Realme X50 Pro review: Flagship configuration and good looks for 3599 yuan?

As early as half a month ago on February 24, realme released its new flagship product realme X50 Pro overseas. After waiting for nearly half a month, Snapdragon 865 flagship phones of various brands have been released one after another, and the price of realme X50 Pro has been repeatedly discussed by netizens. Finally, today, this realme flagship phone, which is sold overseas for 599 euros, has released a Chinese version. Will it continue to be so popular? Let's take a look at the phone itself.

　　Appearance: Can “red rust” add fragrance?

　　From the name, we can see that realme X50 Pro 5G (hereinafter referred to as "X50 Pro") inherits the main design of realme X50. The rear quad-camera module is arranged in the upper left corner of the fuselage, and the realme brand logo is in the lower left corner. The color and craftsmanship of the back cover best show the "Pro" appearance of this phone, which also brings a flagship temperament to the X50 Pro.

realme X50 Pro 5G

　　The back cover is made of atomized glass processed by AG technology, which feels very delicate and is relatively easy to leave fingerprints. The two literary names "Moss" and "Rust" are the colors of the X50 Pro, inspired by the popular Morandi color system in recent years, characterized by low color saturation.

　　We got the "Rust Red" color scheme. When I saw the real phone, my first reaction was that this might be the most appropriately named color scheme for a phone. In the absence of light, the color of the back cover does look a bit like "rust", showing a dark red color. When the light flows, the reflected light pattern gives another feeling. The shape of the light pattern is a strip texture perpendicular to the phone. Compared with the previous generation, it is more stable and majestic. The color shows a distinct metallic texture and is lighter in color, a bit like the shadow of shaking a red wine glass under the light.

The X50 Pro has a more stable and flagship-like appearance.

　　The frames around the body are all made of metal, which is very round and matte. Compared with the real me X50, the X50 Pro has another obvious change, that is, the fingerprint recognition button has disappeared.

　　Naturally, the under-screen fingerprint unlocking has returned to the X50 Pro. The screen uses a 6.44-inch Samsung SuperAMOLED screen and has been upgraded to the third-generation screen fingerprint unlocking. The fingerprint recognition area has doubled. The actual experience speed is indeed very fast, and it can be unlocked almost without feeling. The front camera still uses a "capsule" punch hole to accommodate two cameras. For this design, it can only be said that under the current technical conditions, this is the only way to maintain an ultra-high screen-to-body ratio and carry two front cameras.

The X50 Pro's under-screen fingerprint recognition is located relatively low.

　　In summary, the "red rust" visual effect makes this phone very eye-catching, and the matte texture and rounded edges also give it a good grip, which makes the X50 Pro more in line with the positioning of realme's flagship. However, the weight of 205 grams is still a bit heavy, and as a phone with an AMOLED screen, the black border is not really narrow.

　　The 90Hz refresh rate screen is good enough but a bit regrettable

　　As mentioned earlier, the X50 Pro is equipped with a 6.44-inch Samsung Super AMOLED screen, using E3 luminous materials, with a maximum excitation brightness of 1000 nits. The 90Hz refresh rate that has already appeared on the realme X2 Pro will naturally not be absent, which is of course also the standard configuration of this year's flagship model.

　　Simply put, the experience brought by the 90Hz refresh rate is smooth, with less lag when sliding, less text smearing when reading, and more responsive operation. The most basic operation when we operate a mobile phone is sliding. With a high refresh rate screen, the overall experience of the mobile phone will be smoother.

　　Of course, in order to achieve the above effect, the 180Hz touch sampling rate also plays a role. The touch sampling rate affects the touch sensitivity of the screen. The higher the touch sampling rate, the higher the touch sensitivity of the screen. A high touch sampling rate can reduce our touch delay.

　　Seeing this, some friends may wonder, the realme X50 is equipped with a high refresh rate of 120Hz, why is the Pro version reduced to 90Hz. The answer is actually very simple, the screen materials of the two are different. The realme X50 uses an LCD screen. Limited by the display principle, the LCD screen has a "smear" problem. Especially in low temperature conditions, the screen response time will become longer, and the main effect of the high refresh rate is to reduce the ghosting. Therefore, the X50 Pro uses an OLED screen, which has no inherent defects, and the actual experience of 90Hz is better than the 120Hz of the realme X50.

The left picture shows the 120Hz refresh rate of the X50; the right picture shows the 90Hz refresh rate of the X50 Pro

　　We also tested it on Weibo. The Realme X50 has a higher sliding sensitivity, which means the page slides faster, while the X50 Pro has a relatively slower sliding speed, and one slide can probably swipe out two to three Weibo posts. In slow motion, it can also be found that the text smear of both is very small, and the visual experience is not much different.

　　Starting with realme X50, realme has its own exclusive UI - realme UI. realme hopes that this UI can convey the brand's concept of real design, so it has redesigned the system colors, icons, wallpapers and animations.

　　In actual experience, the overall saturation of realme UI is relatively high. According to the official, these colors are all taken from things in nature. The default icons have also been redesigned in a "realistic style". The system animation has been optimized according to the characteristics of the high refresh rate of the screen to improve fluency. In addition, it also has special features such as Breeno call real-time translation, calendar invitation, super text, focus mode, dark mode, etc.

　　Overall, it is a little regretful that there is no 120Hz refresh rate OLED screen, but the 90Hz effect is still good. Realme UI is still maintained at version 1.0, without much change, but some optimizations have been made to the details such as the smoothness of the whole system and the battery consumption of night standby.

　　Still 64 million quad-camera with more functions

　　The X50 Pro's camera configuration has also been upgraded. First, the front wide-angle main camera has been upgraded to 32 million pixels, using the Sony IMX616 sensor. The ultra-wide-angle camera is still 8 million pixels with an angle of 105°. The biggest advantage of the front dual camera is that the shooting range is wider.

　　The X50 Pro front camera also supports UIS super video stabilization, and can also achieve the video effect of portrait blur. At the same time, HDR, super portrait night scene selfie, AI beauty and 120fps/1080p slow motion video, these common functions of the rear camera can also be realized on the front camera, giving the front camera more gameplay.

　　The four rear cameras have not changed much, with the 64MP main camera + 12MP 2x telephoto lens + 119° ultra-wide-angle lens still there, while the macro lens that used to be used to make up the numbers has been replaced with a portrait mono lens. The performance of the three main cameras has been introduced in detail in the realme X50 review, and this time we will mainly talk about it in combination with sample photos.

A direct comparison between the 64-megapixel mode and the default mode, with the default mode in the middle.

　　The main camera still uses a 64-megapixel 1/1.72-inch Samsung GW1 sensor. Photos taken in 64-megapixel mode have a higher resolution, more room for cropping in post-production, and can maintain a sharp picture after a certain amount of cropping. In the default shooting mode, the camera will combine four pixels into one, taking photos with lower pixels but more delicate image quality.

Use the main camera's default mode to shoot and trigger HDR.

　　Let's take a look at the performance in backlight. When taking this photo, the brightness difference between the sky and the ground is very large. It can be seen that although the position of the sun is inevitably overexposed, the details of the dark part are well preserved and the brightness of the sky is balanced. However, the glare of the lens and an obvious reflection point can also be seen in the lower left corner of the picture.

The ultra-wide-angle lens has a shooting angle of 119° and is integrated with a macro lens.

　　This ultra-wide-angle lens has good distortion control and supports phase focus. Combined with HDR, it is more suitable for taking landscape and architectural photos. However, the pixel of this lens is only 8 million, and under high light ratio conditions, obvious purple fringing will appear, and the image quality at the edge of the picture will also be seriously degraded.

Shooting with 2x optical zoom

Shot with 5x hybrid zoom

　　The telephoto lens is 12 megapixels, with an equivalent focal length of 54mm, and supports 5x hybrid zoom and up to 20x digital zoom. The white balance of common lenses is relatively yellowish, and the saturation of the captured images is slightly higher. The image quality is still good at 2x zoom, and 12 megapixels are more than enough. 5x zoom is the maximum focal length of this camera, and higher zoom multiples cannot guarantee the image quality.

　　Finally, there is the portrait Mono lens, which is mainly used to obtain more light information and assist the main camera to obtain better photosensitivity, so as to adapt to the newly added "filter system" and shoot in the style of retro film.

　　Standard flagship configuration charging is a surprise

　　The X50 Pro is equipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 5G mobile platform, which adopts 7nm process technology and Kryo585 A77 octa-core architecture. Compared with Snapdragon 855, the CPU and GPU performance are improved by 25% at the same time, and it has a fifth-generation AI Engine that is 2 times faster than the previous generation. In actual experience, whether it is daily use, watching videos or playing games, Snapdragon 865 is sufficient, and the most important thing is that it has better battery life performance.