While iPhones dominate the charts as the most popular smartphones on the market, many people can’t afford them and are looking for reasonably-priced devices. If you’re not keen on paying a lot of money on a phone, you should take a look at the realme 11 Pro. It’s an Android smartphone with a very good price, a beautiful design, solid performance, and a long battery life. Read this review to find out why this phone may be a great choice for you:

realme 11 Pro: Who is it good for?

The realme 11 Pro is a great choice if you:

• Want an elegant smartphone
• Desire a phone with a fast, good-quality screen
• Are looking for a smartphone with good battery life
• Want a well-rounded mid-range device with a reasonable price

Pros and cons

These are the things I like most about the realme 11 Pro:

• Beautiful design
• Fast, high-quality display
• Excellent battery life
• Good performance in daily tasks and casual games
• Satisfying photo and video experience
• Competitive price

There are some downsides as well:

• No certification for protection against dust or water
• Plenty of bloatware preinstalled
• No optical image stabilization for 4K video

Verdict

The realme 11 Pro is a great mid-range smartphone. It impresses with its looks, the excellent screen, capable hardware, good main camera, and generous battery life. Unfortunately, its camera system and fast charging are not as good as the ones of its more expensive brother, the realme 11 Pro+ 5G. To complicate things, the price difference between the two is rather small. Therefore, if you’re interested in photography, I recommend the realme 11 Pro+ 5G. However, if this aspect is unimportant to you, and you want a good, well-rounded smartphone that costs less, you’ll be more than happy with the realme 11 Pro.

Unboxing the realme 11 Pro

The realme 11 Pro comes in a large yellow box, showcasing the smartphone’s name and its 5G capabilities. On the sides and bottom of the box, you find a couple of details about the main specs of this phone, as well as its IMEI code(s) and serial number.

realme 11 Pro comes in a typical yellow box

Open the box to find another, smaller, yellow box inviting you to “Dare to Leap.” Take it out, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the generous bundle offered by realme.

Make the leap and open the box 🙂

Inside the package, you should have the following items: the phone itself, a 67W fast charger, a USB-C cable, a transparent protective cover, the SIM card tray eject tool, the quick setup guide, and the warranty details.

Everything you find inside the box

Unboxing the realme 11 Pro is a pleasant experience. Unlike other smartphone manufacturers, realme bundles a fast charger and a protective case. Also, the packaging looks nice and robust.

Design and build quality

The realme 11 Pro has the same colors, materials, and design as its more expensive brother, the realme 11 Pro+ 5G, which we reviewed recently. It’s available in Sunrise Beige, Oasis Green, and Astral Black. The Astral Black version is thinner and lighter than the other two because it doesn’t use the same vegan leather on the back. Instead, it has a sandblasted back with no traces of leather or stitching.

The colors for realme 11 Pro

The back of the realme 11 Pro I tested is Sunrise Beige, covered by vegan leather with a texture that’s a pleasure to touch. This smartphone was created with Matteo Menotto, a prints and textile designer who worked for Gucci, and it shows. The camera island on the top is large and has a pleasant aesthetic. From top to bottom, the back of the phone is vertically divided by a zipper-like section with fake embossed stitches adding to the general impression that you’re holding an elegant device.

realme 11 Pro Sunrise Beige

Adding the bundled silicone cover doesn’t ruin the aesthetic but diminishes the appeal of holding and touching this phone.

The silicone cover is found inside the box

The frame of the phone is made of plastic, and it has an elegant reflective surface. However, it is a magnet for fingerprints. On the left side, you don’t find any buttons or ports.

The left side of this phone doesn't feature any buttons

The Power button and Volume rocker are on the right side. They’re thin, slightly protruding, and easy to press even if you’re not looking at your smartphone.

All the buttons are on the right edge

The bottom of the realme 11 Pro hosts the SIM tray (you can use two nano SIM cards with this phone), the main microphone, the USB Type C port, and the main speaker.

The bottom of the realme 11 Pro

The top edge hosts the secondary microphone and the earpiece speaker. There’s no headphone jack available.

The top edge of the realme 11 Pro

The size of the Sunrise Beige & Oasis Green versions is 161.6 x 73.9 x 8.77 mm or 6.36 x 2.91 x 0.35 inches in length x width x depth. The phone is also thin, at 8.7 mm or 0.34 inches in thickness. As mentioned earlier, the Astral Black version is 0.5 mm thinner and 6 grams lighter than the other two colors. The screen is curved and has a size of 6.7 inches, while the screen-to-body ratio is 93.65%. At the top side of the screen, you have a small cutout for the selfie camera, and at the bottom, there’s the in-display fingerprint reader.

The fingerprint reader is inside the screen

The design of the realme 11 Pro is a strength of this smartphone. The materials, colors, and finishing used by its manufacturer make it look like a premium device, not your usual mid-range phone. However, realme 11 Pro doesn’t possess any certification for protection against water or dust, which may lower its appeal to some users.

Hardware specifications

The realme 11 Pro has almost identical hardware to its more expensive brother, the realme 11 Pro+ 5G. For starters, they’re both powered by the same MediaTek Dimensity 7050 chipset, built on a 6-nanometer manufacturing process. It features an octa-core processor (two Cortex-A78 cores running at 2.6 GHz and six Cortex-A55 cores running at 2.0 GHz) and a Mali-G68 graphics unit. This phone is available in configurations with 8 GB or 12 GB of RAM and 128 GB or 256 GB of storage. The device I tested had 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage. By default, the operating system and all the bundled apps usually occupy around 28 GB of storage. You can lower that figure if you spend some time removing the bundled apps and games you don’t need.

Details about the hardware inside the realme 11 Pro

The screen uses a beautiful AMOLED panel with an adaptive refresh rate of up to 120 Hz, a maximum brightness of 950 nits, and a 1080 x 2412 pixels resolution. It also holds an HDR 10+ certification. These specs are quite impressive for a mid-range smartphone.

realme 11 Pro has an AMOLED screen

The realme 11 Pro is a dual SIM smartphone, accepting two nano-SIM cards that can work simultaneously in dual stand-by mode. However, it doesn’t have a micro-SD card slot, so you won’t be able to expand its storage capacity. 5G mobile connectivity, Bluetooth 5.2, and Wi-Fi 6 are available. The phone has an NFC chip too, plus many other sensors, such as an optical fingerprint reader under the display, an accelerometer, a proximity sensor, a gyroscope, a light sensor, and a compass sensor.

The available connectivity options are pretty good

The biggest difference between the realme 11 Pro and the realme 11 Pro+ 5G is the camera system. On its back, the realme 11 Pro has a main 100 Megapixel camera, with optical image stabilization, a 1/1.8” sensor, and an aperture of f/1.75. On the same camera island, you also find a LED flash and a 2 Megapixel portrait camera, with an aperture of f/2.4. On the front, you have a 16 Megapixel selfie camera with an aperture of f/2.45.

The camera island on the back of the phone

The battery of this smartphone has a capacity of 5000 mAh, and you can charge it using the 67W SUPERVOOC charger included in the box.

realme 11 Pro has a 5000 mAh battery

If you’d like details about all the features and technical specifications, check out this page: realme 11 Pro 5G.

The realme 11 Pro packs a punch in terms of hardware. It has a solid mid-range chipset, plenty of RAM, a good amount of storage space, adequate connectivity, a beautiful screen, and a decent camera system.

Let’s see how it performs in real life. On the next page, you can find out what to expect in daily use, see what this phone’s cameras can do, the software you get, as well as the benchmark results of the realme 11 Pro.