Realme Narzo 10: Decent companion for early gamers

The budget-friendly Narzo series has two phones at offer: Narzo 10 and Narzo 10A.

Of the two, we used Narzo 10 (‘That White' colour) for couple of days and here is what it offers.

The Realme Narzo 10 price in India is set at Rs. 11,999 for the sole, 4GB RAM + 128GB storage variant. The smartphone comes in ‘That Green' and ‘That White' colours.

Realme Narzo 10 is the first smartphone to launch with the Helio G80 processor in India.

This is an octa-core chipset that clocks at up to 2.0GHz and is equipped with a Mali-G52 MC2 GPU, much like the Helio P65.

However, the Helio G80 is not as powerful as the G90 but is a gaming-centric SoC and delivers powerful performance in this price segment.

On the Geekbench 5 tests, Realme Narzo 10 has scored 386 in single-core test and 1336 in the multi-core test.

Narzo 10 is a fairly reliable phone and is good enough for someone who is looking for a smartphone for playing games and using social media.

During the review, we played PUBG Mobile and Call of Duty: Mobile Warzone. The 30-minute session did heat the body up a bit but was not uncomfortable to play.

The smartphone ships with Realme UI based on Android 10. Realme UI offers a cleaner look compared to ColorOS, but it still comes with a lot of pre-loaded apps.

The UI also offers features like pure black dark mode, smart sidebar and simpler notification toggles.

The smartphone gets a power button on the right side and volume buttons on the left side of the frame. The rear-mounted fingerprint sensor is also well placed. The phone comes with a triple card slot to hold two nano-SIM cards and a microSD card.

There is a matte finish on the polycarbonate surface at the back, filled with vertical patterns.

The phone also gets a Type-C port, headphone jack and a speaker grille on the bottom.

Coming to the display, the smartphone features a 6.5-inch HD+ (720 x 1,600) waterdrop display with a screen-to-body ratio of 89.8 per cent and Gorilla Glass 3 protection on top.

Narzo 10 has a 720p screen and image quality decent, although the phone struggled a bit with high-bit rate Full-HD videos.

If you prefer watching streaming on smartphones, you might get disappointed as streaming platforms like Netflix and Prime Video will not offer HD resolution as the phone lacks ‘Widevine L1' certification and will only run on 720p resolution.

Widevine has three certification levels: L1, L2, and L3. Applications such as Netflix, Amazon Video and Hulu etc require the device to be Widevine L1 certified to be able to stream HD videos.

It houses 5,000mAh battery and supports 18W fast charging over USB Type C. The battery was enough to last about more than a day days on normal usage.

The phone has the quad rear camera setup that includes a 48MP primary sensor with an f/1.8 lens and an 8MP secondary sensor with an f/2.25 lens that has a field-of-view (FoV) of 119 degrees. The camera setup also includes a 2MP monochrome portrait sensor with an f/2.4 lens and a 2MP macro shooter with an f/2.4 aperture.

The above combinations of lenses produces photos with a decent dynamic range, retain accurate colour and are well-detailed.

The Portrait mode worked very well with good foreground and background separation.

For selfies and video calls, the smartphone has a 16MP camera sensor at the front, along with an f/2.0 lens. The front camera also performed well in presence of bright light, but as the light dropped, quality too.

The selfie camera also supports HD (720p) video recording at 30fps frame rate. However, the rear camera setup supports full-HD (1080p) video recording.

Conclusion: The smartphone offers a massive battery, good camera as well as the Helio G80 gaming processor at a pocket-friendly price. For early gamers, Narzo 10 is a perfect companion as it takes on Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 Pro as well as Poco X2.