The Realme C51 smartphone has just landed in South Africa and is yet another Chinese smartphone out for our lucrative (and crowded) budget smartphone market. This one starts at R4,000 and hopes to justify the expense with a substantial camera, battery, and a fair crop of other specs.
Don’t be too worried if you haven’t heard much about Realme. You can think of it as a brand like Redmi or Honor (or Poco). It started life as a subdivision of Oppo but has since gone on to do its own thing (while still being owned by Oppo).
This is the Realme C51
The Realme C51 is being aimed at South Africa’s youth, according to the company. That goes some way toward explaining the price and the hardware focus for this 6.74in Android 13 device. The IPS LCD display supports up to 90Hz in terms of refresh rate and the 720 x 1,600 resolution should provide a decent experience. It’ll stop short of stunning, but we’ll give you a proper assessment once we lay hands on one.
Inside there’s supposed to be 8GB of dynamic memory, which is at odds with what we know about the C51’s physical innards. 4GB of physical RAM and 4GB of virtual makes the most sense but we’ll untie that particular knot at review time. Unisoc has provided a Tiger T612 processor for the thing to run on.
The Realme C51 has a few good specs in its corner. A 5,000mAh battery with Oppo’s SuperVOOC charging will come in handy. In deference to the price, however, that charge speed is limited to 33W. There’s a dual camera in the rear of the phone – a 50MP main and a 0.8MP depth sensor. Up front, the 5MP selfie shooter should do decent enough work for its size. Unusually, there’s a triple card slot in the side of the phone. It’ll handle two physical SIMs and a microSD card (up to 2TB), in case you’re space-mad.
That’s all well and good but we’re more keen on something a little more exotic from the Realme brand. One of its special-edition handsets, which all tend to be far more expensive in terms of hardware, wouldn’t go amiss after this one’s finished launching.
