Last year, I did a review of the Realme 10 Pro+ and found it to be a very promising smartphone.
Now, it has a successor, and it is a good-looking smartphone, Isn't it?
But, in a market where a lot of new mid-range phones are now launching with curved displays, can the new Realme 11 Pro+ make a mark?
Design
The Realme 11 Pro+ was designed with aesthetics in mind. It features a curved display with narrow bezels, a slim profile, but its distinctive back design is what sets it apart.
It gets a circular camera housing and a soft-touch vegan leather finish with faux stitching which feels great in hand. However, this central stripe may not appeal to everyone.
Still, the Realme 11 Pro+ stands out without being over the top, and its design alone will win over many customers.
Display
The Realme 11 Pro+ has a 6.7-inch AMOLED display with a variable refresh rate of 120Hz. However, I did notice some games not supporting the high refresh rate.
Anyway, the display also gets HDR10+ certification as well as Widevine L1 support.
The colours and viewing angles of this display are excellent, and so is its peak brightness, as I had no trouble viewing it in this scorching Delhi summer.
Utility
The Realme 11 Pro+ is a 5G-enabled dual SIM smartphone. It has neither expandable storage nor a headphone jack.
It gets an in-display optical fingerprint reader, which in my experience worked fine.
There are also stereo speakers on this smartphone which can get quite loud and make up for a good content watching experience.
Performance & Software
The Realme 11 Pro+ debuts with MediaTek’s new Dimensity 7050. But is the Dimensity 7050 all new?
Not really, you see Dimensity chipsets have recently undergone a rebranding, and what you get here is basically a Dimensity 1080 with a new name. Yup, the same Dimensity 1080 which powered the Realme 10 Pro+.
This 6nm chipset, though, is powerful enough to play Call of Duty at max frame rate, so there shouldn't be any issues here. The stability ratings for the phone's CPU and GPU are particularly impressive, and the thermal management is top-notch as well.
However, the software on this phone is a totally different story. It runs on Realme UI built on top of Android 13, but the Realme UI on this particular phone is all over the place.
To begin with, there are a lot of pre-installed third-party apps and games. Not only that, you have Realme’s first party apps that bombard you with notifications.
Oh, in fact, the phone’s stock internet app won’t let you exit it unless and until you make it your default browser. If you do that, you’ll get to see even more ads.
That’s not all, there are ads baked into the app drawer as well.
To be fair, you can uninstall the bloatware and disable UI ads as well. However, this is the first time that I had to tweak a phone’s settings for hours just to unclutter it.
This is such a bummer since the general performance of this phone is pretty smooth.
Cameras
Brands rely heavily on selling specifications in the mid-range phone segment. And what better specification can you sell than a camera whose resolution matches that of the S23 Ultra.
Yup, the Realme 11 Pro+ has a 200MP main camera with OIS which is good, but let that not be the deciding factor for you to buy this phone.
The photos come out to be well detailed with good dynamic range. You also can click photos in full 200 megapixels, but the dynamic range does suffer in these shots.
Low light photos are also bright and carry a decent level of detail.
Videos are a bit less impressive; you see there is no stabilisation at all at 4K, and 1080p uses EIS despite the sensor getting OIS.
The 8MP ultrawide camera is pretty average in terms of colours and dynamic range, while the 2MP macro camera gets the job done.
For selfies, you get a 32MP camera at the front, which is fine for social media use.
Battery Life
The 5,000mAh battery on this smartphone, when combined with the power efficient 6nm chipset, does offer great battery life. I could easily extract around 7 hours of screen time from this phone with mixed use.
However, do keep in mind that there was additional battery drain when I did not disable ads and spammy notifications. So, it's important to get rid of them.
What’s impressive is the 100W fast charging on offer, which is the fastest on a phone under ₹30,000. It can fully charge the Realme 11 Pro+ in under 40 minutes, which is quite convenient.
Verdict
The Realme 11 Pro+ gets a lot of things right. It looks great, gets a good chipset and offers super-fast charging as well.
On the flipside, its ad-heavy software is something that needs to be fixed and I really hope that Realme is already working on it in a future software update.
