Realme 9i 5G combines Realme 9i 4G with Realme 9 5G. This handset combines the best of both worlds with a fresh design, making it a worthy contender for the budget market.The Realme 9i 5G is a new take on smartphone design. The handset features a Vintage CD design that includes a reflective back panel with colours similar to CDs. Although the colors aren't quite as vibrant as those reflected on a CD, they still look very appealing. You will also notice that the phone does not have a camera platform, and the Realme 9i 5G triple rear camera sensors are flush with the chassis. This concoction is very elegant, and Realme deserves credit for their design choices. The phone attracts fingerprints and is therefore a magnet for fingerprints.In terms of weight, the handset tips the scale at 187 grams, which I found distributed evenly across the device. The phone also measures just 8.1mm in thickness and has flat edges, with curved corners that don’t dig into your palms, making it easy to hold and comfortable to use single-handedly. The right spine of the phone holds a fingerprint scanner-cum power button, while the left fascia houses the volume rocker. The USB Type-C port along with speaker grille, 3.5mm headphone jack, and microphones are all on the bottom edge.The Realme 9i 5G sports a 6.6-inch display of the LCD variety that bears FHD+ (2,400×1,080p) resolution, up to 90Hz refresh rate, and a touch sampling rate of 180Hz. While the refresh rate can stay locked in at 90Hz, Realme offers a variable refresh rate option as well. The latter switches the screen refresh rate from 90Hz to 60Hz depending on the nature of the app to save some battery. Furthermore, the screen supports 400 nits of brightness, making the Realme 9i 5G’s panel good to look at and consume content, both indoors and outdoors. The viewing angles and bezels are also quite reasonable, so no complaints here either.The Realme 9i 5G's performance is aided by the MediaTek Dimensity810 SoC. This chip can be found in phones such as the Realme 9 5G, Infinix Note 12 Pro 5G, and Redmi Note 11T 5G. Dimensity 810 SoC features a 6nm manufacturing process and octa cores with up to 2.4GHz clock speeds, an Arm Mali-G57 MP2 GPU, and a 5G modem. It is a mid-range chipet that delivers fast performance, multitasking, and the ability to run resource-hungry apps like Chrome.The chipset can even run graphically-demanding games such as Asphalt 9 and New State Mobile, but not at the optimum level. There were a few frame drops and freezes while playing these titles. The handset is available in two RAM and storage options: 4GB + 64GB or 6GB + 128GB. You can expand the storage up to 1TB with a microSD card. The phone also has a dedicated slot to store that card. Additionally, the internal storage of the handset is almost unlimited up to 5GB.
For photography, the Realme 9i 5G features triple rear cameras, comprising an f/1.8 aperture 50MP primary lens, a 2MP portrait sensor and a 2MP macro sensor. The setup is quick to focus on the subjects and overturns good images with fine details, at least in favourable lighting conditions. The 50MP primary sensor’s colour science looks mostly accurate too, which is great. But, you don’t just have to take my word for it – in fact, take a look at the rainbow umbrella photo from the gallery (below) wherein, you’ll notice that the colours look vivid and punchy. The HDR mode also does well not to oversaturate colours or over-sharpen the image. That being said, the sensor struggles to reciprocate the colours in images properly in lowlight scenarios wherein, the subject appears washed out and lacks adequate detail as well. The dedicated night mode feature does manage to mitigate some of these problems, but the overall output still leaves something to be desired.The 2MP depth/portrait sensor works well and blurs the background beautifully. It also provides sound edge detection. It is important to note that the sensor does not work well with inanimate objects. However, the 2MP macro sensor can only capture passable closeups when there is sunlight. The device could have greatly benefited from an ultra-wide lens that is more user-friendly than a macro sensor. The 8MP camera on the Realme 9i is great for video calling and selfies, but it tends to oversharpen images. The subject's skin tones can also be misrepresented. The phone comes with a portrait mode, but the quality of the images taken with it enabled is poor.Realme 9i 5G's battery is a 5,000mAh. It lasted around 16 hours in the PC Mark test. However, the real-world performance was not far off. The handset lasted me for a whole day, with my use including social media browsing, watching videos online, checking email, and gaming between charges. All that is great and well, however, the 18W fast charging technology of the Realme 9i5G can take 2.5 hours to recharge the handset completely from 0-100 percent.While the handset supports as many as nine 5G bands, I couldn’t test the same as the 5G network is yet to make its debut in India. Be that as it may, I didn’t face any network issues while running Airtel’s 4G SIM on the smartphone. As for the phone’s side-mounted fingerprint scanner, it recognised my touch at once and unlocked the device in a jiffy. The phone also ships with a mono speaker at the bottom, which gets quite loud although sounds average at best. Last but not the least, the Realme 9i 5G runs Android 12-based Realme UI 3.0 out of the box. While the software is mostly clean, there is some bloatware that you will have to get rid of after setting up the device. Good thing though, the interface is quite user-friendly and comes with a handful of customisation options, screen and call recording options, and app recommendations, among other things.
The Realme 9i 5G, at Rs 14,999 is not the most feature-rich smartphone on the market. Similar phones, such as the Samsung Galaxy F235G, have a 120Hz refresh rate screen with 25W fast charger solution and the Infinix Note 12 5G has an AMOLED panel with 33W fast charge tech.The Realme 9i 5G is stylish and offers a good combination of performance, battery life, and decent cameras. The Realme 9i 5G is worthy of a second glance, even though it's not the best in its class.
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