The Realme GT 2 Pro was Realme’s last noteworthy GT series phone in India. It was a flagship phone with a flagship-killer price. The Realme GT 6T is not a direct sequel—far from it—but it’s the first GT phone to launch in two years and so, Realme will be hoping to recreate the same buzz—if not more—it used to make back in the day when these phones were more commonplace. It has done a great job with pricing. The base variant of the Realme GT 6T costs only Rs 30,999. The OnePlus 12R with an equivalent amount of RAM and storage costs Rs 9,000 more. Even the top-of-the-line version of the Realme GT 6T that ships with a generous 12GB RAM and 512GB storage is under Rs 40,000. The Realme GT 2 Pro started at a relatively heftier Rs 49,999 and while it may strike you as comparing apples and oranges, the point worth noting is that Realme has done well packaging the Realme GT 6T, pricing it aggressively without compromising much on core competency. It’s a win-win situation for everybody.
Realme GT 6T: Performance and battery life
The Realme GT 6T doesn’t have the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 8-series chip like the GT 2 Pro did at launch. But it has the second best. It comes powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Plus Gen 3. That’s actually a good thing. Over time, a lot of these Snapdragon 7-series chips have started to share many quirks and features with their more powerful Snapdragon 8-series siblings. That is one of the ramifications of launching many processors and frankly, they are a dime and dozen today. The benefit of course is that a lot of the higher-end features start to trickle down to lower price points so more people can access them. That’s precisely what’s happening with the Snapdragon 7 Plus Gen 3. It’s a flagship chip in everything but in name. And as they say, what’s in a name.
What’s important is that people are getting flagship power and efficiency without breaking their bank.
Realme sent me the top-end 12GB/512GB variant. RAM is of the LPDDR5x type (which is default across the whole lineup). Storage is UFS4.0 (the 8GB/128GB model uses slower UFS3.1). It absolutely destroys benchmarks. But that was mostly expected. What surprised me was the overall stability. The phone is an absolute “cooler” even in this hot, scorching Delhi weather. Realme says it has put an extensive 9-layer cooling system inside the phone and reviewer’s guide the company sent me actually names and describes them all. I am no expert on this but this is what the setup looks like on paper—
“Starting from the top, the cooling system consists of various components: a 10870mm2 large copper foil above the screen, a 7075mm2 superconductive graphite in the screen compartment, a 10000mm2 dual Stainless Steel Vapor Chamber, cooling gel, a 1420mm2 mainboard top graphite copper foil, the PCB, an 800mm2 bottom copper foil, a 5300mm2 press plate support graphite, and an AL metal support.”
Whatever it is that Realme is doing, seems to be working out just fine, or rather, fantabulous. No matter the benchmark, whether CPU Throttling or 3DMark Wildlife Extreme, the results were outstanding—in this scorching Delhi heat of all things, I can’t stress this enough. I’d like to point out that all tests were done in “GT mode” which is Realme’s equivalent of a performance mode. Cut to the real world, the Realme GT 6T flies whether it be in basis day-to-day tasks or graphics-intensive gaming. Unlike some OnePlus phones, Realme doesn’t put caps on high-refresh rate gaming either. Performance galore is the name of the game here.
| Benchmark | Score |
| AnTuTu | 1,40,5134 |
| Geekbench 6 CPU | 1,801/4,499 |
| Geekbench 6 GPU | 8,117 |
| PCMark | 16,912 |
| PCMark Battery | 16 h 45 min |
The reason why I mentioned OnePlus is because Realme’s software—Realme UI—is now eerily close to OnePlus’s (or it could be the other way around). Booting up the phone for the first time, I swear, it looked exactly like a OnePlus phone— the Home Screen styling, the drop-down notification/settings menu, even the phone’s wallpaper looked like it was taken out of a OnePlus phone (or it could be the other way around). Realme also put the “shelf” aggregator service in its phone, which used to be a OnePlus exclusive feature at one point of time. But to be completely honest, the similarities work for Realme because it also gets to keep the slickness and relatively bloat-free experience of OxygenOS. The amount of bloatware has seriously gone down, at least in the Realme phone we are reviewing today, which is a far cry from some of its other recent launches. Realme is committing to three years of major OS and four years of security updates.
Battery life on the Realme GT 6T isn’t great, but not too shabby either. That’s mostly expected from a performance/gaming focused phone like this. Regular and moderate use can get you through a full work-day with ease. If however, you can also kill it in a few hours if you play too many games on it, more frequently. The phone supports 120W fast wired charging and tops up from 0-100 percent in just under 40 minutes.
Realme GT 6T: Design and cameras
Realme went the other direction with the Realme GT 6T. The Realme GT 2 Pro was more “restrained”, even muted some would say, but the Realme GT 6T is bold and unapologetic. The headline of this review in fact takes from this very aspect. The fluid silver version in particular is so shiny, I had to case it up the minute I unboxed it (Realme ships a really nice TPU case with the phone), one because it’s very susceptible to dust and smudging, and second because it’s just not my style. The back of the phone is made of glass with a mix of glossy and matte bits that give it a very distinct character. Like it or not, you can’t ignore this phone, that’s for certain. It’s built well, too, with great attention to detail, though there is no IP rating to speak of, which is a curious omission on an otherwise “spec-heavy” phone. Ergonomics and handling are on point.
The Realme GT 6T has another ace up its sleeve. Its screen can get very, very bright. The phone uses an 8T LTPO AMOLED panel (1-120Hz) which has a local peak brightness of 6,000 nits, which is frankly overkill, but should help minimise glare when you’re outdoors in this sunny Delhi weather. The screen is tall—6.78-inch—has a resolution 1.5K, and is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2. So, all top-notch stuff there. The bezels are slim and symmetrical. Dolby Vision playback is supported. Biometrics are handled by an in-screen fingerprint reader.
The cameras aren’t the strongest highlight of this phone. The choice of sensors screams cost-cutting at the very least. It’s one of those areas where performance driven phones almost never disappoint. They have a reputation to live up to, it seems. But I digress. The Realme GT 6T has a dual camera setup with a 50-megapixel Sony LYT-600 primary sensor paired to an f/1.88 optically stabilised lens. It shoots well enough when you give it lots of light, but quality goes for a toss the minute you test it under tricky and low light. A good thing about it is that it can shoot 4K@60fps videos, which is not very common on many midrange phones. The output is serviceable. There’s another 8-megapixel ultra-wide camera in this phone but it lacks autofocus, so macros/close-ups aren’t possible. It generally takes soft photos. The front camera is a 32-megapixel (Sony IMX615) and is good enough for your social media posts.
Realme GT 6T: Should you buy it?
Realme has launched its first GT phone—Realme GT 6T—in two years. That’s a really long time because in the world of technology, out of sight, out of mind is a truth of life. It hits you even hard when you realise, GT phones used to be a staple at one point of time. Whatever happened? We may never know. But at last the sabbatical is over now. And the wait was worth it. It feels like Realme never left the building. Not that there’s nothing wrong with it, but the Realme GT 6T gets so many things right, it makes you sit up and cheer up for Realme again. This is what we were missing out on all this time and here’s hoping it keeps them coming.
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