Realme 9i is the low-cost alternative presented by the brand [Analysis]

The Realme 9 Series has just landed, in fact we have analyzed its most powerful addition, the Realme 9 Pro+, but that is not why we are going to focus only on that alternative, and that is that Realme is a brand that seeks to democratize the market and it could not be less with the terminal that we have in our hands right now.

Discover with us the new Realme 9i, the latest budget alternative offered by Realme that offers acceptable performance at a low cost. Get to know all its details in depth and discover if it is really worth it within the economic terminals.

Design: Simple, effective and cheap

This new Realme 9i has many similarities with its brothers from the 9 Series, keeping the differences, especially on the front, although we did not find notable differences in terms of perceived quality, since as with the other terminals of the brand, it is made entirely of plastic and opts for brightness and bright colors to distract our attention from the perceived quality. Nevertheless, we are in an economic range, it would not make much sense to emphasize this.

The terminal has dimensions of 164 × 75,7 × 8,4 mm so without being excessively compact or thin, we have a good grip, and good dimensions. That helps a lot the fact that we find a terminal of only 190 grams, striking considering the large capacity of its battery, which we will talk about later. The brand has offered the terminal in two colors, prism black and prism blue, all of them with a bright serigraphy on the back that matches the lights. In our case, as you can see from the photographs, we have analyzed the unit with the darkest color.

The device feels like what it is, a fairly attractive and comfortable economic terminal on which we should not have too many pretensions in terms of perceived quality.

Technical characteristics

Unlike its older brother, in this case Realme bets on the well-known Qualcomm, mounting the Mid-performance Snapdragon 680. It is accompanied by a 4GB LPDDR4X RAM. to which would be added the striking but ineffective 3GB of virtual RAM, a car that many brands are getting on lately, especially in the medium and low range. In this section the terminal has given us enough experience for day to day, we talk about social networks, instant messaging, navigation and low-demand games.

Regarding storage we have an option of 64GB is clearly insufficient, so I would invite you to bet on the 128GB version, both with UFS 2.2 technology that is not bad at all considering the price of the device and that it gives us a more than enough data transfer, reading and writing experience. In addition, we will be able to expand the memory through a microSD card with compatibility up to no less than 1TB of storage, that with the card slot in which we can also include two microSIM cards.

Multimedia and autonomy

This terminal has as a noteworthy point a panel of 90Hz, more specifically a 6,6-inch LCD with FullHD + resolution of 2412 × 1080 pixels, obviously it does not reach the OLED for price reasons, but it makes up for it in an interesting way, as we have said, with this attractive refresh rate that makes it lighter and more comfortable to interact with the Operating System and adapted applications. As expected in this type of terminal, we have a fairly marked lower edge, and the selfie camera is in the upper right corner, of which we will give you more details in the following lines.

• Adaptive 90Hz refresh rate.

It is curious, yes, that it offers a lower refresh rate than the previous model. The brightness is sufficient, although the sensor sometimes gives wrong settings. As for the sound, we have a 3,5-millimeter jack socket and a typical sound of this type of terminal, somewhat canned, sufficient in power and with distortion in the upper 20% of its capacity. Of course, the speakers are stereo, something to be thankful for.

In terms of autonomy, we have nothing less than 5.000 mAh accompanied by a 33W fast charge that has offered us at least 10 hours of screen time in the tests, and only half an hour to charge 50% of it.

photography that meets

We have a 50MP main camera with standard f/1.8 aperture, that suffers with low lighting and strong contrasts, but that offers an intermediate performance in the favorable photographic shot, with a good post-shot processing. We also have a testimonial 2MP f / 2.4 depth sensor and a 2MP f / 2.4 Macro lens I don't find much sense either, I would have dispensed with the aforementioned sensors to mount a Wide Angle of at least 8MP, something that would have provided the camera with much more versatility.

The selfie camera is 16MP with f/2.1 aperture, the typical Realme one that gets us out of trouble, enough for the daily selfie and with an excessive "beauty mode" in all its cases. As for the recording of both cameras, we have FullHD resolution but as expected, we lack optical stabilization, so we should avoid movement in the shots or the results will be noticeably disadvantaged.

User Experience

We have a fingerprint sensor on the side, which is still one of my favorite bets, ahead of even in-display fingerprint readers. Bet on Realme UI 2.0 based on Android 11, which, however, comes once again loaded with bloatware, adware or whatever we want to call it, I don't understand the need to bring installed applications or shortcuts that we don't need, precisely Realme prided itself on cleanliness in its first editions.

For the rest, the terminal has defended itself well, it has measured up and we must not forget in any case that the 64GB edition is 229,99 euros and the 128GB version is 249,99 euros, without being excessively cheap, expensive plant in the lower part of the mid-range.

Pros and cons