Realme 11 Pro Review: A Solid Contender With a Classy Design

Realme unveiled the 10 Pro series just six months back, and the company is ready with the Realme 11 Pro series. The company stresses that the Realme 11 Pro is a massive upgrade over the entire outgoing series — a big claim if you ask us. That statement seems to be true for the most part.

The Realme 11 Pro flaunts a beautiful and premium finish, a curved AMOLED display, and a Dimensity 7050 processor — all of which are an upgrade.

The smartphone has a Rs 23,999 price tag for the base variant with 8GB RAM and 128GB storage. The current crop of smartphones in this segment — namely, Lava Agni 2 (Review), Poco X5 Pro (Review), Redmi Note 12 Pro (Review), and more also offer some enticing features, so can the Realme 11 Pro be the crème de la crème? Find out in our review.

Realme 11 Pro Review: Pricing and Availability in India

The Realme 11 Pro will be available in India in three storage variants. Unlike the Realme 10 Pro (Review) from last year, the newer version starts with a higher memory variant. Pricing details for the Realme 11 Pro are listed below:

• 8GB/128GB – Rs 23,999
• 8GB/256GB – Rs 24,999
• 12GB/256GB – Rs 27,999

Realme 11 Pro Review: Design and build quality

• The phone weighs 191 grams.
• It’s available in three colour variants.

Realme has always gone over the top in the design department. The company has tried almost everything, from tacky colour-changing panels to designs inspired by a suitcase. But we think the Realme 11 Pro’s design is by far the best of the lot. It is one of the most beautiful phones we’ve come across in this price segment. Realme worked in collaboration with Matteo Menotto, former designer for Gucci, who claims the city of Milan inspires the design.

The device comes in three colour variants: Astral Black, Sunrise Beige and Oasis Green. The latter two variants sport a faux-leather finish that feels like a sofa. The back is separated by a glossy textured zip-like finish, which is meant to resemble a stitch between two cloths. It gives the whole package a different look.

Try not to drink tea or coffee around the phone, as they will surely leave dirt marks. You can use the TPU case to save yourself from trouble and embarrassment. The circular camera module at the rear takes up a fair amount of real estate, but it does not protrude much. Nevertheless, this finish is a looker and tends to turn heads in public.

Weirdly enough, the Realme 11 Pro+ (Review) also sports the same design at a higher price. Both the devices are so similar that one of our colleagues unknowingly took home the Realme 11 Pro, thinking it was his 11 Pro+, only to realise the next morning.

Its well-distributed weight makes it an easy phone to use for long hours. The right side of the device features a volume rocker and power button, both of which provide good feedback.

The top portion houses a secondary microphone and a speaker grille. A SIM Card tray, primary microphone, USB Type-C port, and speaker grille sit on the bottom frame, while the left side is devoid of any buttons.

Realme 11 Pro Review: Display and audio

• It features a curved AMOLED display
• The panel refreshes at 120Hz.

As mentioned, the Realme 11 Pro is an upgrade over the Realme 10 Pro. While it can be prominently seen on the design front, the display also is a part of it. The Realme 11 Pro sports a 6.7-inch curved AMOLED display. The panel looks quite sleek because of the relatively thin bezels on all sides.

It has a resolution of 1080×2412 pixels with a screen density of 394 dpi. As is the case with most of the phones in today’s market, you get a 120Hz refresh rate, with an option to go down to 60Hz — to top it off, it also features an instantaneous touch sampling rate of 1260Hz.

The display looks gorgeous and has a good touch response. Additionally, the usual conundrum with curved displays — mistouch is also neatly avoided on the Realme 11 Pro. Comparing the colour output to that of the Lava Agni 2, the Realme 11 Pro produces more natural colours with cool tones in the Vivid colour mode.

The display offers a great content consumption experience with rich colours and decent brightness for outdoor usage. The content looks crisp, with deep blacks and punchy colours. It also supports the Widevine L1 certification so that you can stream full HD videos without issues. It also comes with HDR10+ certification, but Netflix does not support it out of the box.

Realme also claims to have integrated 20,000-level automatic brightness adjustments and AI brightness adjustment, which is said to make delicate backlight brightness adjustments — though we did not notice anything special in our day-to-day usage.

The Realme 11 Pro also has an in-display fingerprint sensor, which works flawlessly. Face unlock also did not cause us any trouble.

The stereo speaker setup makes the content consumption circle a whole. While it gets loud enough without any distortions, it lacks decent depth in the bass.

Realme 11 Pro Review: Performance and Software

• A MediaTek Dimensity 7050 processor powers it.
• It comes with Android 13 out of the box.

The MediaTek Dimensity 7050 seems to be getting comfortable in the under Rs 25,000 price segment. It recently debuted with the Lava Agni 2 and can also be found in 11 Pro’s elder sibling. It’s essentially a renamed version of the Dimensity 1080 since both run at the same clock speeds with the same fabrication process. It comes with the usual set of connectivity options but misses out on any IP rating.

The Realme 11 Pro ran smoothly in our daily usage without noticeable lags or stutters. The phone handles multi-tasking quite well, especially when switching between multiple apps.

While the RAM management on the device is decent in most cases, we noticed instances when the phone cleared a bunch of apps saved in the background. This happened to us when a benchmark app was opened.

Realme introduced something called Dash Engine, which is supposed to help with switching between apps and keeping it in memory for heavy tasks. We are guessing the engine needs a bit of oiling. It’s something that can be fixed with a software update and is not really a deal breaker.

As for numbers on benchmark tests, the phone secured a score of 510,336 on AnTuTu v10. The Realme 11 Pro+ scored 534867 on the same test. In Geekbench 6, the phone returned 836 and 2099 single-core and multi-core scores, respectively.

While AnTuTu scores are higher than Lava Agni 2, Geekbench scores are lower. The Sling Shot Extreme test on 3DMark returned an overall score of 4021.

The Realme 11 Pro can go to Smooth and Extreme settings on BGMI, which means you can get 60fps gameplay. It also can go to HDR and Ultra, allowing you to play at 40fps. We did not face any major stutters or lags during our time gaming on the phone. But we did notice the back panel starting to warm up.

The Realme 11 Pro runs on Realme UI 4.0 based on Android 13 out of the box. The software is quite snappy, with smooth animations throughout. As usual, you get a slew of special features such as a Split screen, Quick Return, Smart Sidebar, and more.

Speaking of usual things, the Realme 11 Pro comes with an overwhelming barrage of bloatware apps, some of which cannot be uninstalled. These apps tend to get under your skin with constant spam notifications.

Additionally, gimmicks such as RAM expansion are also available, which allocates a portion of the storage for the memory. You can go up to a total of 12GB of expanded RAM.

Realme 11 Pro Review: Cameras

• It sports a dual camera setup with a 100-megapixel primary camera.
• The phone can record videos at 4K 30fps.

While the elder sibling gets a 200-megapixel primary camera, the younger sibling is not very far out with a 100-megapixel primary camera. However, on the numbers front, it gets an inferior camera compared to the Realme 10 Pro.

The primary camera has OIS to compensate for shakes. It misses out on an ultra-wide angle camera, like last time, which is a bummer. The secondary shooter is a 2-megapixel portrait camera. The front of the Realme 11 Pro features a 16-megapixel camera for selfies.

The camera UI is pretty much the same as last year, though we found a very interesting mode which takes a burst shot (contains three images) of a single frame. It then showcases three different photos with a focus on every perspective. As for the rest, Realme’s traditional Street mode can be seen here, too, along with Group Portrait, which is a great addition.

Photos captured in daylight were bright, contrasty and detailed. The post-processing tends to boost the greens, as you can see in the images above. Despite that, the photos were quite eye-candy and social-media ready. On default settings, the phone clicks pixel-binned 12-megapixel shots, but you have the option to switch to Hi-Res shots using the full 100-megapixel shooter.

Capturing these shots doesn’t take much time, and photos contain more details. However, the dynamic range on the Realme 11 Pro wasn’t up to the mark in most scenarios, as we noticed overblown highlights often. In some cases, it managed to over-brighten the image for no reason.

The Realme 11 Pro allows you to zoom 20x digitally, but the company claims the in-sensor 2x zoom can click lossless images. This mode takes a bit of warmth out of the picture, and while it looks decent on the surface, zooming in reveals a bunch of watercolour effects on the foliage.

The Street mode also has two options: 26mm and 52mm, which is essentially 1x and 2x. What we enjoyed more in the Street Mode was the auto-zoom effect. A single tap on the subject locks the focus and then slowly zooms into it. It looks quite cool and lowers the burden of you trying to pinpoint the subject and pinch into the screen. Portrait mode also works well, with a good blur effect.

In low-light conditions, the output from Realme 11 Pro was quite good. Night mode kicks in automatically, helping brighten the entire scene. In dimly light conditions, the camera did not invite noise as much. Thanks to OIS, minor shakes are compensated at night, so photos don’t turn out blurry. Places with bright light did not cause any blooming effect, which is good.

If you haven’t understood some jargon from the above paragraphs, Shubham has helped break it down in his review of the Realme 11 Pro+.

The selfie camera is rather underwhelming, with unnecessary skin-smoothening despite the filter being turned off. Photos clicked when facing the sunlight reproduced overblown highlights on our faces, and the same can be seen in Portrait mode. Speaking of which, edge detection was also average, as it couldn’t handle our hair strands well.

The Realme 11 Pro can record optically stabilised videos at 1080p. You get an option to enable ultra-steady in the settings.

Realme 11 Pro Review: Battery life and charging

• It packs in a 5,000mAh battery.
• It takes the phone an hour and 10 minutes to charge fully.

You get an 80W charger in the box, but the phone supports only up to 67W. Realme also seems to be running with an excess stock of 80W chargers in the factory.

The battery backup on the Realme 11 Pro is excellent, with a screen time of anywhere north of the six-and-a-half-hour mark. Our usage mainly consisted of scrolling through social media apps, using the camera, and binge-watching Asur.

The phone takes half an hour to reach the 60 per cent mark and an hour and 10 minutes to fully charge from dead, which is on par with the competition.

Realme 11 Pro Review: Verdict

The Realme 11 Pro is, without a doubt, an upgrade over last year. The faux leather finish gives the phone a premium and unique look, which is uncommon in this segment.

The curved display adds to the premium package while producing good colours for an apt multimedia experience. The Dimensity 7050 won’t lure performance enthusiasts, as the chip is ideal for people with generic usage.

While the primary camera shoots good images, the absence of an ultra-wide angle camera is still disappointing. Adding this would’ve given the whole ‘upgrade’ tagline more essence.

The battery life and charging duo are well-optimised and meet the standards of the segment while exceeding at times. The software is feature-rich but also bloatware rich.

Coming to alternatives, if you prefer clean software and an ultra-wide angle camera, the Lava Agni 2 can be a good alternative (if it ever comes back in stock), but you’ll have to bear in mind that it comes with a slightly lower-capacity battery. Performance enthusiasts can look at the Poco X5 Pro, which will surely quench their gaming thirst.