Realme 11X 5G First Impressions: A Strong Player in the Budget Segment

Realme has launched its latest 11 series smartphones in India which includes the mid-range Realme 11 5G as well as the Realme 11X 5G. The latter if the more affordable one and comes with a sleek and lightweight design. The new smartphone is the first phone in the product lineup to come with a new Purple Dawn colour option. Apart from this, the recently launched octa-core MediaTek Dimensity 6100+ SoC has also been used in the smartphone. We got our hands on the 11X 5G and here’s our first impressions of the phone.

The starting price of Realme 11X 5G has been kept at Rs. 14,999 in India. This is for the base variant which comes with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. The 8GB RAM variant is priced at Rs. 15,999 and comes with the same amount of storage. Apart from the new shade of purple, the phone is also available in Midnight Black. 

The Realme 11X 5G features a polycarbonate body

Starting with the design, the body of the Realme 11X 5G is made of polycarbonate, but the back panel has a glass-like finish. For this colour variant, the glitter effect and lines look similar to the letter ‘S’ which the company calls ‘S-curve Gradient’ design. We have the Purple Dawn color of the phone for review, which has shades of blue and purple when the light falls on it. The good thing is that despite having a reflective panel, fingerprints are not easily visible. Its thickness is 7.89mm and weight is 190g.

There is a large circular camera module on the rear panel, which includes two camera sensors and a flash unit. The Realme 11X 5G has a boxy design. The company calls it a ‘right angle bezel design’ and claims that it should offer a comfortable grip. Even though it’s not very slippery to hold, you can still use the tinted silicone cover in the box for added safety. The phone has a fingerprint sensor on the power button, which worked smoothly during my initial use.

The Realme 11X 5G ships with a charger and case in the box

There’s a 3.5mm headphone jack, USB Type-C port, and speaker grille on the bottom, and the triple-slot SIM tray on the left side of the frame, which can hold two SIM cards and a microSD card. Realme says that the storage can be expanded by up to 2TB. The Realme 11X 5G uses a MediaTek Dimensity 6100+ chipset, which was launched in July this year. It is a built using the 6nm process and has eight CPU cores.

The Realme 11X 5G has a 6.72-inch full-HD+ AMOLED display, which has a 120Hz refresh rate and up to 240Hz touch sampling rate. It supports a peak brightness up to 550 nits. In my initial time with the phone, I found the display to be bright enough for indoor use, but outdoors during the day, I had some difficulty viewing content. Colors were also vivid. There are three options for adjusting the display refresh rate — 120Hz, 60Hz and an Auto-Select, which automatically adjusts the refresh rate based on the content playing on the screen.

The dual-rear camera setup of the smartphone includes a 64-megapixel main sensor with f/1.79 aperture. A few sample photos taken in good light looked social media-ready. The camera can record videos at up to 1080p 30fps. The setup also has a 2-megapixel portrait sensor with an f/2.4 aperture. Features such as 64MP mode, night mode, street mode, text scanner, tilt shift are present in the camera app.

Even though the Realme 11X 5G falls in the affordable segment, there are few competing models which give you an ultra-wide camera, so it’s disappointing to not see one here. The Realme 11X 5G gets an 8-megapixel front camera which captures decent pictures in daylight. However, we will give you all the finer details in our full review.

The Realme 11X 5G misses out on an ultra-wide camera

The Realme 11X 5G packs a 5,000mAh battery which supports 33W fast charging. You get a 33W charging brick inside the box. In my initial usage, the battery managed to get me through the whole day comfortably. Talking about the software, the Realme 11X 5G runs on Android 13-based Realme UI 4.0. On first boot, I noticed a lot of bloatware. However, most of these apps could be uninstalled. I didn’t get spammed by notifications in my initial use. The smartphone comes with almost all the basic connectivity options such as 5G, 4G LTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.2, GPS/ A-GPS, and USB Type-C.

Stay tuned for the full review of Realme 11X 5G, coming soon.