Picking up a half-decent sub-R10,000 smartphone wasn’t always quite so simple. South Africans were once regularly strapped for choice, but the times, they are a-changin’. It seems like every other day we hear about some new budget device vying for our attention. This is one of those days. Realme has officially launched a fresh budget-beater, the C61, hoping to detract from the likes of Apple and Samsung with a R6,000 price tag.
“C61 is a smartphone that will be your companion for many years, offering plenty of storage for your media, an unprecedented battery guarantee, and the performance you need to multitask across your favourite personal and work apps. All this power comes packed into a phone thinner than 10 credit cards stacked together,” said Jace Chen, Realme’s country manager for South Africa.
Touchin’ grass
There’s no denying Realme’s built a nice-looking smartphone for a fraction of the price. But nice-looking isn’t all we’re after, no matter how satisfactory that textured backing is. It’s certainly a cliché, but the personality is all we’re after in a smartphone nine times out of ten. Fortunately, Realme’s kitted the C61 with the basics. That means an HD+ 6.7in LCD display capable of hitting 90Hz and a rough 560 nits peak brightness.
Realme’s real coy about the chipset powering all that, but a quick trip to GSMArena tells us the C61 packs a not-so-reputable 12nm Unisoc Tiger T612 chipset, and Realme’s attitude suddenly makes a whole lot more sense. It may not be the most capable chipset out there, and it absolutely loathes gaming. But for the R6,000 asking price, it’ll get you from WhatsApp to Spotify without much hassle along the way.
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6/8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage make up the rest of the specs, even if Realme managed to convince customers the C61 offers “up to 24GB of Dynamic RAM.” Spoiler alert: it doesn’t. But that hasn’t stopped Realme from spouting it with a straight face. We’re less sceptical of Realme’s claims that a 5,000mAh battery powers the C61, which has long since become the standard for smartphones, even the budget-beaters.
Finally, there’s a 50MP sensor on the C61’s rear, accompanied by a 0.08MP auxiliary lens and a 5MP snapper up front. If that sounds like a deal you can swallow, the Realme C61 is available today from Vodacom for R6,000 once-off, R330/m on a 24-month contract, or R280/m if you bump that up to 36 months.