Ever since its separation from Oppo, Realme has been putting in some serious work towards establishing its presence in the highly-competitive Indian smartphone market. The company offers a wide range of devices ranging from flagship-tier beasts such as the Realme X2 Pro to more budget-friendly options such as the Realme C2. Its latest budget offering -the Realme 5i- first made its debut in Vietnam and is now available in India.
The Realme 5i features a 6.5-inch IPS LCD panel that has a resolution of 720x1600. It is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 665 SoC coupled with 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of internal storage expandable up to 256 GB via micro SD card. The rear camera array consists of a 12 MP primary sensor, an 8 MP wide-angle lens, a 2 MP macro lens and a 2 MP portrait lens. There's an 8 MP selfie camera at the front to round things off. The device is powered by a 5,000 mAh battery that supports 10 W charging.
Lastly, the Realme 5i comes with a rear-mounted fingerprint scanner and a headphone jack. It runs Android Pie-based ColorOS 6.1 out of the box. Realme promises that it will receive a bump up to Android 10 later this year.
There is only one variant of the Realme 5i for sale in India. It will be priced at Rs 8,999 ($129) and will come in two colors; Aqua Blue and Forest Green. It will go on sale starting January 15 and will be available on Flipkart and Realme's official website.
It'll be interesting to see how the Realme 5i fares against competitors such as the Redmi Note 8 and the Samsung Galaxy M20. There is a lot of demand for Rs 10,000 ($139) smartphones in the Indian market, and more competition is always welcome.