Friday, June 21, 2019

My Realme C2 budget phone with Color OS 6

Realme is a brand of OPPO. Realme C2 is a decent budget phone which you can get at the price of slightly below RM400.

Realme C2 is a successor of C1. I would say it is an alternative option of C1, which both of them are identical in terms of actual performance, which in some areas C2 is slightly better than C1 and some other C1 is slightly better than C2.

The 2 main differences are that C2 is using Mediatek MT6762 Helio P22 (12 nm) chipset and running on Android 9 OS, while C1 is using Qualcomm SDM450 Snapdragon 450 (14 nm) chipset and running on Android 8.1 OS.

Its size of 6.1" is big enough to have a screen suitable for elderly people to use after the font size is configured to be the largest.

Although it is a budget phone, it has pretty well performance with just a little bit of speed lagging compared with those flagship phones for normal applications. Its back cover is pretty nice and modern looking too. Therefore, it is also very suitable for kids and for people that just need a decent phone.


The Realme C2 comes with 2 options of specification: one with 2GB RAM & 16GB storage, and another more expensive one with 3GB RAM & 32GB storage. Bear in mind that the actual usable storage for the 2/16GB option is only around 6GB. The other 10GB was already used by the system and OS. It has a dedicated slot for microSD and supports external storage up to 256GB.


This phone only supports 2.4GHz WiFi and does not support 5GHz WiFi. However, it does support dual SIM 4G LTE.

It has a normal 13MP f/2.2 main camera working together with a 2MP f/2.4 camera for depth sensor. At its front is a 5MP f/2.0 camera, not a good option for people who loves selfie, but still usable.

Its Color OS 6 has a Control Center with big icons, provides convenient and easy access particularly to elderly people.


Color OS 6 also comes with  the Android App Drawer, which you have a choice to switch it on or off.


It's home screen has a handy smart sidebar for quick access to your favourite apps, which you can access by swiping from the side of the screen. The apps listing in the sidebar is configurable. You are also given the option to switch it off if you don't want to use it.


The phone has all the essential features in Android 9. It has quite a number of security related functions.


The anti-harassment/fraud function is actually the call and/or SMS blocking function. It has interesting features such as blocking of one-ring incoming calls, which you might not find in other phones.


The Realme C2 4,000 mAh Li-Po battery can last for more than 1 day for normal use.

One thing I dislike is its battery saving feature, which I think is too over. It always kill a lot of background running processes and apps, which might stop automation app and widgets from working after a while.

A lot of tweaking needs to be done to find the way to let the automation app and widgets continue working at normal even when the phone is in sleep. Smart Power Saver will always kill them off. You need to use Custom Power Consumption Protection option, and manually configure each of the apps for them to be able to continue running in background, and to automatically start when the phone starts.


All in all, this is a nice phone with high performance/cost ratio. Most apps (including the not so resource demanding games) can run pretty well on it, also I found Facebook is quite slow (takes a few seconds) in launching up in it.


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