Realme is now back with another mid-range value offering and it's got a lot of spec on offer for
the price it is the gt master edition powered by this snapdragon 778 g it's a 5g chip we have
a 6.43 inch 120 hertz amoled panel from samsung and this with a touch sampling rate of 360 hertz
a 4300 milliamp hour battery with 65 watt fast charging 64 megapixel main camera 32 megapixel
selfie and really a lot of offer for that price but is it a phone that you should
consider should you shortlist it and definitely check it out well there's a lot going for this
gt master edition as i'll show you in this in-depth review in the box you'll find a type
a to type c cable we have our 65 watt charger which fully charges this phone in approximately
40 minutes so it is very quick a great tpu case high quality one and we do have a sim tray tool
so the model i have here is the voyager gray they call it this color and it almost looks to me brown
so the weight of the phone not bad at all it's 180 grams the thickness you are looking at 8.2
millimeters with the camera included that brings it up to almost 10 millimeters according to my
measurements so this power on button here we've got easy access to that it's on the right but
what i don't really have easy access to is the in-screen fingerprint reader right here so it's
a little bit too low for me to me this is one area that i've got a bit of criticism from them
to give them sorry is that it really should be a little bit higher about here but even so it
does work really well as you can see so just unlocking right now that unlocks really quick
and fast we have a full hd display here this one is a samsung amoled screen okay and the size of
it is 6.43 inches this one and 120 hertz are very very smooth and i'll get on to the performance of
the rom and everything so right up here we have a 32 megapixel front facing camera the cameras on
the back so the set here we've got three of them it's good to see they've actually gone down one
camera because the other models they actually had four cameras on them so this one we've got
a main 64 megapixel sensor f 1.8 aperture then we've got an ultrawide which is 8 megapixels f
2.3 aperture with that one and a 2 megapixel f 2.4 macro camera with a focus point of 4 centimeters
now this material on the back it does pick up fingerprints it is plastic the frame around the
outside is plastic there too and our sim tray just to pull that out and show you that it takes two
nano sims there is no micro sd card support with this model down the bottom a single loud speaker
so there are no dual loudspeakers in this model which is sad and we have a type c port of course
now this is usb 2 speeds there's no video out support microphone and yes hooray a 3.5 millimeter
headphone jack so we are missing on the micro sd card support but at least we do have this which i
really love to still have in my phones so right at the top here there is a secondary microphone
for noise cancellation in calls and for video what is missing here is an ir transmitter sadly
not included overall i like the build quality for the price point of this phone it's perfectly
acceptable it's a nice solid build and just giving a bit of a flex here there are no creaks it does
not feel cheap at all the gt master edition screen here is 6.43 inches 120 hertz with a touch
sampling rate of 360 hertz so it responds to touch really quick and i've not had any problems
with gestures and just overall touch response is excellent on this so the maximum brightness i've
measured now to be 732 nits that's with whites and it is very good it's a bright screen blacks
look very very good nice and deep it does come with a pre-applied screen protector
and there is dc dimming that you can enable in the roomy labs which i will show you just after this
so some of the other settings here that we do have with this is you can go in to of course
display and i'll just quickly show you what we do have so right up the top here jump into that we've
got our dark mode i comfort you can also adjust the white balance color mode there which i keep on
gentle you can change it to vivid for more punchy colors or even brilliant and the refresh rate
under more you can go and change that so i've got it forced too high which is 120 hertz i mean why
not after all it's a 120 hertz phone but if you wanted to save on battery life you can use auto
or force it onto 60 hertz the gt master edition is running android 11 and Realme ui 2.0 it is very
very quick very fast optimization is excellent and it does have really to me an oxygen always feel
about it especially when it comes to the speed and performance so i have not seen any ui starters
lag anything like that now there are a few settings that are hidden away so one of them is
the dc dimming that i did mentioned you'll find that under realme lab so under roommate lab you
can go in and enable this if you're sensitive to that flickering you see the pulse with modular
modulation flicker and that is the option that you want to turn on the other which is a new feature
is the ram expansion that you can do so you'll find that under about the phone here if you go
into the ram so i have hardware eight gigabytes and then you can expand upon that by adding more
ram now it's a little bit misleading because it's not ram okay it's not random access memory this is
virtual memory so it's like your pc your pc your windows 10 pc virtual memory you may be running
that so it's just a swap file it's swapping between that it's going to boost in cache and
it does aid in the performance you can set this to two gigabits three or even five if you wanted
to do so if you're a very heavy user you may get some benefit out of that and so far i mean it does
seem to be very very smooth more manufacturers i believe will start to implement this and do it
and that's just really like a caching system there to speed things up so when you first get this
phone you have approximately 236 or so gigabytes free with this 250 gigabyte spec version and i
do have the eight gigabytes of ram so there's no micro sd card support so make sure you do choose
wisely on the storage capacity that you need now i'm on real ui's latest update here so that is 2.0
and there is a little bit of bloatware you do get with this it's not as bad as some manufacturers
but there's still quite a bit there there's facebook linkedin talk all those sorts of things
that uh i end up uninstalling those which only takes you know just a few minutes to do so but
still it's a bit of an annoyance that it is there so i do mention it so we have very fast storage
on this that it's not a bad speed at all here as you can see good random reads and rights and
even the sequential speeds there not bad at all considering the price group and the category of
phone that this really is like a mid-range phone very very good here as you can see the performance
from that snapdragon 778 g is quite good i am actually really happy with the performance of this
one it's very fast quick and even gaming as you see later on it does an excellent job at that too
now i ran this without the gt mode you can enable gt mode which is swiping
down here from the toggles you can then go into it and where is it it's just on the side here
gt mode which is a high performance mode which is going to set the governor then to performance and
that's putting the gpu and the cpu at their top clock rates so they can perform at their maximum
but i didn't do that okay so that is it could actually be slightly better if i use that mode
the same for 3dmark wildlife here so it's an okay score it shows that it's not a flagship
but it shows that for a mid-range device it's still not actually too bad with that result
wireless speeds excellent so yes it does support wi-fi six if you have a fast router which i do
you're able to get gigabit transfer speeds and even at the point downstairs i'm still getting
very respectable transfer speeds here of almost 300 megabits per second not the fastest i have
seen which are around 400 but still very very good there now the gps very good average score you see
a lot of satellites but the accuracy will not be any better than three meters with the qualcomm
restriction that they do have they cannot be any better than that so here we have a widevine level
one cert now that also means normally it depends on the phone that you should have amazon prime
video in full hd as well and thankfully we do with this particular phone so amazon has given
the green light this is a white listed device it will run the videos in full hd which i
really do enjoy and like to see of course i don't want to be stuck in standard definition
camera 2 api support level 3 maximum look for those gcam ports if you want a different style
and quality of photo that is and around the stress test just to see after the 20 loops that it does
did it throttle and it basically didn't you can see we lost 0.9 performance dip after
this very demanding benchmark was ran then for the 20 times so that is a good result
and here we have while battery charge time it does say 26 minutes to go from 4 to 100 i don't
actually believe that's accurate it's more like what i'm seeing around 40 minutes to fully charge
the 4 300 million amp hour battery so ignore this right here where it says the battery health is at
43 it's just this application which is part of antutu it's not measuring it correctly at the 65
watts and the battery run time so this was display calibrated 200 nits it just runs until it gets to
20 to give me this result here looping benchmark a fixed battery score so 9 hours and 52 minutes for
hertz screen and then of course with the snapdragon 778 i don't you think
is too bad for 4 300 mm hours realistically you're looking about six to seven hours of on-screen time
with this phone the gaming performance here is quite decent thanks to that snapdragon 778g
so with pubg that i've got right here we can run as i'll show you here the extreme frame rate
is the maximum here so we can't get unfortunately 120 frames per second until maybe the developers
add that and this is on the smooth mode only so in balanced or hd okay you only get the ultra
frame rate so i will be running it on extreme here because with a game like this you definitely want
the frames per second to be the priority so i'm 10 kills into this game there's only three people
left we're down to the last moments of this and it's just been great because it's a constant 60
frames per second now if i swipe from the upper left here you can see the frame rate 59 60 all
the time gpu's not really being stressed i've seen that about 40 maximum oh someone's shooting full
burst there that must be my teammates it looks like we're going to be able to win this one
but i'll take a look at the temperatures now after gaming at least pubg four or five different rounds
i'm on my third game here of pubg and let's take a look at those temperatures
it is getting up to i can see about 45 degrees maximum on the screen here flipping it over
they do have a vapor chamber in this you can see temperatures around 44 degrees i just think that
this chipset really is not getting hot enough now if it was a snapdragon triple eight would
probably be seeing right now about 50 degrees but here with the snapdragon 778 it seems to
be a reasonably cool running chip around about 45 46 max after about 1 hour 40 minutes or so gaming
audio performance now so it is just a single loudspeaker on this one unfortunately there's
no loudspeaker in the earpiece not with the gt must addition here the gt explorer
edition yes it does have the speaker there but it's a more expensive model
now the 3.5 millimeter output from this i do find to be good it's clean it is loud enough and really
no complaints from me but here's a sample now of that single loudspeaker at 100 volume
moving over to the cameras now so with the front-facing camera you get 1080p maximum with
electronic image stabilization so that high pitch noise you can hear right now that's just some
cicadas in the trees it's not nothing to do here with the phone you can see it's relatively steady
you're just going to go through my little jungle right here down these stairs just to demonstrate
that we got the electronic image stabilization now the audio quality is the typical we get now
which is 320 kilobits per second let's take a look at the rear cameras now so this is the main
camera here which is 64 megapixels we're able to shoot 4k 30 4k 60 and i'm currently shooting
4k 30 frames per second to match my own video here so i've noticed that the focus is very good
no problems with it at all to get a lock see if i put my hand up there that it's pretty much instant
a nice smooth motion to with that so walking ahead the electronic image stabilization is
taking out the shakes and trimmers and any jolts of me walking so that's great and if i just jog
see then it does tend to move around a little bit but overall not too bad there so panning around
it's going to be a bit of a hard exposure change here for phones to do it 4k sometimes it does
introduce a few chatters but overall that seems to be pretty smooth let's swipe over now to the
ultra wide camera so just an 8 megapixel sensor here and i do find the ultra wide
quality here 1080p maximum the stability is good but the details captured here no way near as good
as the main camera at least of course we can get a lot more into the shot which is great
panning around here 1080p i don't see any electronic image stabilization jetta
coming through with this and it shouldn't happen definitely not with this chipset and only at 1080p
do
so
so to recap now my time using this i think this phone has an excellent display it's bright it's
fast a 360 hertz touch rate i think it offers everything that most people would want so
the bezels aren't the slimmest but still the performance the brightness it's all there ui
runs really quick 120 frames per second it's very very smooth it's fast it's fluid launch times for
applications are great the storage is fast there's no bottleneck there at all the snapdragon 778 g
is not a bad chip at all it's an excellent mid-range chip you still get the 5g if you
actually needed those faster download speeds now the interesting thing is that they've got that ram
boost option the fact that you can well a lot of people used to say or joke around with that
comment didn't they that uh you know i downloaded two gigabytes more of extra ram to my phone you
could say that almost or three gigabytes but it's not actually that it's not ram so it's a little
bit of an incorrect marketing term there really because it's a cache it's like virtual memory on
a laptop or windows 10 laptop if you've got some virtual memory there that's using it it's swapping
it's a swap file really that it's doing but it's speeding things up i think it does feel so quick
the ui on this reminds me a little bit of oxygen os but just how fluid things are and that's great
this price point now the other things that are really good about this particular phone is the
charge times about 40 minutes so very quick 4 300 milliamp hour battery will get you around
six to seven hours of on-screen time at 120 hertz of course that depends on
what you're doing as they say mileage will vary but if you change it to 60 hertz of refresh rate
you get an additional hour or two more out of this and of course it charges so quick so i think that
is they're fine there so what are the weaknesses then of the gt master edition
well for me it's missing of course micro sd card slot would have been great on this it's
a missed opportunity no secondary loudspeaker a little bit disappointed with that i mean the
single speaker is fine but it would have been nice for a little bit more immersion and gaming
and just generally sound better and the other one is the camera so camera optimization still
a little bit more as needed there i feel now the main camera does take an excellent still
and the night shots from the main camera yeah okay but it's definitely room for improvement the ultra
wide is the weakness 8 megapixels video quality from the ultra wide disappointing not amazing
i would have preferred they ditched the 2 megapixel macro camera
and just give us the main 64 megapixel camera and then a 16 megapixel ultrawide
would have been fine or even a 13 megapixel ultra would be good now face unlocking works fine it's
quick and then the fingerprint reader location as i mentioned like right down the bottom there
i think they could really move that up and i hope to see that in future generation phones that they
move that just up a little bit to make it a little bit more comfortable but all up
the gt master edition here does get a thumbs up from me i think it is an
excellent mid-range phone so much on offer and as i mentioned the performance everything there
it pretty much ticks all boxes apart from their micro sd cards and yeah they could have had a
secondary loudspeaker so thank you so much for watching my review here of the gt master
edition from Realme do check out my review of this one here as well which is a well
it's basically a high-end phone from them powered by snapdragon 870 it is the gt explorer edition