One of the highly-anticipated mid-range phones is finally here in Malaysia! Introducing the realme 16 Pro. I have it here in the purple color, and we got it for the past like 3 weeks already, and have been doing some tests with it as well. I know we’re kinda late to the party since the realme 16 Pro was released in other countries for like 3 months or so.
Performance
We’ll start with the performance. The realme 16 Pro comes with the MediaTek Dimensity 7300 Max. We’ll get to the “Max” part later, but we’ll talk about the gaming performance first.
Now, the Dimensity 7300 Max is pretty much similar to what the Snapdragon 7s Gen 4 level, and the performance is quite okay, I’d say.
In Genshin Impact with the lowest graphical settings, it can run about 30-ish FPS while in combat and can maintain around 40-ish FPS while running around. The frame rate does fluctutate a lot, because the GPU is already at 100% while we’re just standing around.
Zenless Zone Zero comes next. At the lowest graphical preset, the flower boss fight was full of stutters at first because it had to do some shader caching, but once it’s done, the game runs at an okay frame rate. It’s definitely playable, but also not the best experience.
Wuthering Waves can actually still run at the lowest settings. I mean, with the most demanding nest fight, it can drop the slideshow FPS territory, but it’s not too bad. It’s still playable, though it does test my patience.
Driving around is also going to drop to some slideshow-ish FPS as well, somewhere around 19fps. I mean, it’s still playable, but it definitely tests my patience a lot. The problem with it – I think – is the loading speed and the GPU.
We also tested Arknights Endfield on the realme 16 Pro, and if you’re interested then check our full gaming test video down below, where we also talk about the FPS number, the wattage, the temperature, and frame times, all of that.
Battery life
For the battery, the realme 16 Pro comes with a 7,000mAh battery, and realme surprisingly also published the Wh value too, which is 27.44Wh. Using our standardized battery life test, we can get around 22 hours and 47 minutes. It’s… not that good. Again, doing some quick napkin math, it is using around 1.2W average throughout the entire PC Mark battery life test. Kinda high, actually – but do keep in mind that we are testing it at the native resolution, not 1080p.
Charging speed
Now, the charging speed. The realme 16 Pro comes with an 80W SUPERVOOC charger in the box, and with the default settings, it can charge from 15% to completion in around 80 minutes. It’s not really a linear charging graph as the charging speed is clearly responding to the temperature of the battery.
Then, in the settings menu when we turned up the charging speed to the maximum, it surprisingly has better temperatures? I don’t know how and why, but hey, it charges completely in less than an hour – and I’m truly impressed by it.
Using our USB-PD PPS charger, it can charge from 15% to completion in around 2 hours, but we have to look at it under a microscope, figuratively speaking. The beginning parts of the charging cycle is actually really fast as it can take in around 45W for a long time, hence the temperature reaching up to around 37.5°C. It then reaches 80% battery charge within just like 40 minutes.
Then, it slows down the charging speed to the point that it takes in only around 7W. Of course, it takes a super long time fill up that last 20% battery.
But still, I’m happy that it plays quite well with USB-PD PPS chargers. Not the best, but it’s okay for me since I charge my devices overnight anyway.
Screen
Let’s now also talk about the screen. The realme 16 Pro comes with a 6.78-inch AMOLED display with a resolution of 2772×1272 pixels, and goes up to 120Hz refresh rate. The screen in itself is actually pretty good, too.
The brightness levels are quite good here as it can reach around 1100 nits at most, and down to 1.82 nits at its lowest.
As for the color gamut coverage and color accuracy, we tested it straight away with the Brilliant color profile to test its true potential. It can actually cover virtually 100% of both sRGB and DCI-P3 color gamuts while maintaining a low average ΔE. The maximum ΔE is probably just a spike somewhere since the average is so low.
Overall, it’s actually good for a mid-range device.
Software
The software is actually quite difficult to talk about, I’d say. It comes with realme UI 7.0 and it is very smooth to navigate around and there were no snags or hiccups. However… as you can see here, there are quite a lot of bloatware. All these apps – I didn’t install them and it just comes with the device. Plus, the notification bar has a persistent “search bar” from the system launcher that I have no idea why it’s there.
I can remove it, but why is it there in the first place? Other than the bloatware issue, I’m actually quite okay with the software overall.
Camera
Oh, the cameras. We have a total of three cameras here, but only two of them can be used to take pictures. The last camera-looking circle… it’s actually the IR blaster.
To have a look at all the pictures taken with the realme 16 Pro, watch our video at the top of this review.
Design
All of this is packed within this design of a phone. It’s quite thin, very nice to hold, and has a really nice camera bump design. It’s one of the nicer-looking ones that I’ve seen in recent years. Also, this purple color is just really nice. I love it a lot, and they also color-matched the phone’s frame too!
A few more things to mention
And a few more things to mention about the realme 16 Pro. It comes with a USB 2.0 port at the bottom, pretty typical for a mid-range phone – and it also has a dual SIM card slot as well.
And as mentioned earlier, since there is an IR blaster – there is a remote functionality too. Pretty straightforward overall.
Should you buy the realme 16 Pro?
So, should you buy this phone? The realme 16 Pro… I don’t have the price right now, but I’ll make a guess.
If the realme 16 Pro is at around RM1,499 or lower, then the price is at quite a good price point. This phone sit somewhere around the lower mid-range segment of smartphones, and with that price, I can get by.
Where to buy? (Affiliate links)
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