Realme 11 Pro+ 5G Review: Close to the Mark, Yet Misses the Bullseye

Realme’s number series is known for value-for-money devices. It’s quite popular among consumers and gives tough competition to offerings from other brands in the same price bracket.

The latest addition to this lineup is the Realme 11 Pro series, which includes the Realme 11 Pro and the Realme 11 Pro+, successors to the Realme 10 Pro and the Realme 10 Pro+, respectively, from last year.

Compared to the last year’s offerings, the new models promise improvements in a few areas but for an increased price tag. Is this price hike justified, though? Let’s try and answer that for Realme 11 Pro+ 5G through this review.

Realme 11 Pro+ 5G: Design and Build

Realme is using a textured-finish back panel on the Realme 11 Pro+. It’s made out of plastic with vegan leather on top, which gives the device a premium look and keeps smudges away. Not only that but combined with the curved edges and the device’s weight—at just 189g—it also offers a nice in-hand feel, which makes it easy to use without a case.

However, what feels a little odd about this back panel design to me is the thin vertical strip running along its center. It’s a reflective strip sandwiched between fake stitching that gives a sense of a zipper. While I like the idea of a faux leather finish, the strip element isn’t to my taste. I’d pick the design of the Realme 10 Pro+ over this any day.

Similarly, there’s a massive camera module at the top of the device, which juts out a fair bit, though it acts as a nice resting position for the finger on the back panel. Talking about the frame, it’s a plastic one with a glossy finish. It doesn’t, however, look or feel cheap. Along its rid edge sit the power, volume up, and volume down buttons, all of which are sufficiently clicky and tactile.

Realme offers the Realme 11 Pro+ in three finishes: Oasis Green, Sunrise Beige, and Astral Black. Except for the Astral Black colorway, the other two colorways come with a faux leather finish.

Realme 11 Pro+ 5G: Display

Coming to the front, Realme has kept things on the Realme 11 Pro+ pretty much the same as its predecessor. As such, you get a large 6.7-inch curved AMOLED display with an FHD+ (2412×1080 pixels) screen resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate.

If you’re a fan of smartphones with curved displays, you’ll like what’s on offer here. The display is sharp and bright and has good contrast levels. As a result, watching content on the display is a nice experience. And Realme adds to this further by offering HDR10+ certification, which works well with YouTube.

Similarly, the Realme 11 Pro+ display has a peak brightness of 950 nits, which makes it sufficiently bright, so you wouldn’t experience any issues using it outdoors. Plus, being a 120Hz display, it also feels snappy.

That said, the display uses the Vivid color profile out of the box, which is a little too saturated for my liking. Thankfully, Realme offers two other modes—Natural and Pro—so you can switch to either based on your preference. Plus, there’s also the ability to tweak the screen’s color temperature for each mode, should you need it.

Lastly, Realme employs an in-display fingerprint scanner on the Realme 11 Pro+ for biometric authentication. Although it’s fast and reliable, it’s placed a little too low for my liking.

Realme 11 Pro+ 5G: Performance

Talking about performance, the Realme 10 Pro+ 5G comes with the Dimensity 7050 5G chipset under the hood, which is essentially a rebranded Dimensity 1080 5G that launched last year with some performance tweaks. It packs two Arm Cortex-A78 performance cores and six Cortex-A55 power-efficiency cores, and an Arm Mali-G68 GPU for graphics processing.

In day-to-day performance, the Dimensity 7050 on the Realme 11 Pro+ managed to tackle most operations without any hitch. It served me well with everyday tasks like browsing social media, watching content on YouTube (and OTT platforms), and capturing photos and videos.

I also played a few games on it, like Call of Duty and Asphalt, and it generally performed well without any stutters, though the back panel did get a little warm after gaming for 15-20 minutes. Similarly, the phone also got warm—a little too much for my liking—while clicking pictures or shooting videos; that too, for just 5 minutes on multiple occasions. This wasn’t a problem with the Realme 10 Pro+.

As for RAM management, Realme has done a good job here. Our unit comes with 12GB of RAM (with the ability to expand it further by 4GB), and in my time with the device, I didn’t experience any issues during multitasking. And except for maybe once or twice during gaming, I didn’t find the apps on the device going out of memory.

All in all, I’d say the Realme 11 Pro+ 5G is a capable performer for its price. It can handle everyday tasks just fine, but you shouldn’t expect mighty performance from the chipset running at its core. I used the device side-by-side with the Realme 10 Pro+, and I didn’t experience any noticeable difference between them in everyday tasks.

Realme 11 Pro+ 5G: Battery Life

Realme packs a 5000mAh battery on the Realme 11 Pro+ 5G. Kudos to Realme for including a high-capacity battery on a phone that’s so slim.

As per the company, this 5000mAh battery should easily last an entire day on a single charge. During testing, it averaged around 7 hours of screen-on-time with moderate use, which is impressive. And when it ran out of juice, the bundled 100W charger came in handy and fueled up the battery from 0 to 100% in just under 40 minutes.

Realme 11 Pro+ 5G: Software

The Realme 11 Pro+ 5G runs on Realme UI 4.0 out of the box. It’s a custom skin based on ColorOS 13, and it offers several customization options to help you personalize your experience to your preference.

Talking about my experience, I like the UI for its responsiveness and smooth animations. However, the bloatware situation here is terrible. It’s the same as last year, and it’s sad to see Realme not taking any measures to fix it.

Realme preloads a bunch of bloatware apps on the Realme 11 Pro+, like Josh, ShareChat, and Moj, which isn’t desirable. Thankfully, these apps are uninstallable, so you can remove them to free up some significant storage space. But what makes matters worse is the Hot Apps and Hot Games recommendations, which are still present in the software.

Similarly, many of my gripes with the software experience on the Realme 10 Pro+ are still present on the new model. For example, Realme UI continues to serve app recommendations when you install an app on your device. Then, there are those annoying notifications from Game Center, App Market, Phone Manager, and other system apps, which keep popping up multiple times a day.

Another thing I despise about the UI is the number of suggestions and tips it throws at you in certain apps. While the intention here may be to inform users about the features in the initial days of use, these prompts and suggestions add unnecessary friction to the user experience, if anything.

Realme 11 Pro+ 5G: Camera

The Realme 11 Pro+ 5G sports a triple-camera setup on the back. This setup includes a 200MP Samsung ISOCELL HP3 sensor with an f/1.69 aperture, an 8MP ultra-wide, and a 2MP macro sensor.

Starting with the primary sensor, it’s a decent one that shoots good-looking images in daylight and well-lit environments: the images come out sharp, have good contrast and brightness levels, and exhibit good dynamic range.

However, the colors appear a little too saturated in certain scenarios, which was the case with the Realme 10 Pro+ as well. What isn’t similar to its predecessor is that the camera software now gets skin tones close to real life, so portraits look more natural.

Speaking of, there’s a noticeable color shift in images shot in regular mode and portrait mode: the latter boosts colors and adds more contrast to images.

Talking about zooming capabilities, it’s improved on the Realme 11 Pro+. Shots captured with 2x and 4x zoom come out more detailed and sharp, and there’s no visible change in color saturation or temperature.

Low-light pictures also come out decent on the Realme 11 Pro+. It’s better than what the Realme 10 Pro+ managed to capture, thanks to a larger sensor and OIS support. But having said that, the performance isn’t consistent, as sometimes the pictures come out clear and sharp, while other times they’re a little too dark, soft, and lack details.

The same goes for night-time shots too. Although it’s gotten a lot better than what the Realme 10 Pro+ delivered, color reproduction is a hit or miss in challenging lighting conditions. On some occasions, the phone captures neutral-looking shots; other times, it produces too warm shots. Similarly, saturation levels are also inconsistent, just like how it is with daylight shots.

Talking about the ultrawide, you get subpar shots from this sensor, as the images mostly appear washed out and soft. Plus, there’s an odd flare that crops up around light sources at night. Lastly, you have the macro sensor, which is bad and produces unsaturated shots with too much noise.

Moving to the front camera, the Realme 11 Pro+ comes with a 32MP selfies shooter from Sony. It captures good selfies in daylight with enough details and natural-looking skin tones. However, things aren’t the same indoors, as the images often appear too soft and washed out in artificial light.

As for video recording, you can shoot up to 4K (in 30fps) with the rear camera on the Realme 11 Pro+ 5G. I like the footage quality—it’s more stable and clearer compared to the Realme 10 Pro+ in low light. The front camera, however, can record only 1080p videos at 30fps.

Realme 11 Pro+ 5G Review: Verdict

Realme offers the Realme 11 Pro+ 5G in two configurations:

• 8GB + 256GB: Rs 27,999
• 12GB + 256GB: Rs 29,999

For Rs 27,999, the Realme 11 Pro+ gets you a thin and light design with a good build, a very good display for content consumption, a capable processor that can handle everyday tasks and casual gaming without any hitch, and excellent battery life. But it falls short in camera performance (due to subpar secondary and tertiary cameras) and software experience (because of bloatware).

So if camera performance and software experience top your list of priorities, there are some other devices in this price range that you can check out. For example, you can consider the Pixel 6a if the camera is your top priority (although its general performance is questionable) and the Motorola Edge 40 for a clean software experience (although Moto isn’t known for software updates). Similarly, if you want the best performance under Rs 30,000, the POCO F5 is the phone to consider, or if you want a well-rounded device and you can stretch your budget a little, the Samsung Galaxy A54 makes for the perfect mid-range smartphone right now.

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