Realme GT Neo 3T review: The value gaming phone

This is the new Realme GT Neo 3T and it resides in a segment below the GT Neo 3.

Yes, that’s an odd naming scheme, but hey, we review phones based on their performance, not their names. So let's do just that!

Design

The 3T’s back panel has a subtle chequered flag design which is visible only under specific lighting conditions. While this is a love-it-or-hate-it aesthetic, that racing stripe on the camera island looks out of place.

Thankfully, you can opt for the subtler grey colour option as well.

The phone is constructed completely out of plastic, but it feels mostly durable.

The weight is quite evenly distributed and its thickness of 8.7mm is acceptable keeping its large battery in mind. But more on the battery later.

The phone’s power button and volume rocker are quite tactile to use, but the latter is placed on the phone’s left which may not be to everyone’s liking.

At the front, the 3T gets a left-mounted hole punch layout. There’s a slight chin at the bottom, but that’s quite prominent in most mid-range phones.

Utility

The optical fingerprint scanner on the 3T is pretty quick to unlock the device.

It also gets a stereo speaker setup which is loud and decently clear as well. However, there is no headphone jack here. Also missing is an SD card slot since the SIM tray only accepts two SIM cards, but you do get up to 256GB of internal storage.

Display

The Realme GT Neo 3T has a 6.62-inch FHD+ AMOLED display which is great in my opinion. Colour saturation here is quite impressive, and so are its max brightness and viewing angles.

The display has a refresh rate of 120Hz and a touch sampling rate of 360Hz, both of which help elevate the overall experience.

Performance & Software

The GT Neo 3T is a value gaming smartphone and so the Snapdragon 870 chipset is one of its highlights. The chipset is combined with a large stainless steel vapour cooling system for sustained performance.

The 3T comes with 8GB of RAM, so multitasking is not an issue either.

Also watch: Realme Watch 3 Pro review : Affordable and capable

The phone shines when it comes to heavy gaming. For instance, I could play Call of Duty at very high graphics and max frame rate.

Also impressive is its thermal management as you can play games for extended periods of time without much heating or throttling.

On the software front, the device runs on Realme UI 3 on top of Android 12. Realme UI is based on ColorOS but has come a long way in differentiating itself from the latter. It's quite customisable and very smooth in general. This makes the 3T quite a nice phone to use.

Do not that there is a lot of pre-installed bloatware on this phone but you can easily uninstall most of it.

Cameras

Value gaming phones aren't known for their cameras, but the GT Neo 3T manages to deliver very decent results.

The 64MP main camera outputs crisp photos given the lighting conditions are right. These are definitely not colour accurate, but the processing is quite good.

You get a dedicated night mode that requires a really stable hand, which ends up in bright but slightly blurry nighttime photos.

Videos from the main camera are quite nice with good colours and decent HDR performance. You can shoot at up to 4K resolution, at 30 or 60 frames per second with the main sensor.

The phone also comes with an ultra steady video mode in both main and ultrawide cameras which does stabilise the footage quite a bit but results in grainy videos with weak dynamic range.

Talking of the ultrawide photos, they are usable but often appear to be overly soft around the edges.

You also have a third 2MP macro camera which is not worth discussing.

The 16MP front camera of the 3T does produce nice selfies without much overprocessing.

Battery Life

This phone impresses in terms of battery life. With its large 5,000mAh battery, you can easily expect around 7 hours of screen time with medium to heavy usage.

The supplied 80W fast charger is the star of the show here. With it, I managed to charge the battery from 0 to 100 in under 40 minutes, which is very respectable.

Verdict

Overall, the Realme GT Neo 3T is a value-for-money smartphone.

The chequered flag design might not be to everyone's liking but it is a good option for those who do a lot of gaming, watch a lot of content and enjoy the convenience of fast charging.