Realme Narzo 50 5G review: stunning design and dependable battery life

Here's our review of the Realme Narzo 50 5G

• By Ashish Kumar
Published On: 2 June 2022 | 17:05 IST

Realme’s Narzo-series has included some noteworthy options, and in a span of four months, the company has launched as many as four Narzo smartphones in the form of the Realme Narzo 50, Narzo 50A Prime, Narzo 50 5G, and Narzo 50 Pro 5G. The Narzo 50 5G is the latest in the lineup. The handset is a 5G version of the Realme Narzo 50 4G (review) from earlier this year, with some tweaks in design and specifications. Here’s a quick review of the phone after using it for well over a week.

Verdict

The Realme Narzo 50 5G is one of the better-looking smartphones in the segment. The handset comes with the latest design and offers a great in-hand feel. That said, the display and performance of the Realme smartphone aren’t something that a power user would like. The handset is good for light gaming and some multi-tasking. However, the cameras are just average. There is some solicitude for the Realme Narzo 50 5G thanks the good battery life and useful fast charging solution.

The lowdown

• The Realme Narzo 50 5G design has my heart. Despite the plastic build, the handset in blue hue looks quite solid and premium to me. The phone comes with a gradient kevlar speed texture, which features chamfered edges and offers a cool effect under lights. The chamfered edges make the phone comfortable to hold. Additionally, the Realme Narzo 50 5G smartphone has a matte finish that does a decent job of hiding fingerprints and smudges. There is a side-mounted fingerprint scanner embedded in the power button, and a USB Type-C port along with a speaker grille, 3.5mm headphone jack, and a microphone on the bottom edge. The rear panel of the Realme smartphone sports a rectangular camera module with huge sensors, which I found to be a bit intimidating but that’s how the phones have been lately. The camera module protrudes from the surface and makes the phone wobble, but it can easily be countered with a case like the one the company ships in the box.

• The Realme Narzo 50 5G packs a 6.6-inch FHD+ display that bears a waterdrop notch for the selfie camera atop. It’s arguably the same IPS LCD panel as the 4G Narzo 50; however, with a 90Hz refresh rate instead of 120Hz. This is good for the battery life but not for gaming as the moving content looks and feels great on high refresh rate panels. That said, I didn’t notice any drop in refresh rate while working through supported apps and the interface. The Realme Narzo 50 5G also offered respectable viewing angles and colour accuracy. While the display isn’t entirely bezel-less, it offers an immersive viewing experience. The handset also supports a 180Hz touch sampling rate for a quick response time and is Widevine L1 certified. The latter ensures that the Realme smartphone can stream HD content from OTT platforms. However, the 600 nits of peak brightness don’t offer good readability under direct sunlight.

• At the core of the Realme Narzo 50 5G lies the MediaTek Dimensity 810 SoC. It’s the same chipset which can be found in Realme 9 5G, Redmi Note 11T, Lava Agni 5G, Vivo V21e, and a bunch of other mid-range devices. The chipset is known to perform decently well in terms of handling day-to-day activities and occasional gaming, and the same can be said for the Realme Narzo 50 5G. I didn’t notice any lag or heating issues while multitasking and playing light games. However, things did get a little iffy for the handset while playing high-end games. There were some noticeable frame drops while running BGMI in HD graphics and high frame rate settings. The experience only got better when I toned down the game’s graphics settings to ‘Balanced’. Now, I was using the top-end variant of the phone, which ships with 6GB RAM and 128GB UFS 2.2 storage. The Realme Narzo 50 5G is also available in two other RAM and storage variants – 4GB / 64GB and 4GB / 128GB. The storage is further expandable up to 1TB using a microSD card in a hybrid slot. The handset also supports RAM expansion, which adds up to 5GB of virtual RAM from the phone’s storage. This comes in handy when too many apps are running in the background.

• In the camera department, the Realme Narzo 50 5G packs dual sensors at the back, comprising a 48MP primary unit with f/1.8 aperture. This is aided by a 2MP portrait lens and dual-LED flash. There are several modes as well, including Nightscape for lowlight photography, Street, Portrait, and more. However, the results can be less than impressive. The handset offers well-lit photographs in broad daylight, but with some noise, which is only noticeable when you zoom in. Additionally, the HDR mode oversaturated the colours a bit and made them look brighter than they were. As for the lowlight photography, the Realme Narzo 50 5G lacks clarity and detail. The Nightscape mode adds a little brightness to the images, but the results can be grainy. The 8MP AI beauty selfie camera offers similar results.

• Now, the battery life on this phone is up to par. The Realme Narzo 50 5G packs a 5,000mAh battery, which kept me going for an entire day. The usage included checking Gmail and Slack every now and then, streaming shows, going through social media posts, and playing games. On days I grilled the phone with back to back BGMI sessions, the battery life dropped by a couple of hours. Good thing though the handset supports a 33W fast charging solution, which juices up the battery from zero to 50 percent in just 35 minutes. Thereafter, as with any other fast charging tech, the charging speed slowed down and the remaining 50 percent took 40-45 minutes to charge. Additionally, Realme has added Smart 5G power-saving technology on the Narzo 50 5G, which can intelligently switch between 4G and 5G networks depending on the surrounding signal strength, thereby reducing the power consumption of the phone by 30 percent. Unfortunately, I couldn’t put that claim to test as the 5G services are yet to launch in India.

• The Realme Narzo 50 5G boots Android 12-based Realme UI 3.0 out of the box. The OEM has improved the custom skin over the years, making it cleaner and more minimalistic than ever before; however, there is still some bloatware to address. The side-mounted fingerprint scanner unlocks the smartphone in a jiffy. The phone’s bottom-firing speaker gets sufficiently loud but lacks clarity. As for the connectivity, the handset offered decent 4G speeds on Faridabad’s Airtel network.

Final verdict

The Realme Narzo 50 5G is Realme 9 5G (review) in disguise, with a design change. The handset shares a ton of similarities with the number series smartphone, which was launched earlier this year. That said, the Narzo 50 5G runs the latest Android 12 OS out of the box and supports a faster 33W charging solution. The handset’s price in India is also marginally higher than the Realme 9 5G, which has got better cameras.

The Realme Narzo 50 5G is priced in India at Rs 15,999 for the base 4GB RAM + 64MP storage variant. The 4GB + 128GB and 6GB + 128GB options cost Rs 16,999 and Rs 17,999 respectively. Smartphones that are available in a similar price range include Moto G60 (review), Samsung Galaxy F23 5G (review), Redmi Note 11T (review), and Poco X4 Pro (review), most of which are better specced than the Realme Narzo smartphone. However, the Narzo 50 5G score high for its nice design and long battery life.

Editor’s rating: 3.5 / 5

Pros

• Good design
• Smooth performance
• Long battery life

Cons

• The display could have been better
• Low light photography needs improvement