t want to draw too much attention.
Realme GT Neo 3 design
The shape of the Realme GT Neo 3 is the same as that of the GT Neo 2. Some of the changes are a new finish on the back panel, a different arrangement of the cameras on the back, and a hole-punch cutout in the middle for the front-facing camera. Realme changed the GT Neo 2’s flashy two-tone back glass panel to a simpler AG glass with a matte finish, which turned out to attract a lot of fingerprints.
The GT Neo 3 feels a lot more high-end than its twin, the OnePlus 10R, which I reviewed earlier. It also feels better in your hand. It’s not too heavy at 188g, but it’s still too big to use with one hand. Its big screen is protected by Gorilla Glass 5, and it does get fingerprints, but they are easy to get rid of. The AMOLED display with a hole-punch has thin bezels all around, which makes it look more expensive.
The specs of Realme GT Neo 3
The MediaTek Dimensity 8100 SoC is used in the Realme GT Neo 3. The Dedicated Display Processor is an imaging chipset that Realme put in the phone. The company says that it should help improve gaming performance and use less power. Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, NFC, a Type-C port, and the usual satellite navigation systems are all ways to connect. The fingerprint reader is built into the screen, and it always worked.
Realme did a good job of combining Android 12 and its Material You features with its own user interface, Realme UI. Realme UI 3.0 on the GT Neo 3 looks about the same as it does on a Pixel phone, with only a few icons that look a little different. All of the widgets in Android 12 worked as expected, and the theming engine changed the colors of the keyboard, widgets, and other icons based on the wallpaper. The Personalization section of the Settings app looks a lot like the one on OnePlus and Oppo phones. It lets you change the shapes of the icons, the icons for quick settings, the accent colors, and the system font.
As with all Realme phones, there are a lot of third-party apps already on the phone. But these didn’t get in the way of my software, and I could remove them if I wanted to. What did bother me was that the Themes Store app would sometimes tell me about new wallpapers and themes.
Performance
The Realme GT Neo 3 has a 120Hz AMOLED screen that is 6.7 inches and full HD+. When I looked at the screen in direct sunlight, it was bright enough and the text was clear and easy to read. The default Vivid screen color mode made the colors look very bright, but this could be changed. The refresh rate can change, but only between 60Hz and 120Hz, depending on the app that is running.
The Realme GT Neo 3’s software felt smooth and quick, and its benchmark scores were close to those of phones with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888 SoC. The phone got 8,10,225 points on AnTuTu. It also got 969 points on Geekbench’s single-core test and 4,065 points on its multi-core test. The Dimensity 8100 SoC didn’t get to show off its graphics prowess in benchmarks, possibly because games have a frame rate cap. In GFXBench’s T-rex and Manhattan 3.1 gaming tests, the GT Neo 3 got 54 and 60 frames per second, while the Snapdragon 888-powered Xiaomi 11T Pro (Review) got 121 and 100 frames per second.
GT Neo 3 cameras
The Realme GT Neo 3’s main camera has optical image stabilization (OIS) and a better 50-megapixel Sony IMX766 sensor than the GT Neo 2’s 64-megapixel sensor. There is a fixed-focus ultra-wide-angle camera with 8 megapixels and a fixed-focus macro camera with 2 megapixels. Selfies are taken with a 16-megapixel camera on the front, and this time Realme has used a Samsung sensor with a slightly wider aperture and field of view than its predecessor.
When compared, the Portrait mode on the phone did a better job with colors because it toned them down and made them look more natural. The dynamic range was good, and the edges were picked up well, and the backgrounds were well-exposed. Selfies turned out a little too sharp and saturated, and backgrounds that were too bright were blown out. When taking selfies, switching to Portrait mode made a huge difference in the dynamic range, but edge detection was just average. The macro camera took average photos with purple fringing around the edges of the objects, and its fixed-focus system was even more annoying and hard to use than usual.
Realme GT Neo 3 verdict
The GT Neo 3 has more features than most smartphones, but that doesn’t make it a very competitive phone. Even though the GT Neo 3 is better than its predecessor, it is still behind the competition, unless you compare it to the OnePlus 10R Endurance Edition (Review), which is the same phone with a different name and design.
The 150W fast charging system on the Realme GT Neo 3 does make the phone too hot, and the 120Hz refresh rate on the screen isn’t good enough for most games. In terms of raw performance, the SoC is also a bit behind the competition, most of which use a Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 SoC. The phone also doesn’t have a few hardware features, like an IP rating or wireless charging, that other phones in the same price range do have, like the Samsung Galaxy S20 FE 5G and the Apple iPhone 2022.