Realme launched the Narzo 10 and the Narzo 10A smartphones together to target young people, especially those who care about style and about gaming performance. Realme created this new sub-brand to put more emphasis on these features and draw more attention to this price segment. The Narzo 10 and the Narzo 10A are both priced very modestly, and they compete with some of Realme’s existing phones.
The Realme Narzo 10 and the Narzo 10A were announced before the national lockdown but were only able to officially launch and bring them to the market after the lockdown relaxations were announced. The Narzo 10 is already being sold as Realme 6i in a few other countries and the smartphone is expected to compete with the brand’s own Realme 6 in India.
Despite being a budget smartphone, Realme has come up with a rather premium design for the Realme Narzo 10 smartphone and the smartphone is available That Green and That White colors. The back panel of both these colors features a vertical pinstripes pattern that appears to shift from one side to another when you move the phone under sunlight. This is a little similar to what Realme tried with the onion edition of the Realme X Master Edition.
The front of the smartphone is very simple and comes with a waterdrop notch at the top of the display, the chin is pretty thin as well. The white variant of the Realme Narzo 10 comes with a matter silver frame while the green variant will have a green frame along with it. The smartphone comes with a very slick build and has a 20:9 aspect ratio display, the smartphone is pretty tall and narrow overall. The corners of the display were a little hard to reach, especially the top but thankfully the back of the Realme Narzo 10 isn’t very slippery allowing users to get a good grip of the smartphone.
The Realme Narzo 10 uses Gorilla Glass 3 for the protection of the display and comes with a pre-installed protector film, this doesn’t protect the edges of the class, but the included plastic case does add a little more protection. The Realme Narzo 10 comes with a fingerprint sensor on the back which is a little out of reach. The power and volume buttons on the smartphone are placed on the right and left respectively. The Realme Narzo 10 comes with a removable tray with support for nano-SIM cards and a microSD card slot. The fact that the Realme Narzo 10 came with a USB Type-C port was a surprising one and it certainly did make us happy to see budget smartphones finally move out of MicroUSB ports.
The Realme Narzo 10 is powered by the MediaTek Helio G80 SoC and is mainly targeted towards seasoned gamers, the Helio G-series chips come with good graphic capabilities and this smartphone is one of the few in the market with the G80 chipset. The SoC uses a 2GHz ARM Cortex-A75 core and 6 additional Cortex-A55 cores for efficiency. The smartphone only comes in one variant, the smartphone has 4GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage.
The Realme Narzo 10 comes with a 6.5-inch display and has an HD+ resolution which is surprising given that there are alternatives in this segment that offer a FullHD resolution. However, keeping the gaming aspect in mind, the lower resolution HD+ panel might actually help with the performance. The Realme Narzo 10 is powered by Android 10 based Realme UI that is similar to the ColorOS. The software is well laid out and comes with Digital Wellbeing, apart from this feature the software does look more familiar to the ColorOS that we are commonly used to seeing on Oppo smartphones.
The software still comes with a lot of bloatware even if you choose not to install several of the sponsored apps during the initial setup process. Luckily, the third-party apps are removable, but we did see a lot of spam notifications with misleading or clickbait ads. The browser is filled with ads and these ads cannot be removed or disabled. The Realme Narzo 10 is powerful enough for everyday use but we did face occasional touch response issues that make the device a little lagged. We did notice a little sluggishness while loading or exiting heavy apps and while the 4GB amount of RAM is generally enough for most tasks, it did end up being insufficient in some cases.
The display on the Realme Narzo 10 was pretty bright and crisp for the gaming experience, while the colors weren’t very vibrant but served the purpose of gaming and more. The smartphone is powered by a 5,000mAh battery and the phone easily lasts through a day full of use. After playing games, streaming lengthy movies, and regular phone usage we still had about 30 percent battery left.
Talking about the cameras, the Realme Narzo 10 comes with a quad-camera setup, the rear camera setup includes the regular 2MP macro and 2MP depth sensors that are commonly found on other smartphones. The primary 48MP sensor captured images well under bright sunlight and had a lot of details and exposures were balanced. There was a little blurring, but the close-ups were much better than landscapes.
While this camera might not be the capable one, it is good to see low-cost smartphones performing better than usual. The 8MP wide-angle sensor also delivers decent quality shots when there is good lighting, there is a little distortion towards the middle of the frame, but overall images are pretty good. The camera app is very well developed, and you can easily switch between the different modes easily without much of a learning curve.
Realme appears to experiment a lot with the Realme Narzo 10 and attempts to bring an all-rounder that meets most people’s requirements. The smartphone is targeted towards the young audience and places a lot of emphasis on gaming performance, we wish a little more emphasis was placed on the camera quality but Realme does offer phones at a little higher price for those who are looking for more.
