Content
- Equipment and design
- Software
- Cameras
- Performance & Tests
- findings
The pandemic that broke out last yearCoronavirus has forced millions of people around the world to stay at home, which has dramatically increased the demand for tablets, laptops, smartphones and other equipment. At the same time, the workers of the factories that produce the components for all this went to sit at home. As a result, many of them, especially processors, were in short supply - therefore, they went up in price. This forces manufacturers to both raise prices and look for more exotic components to replace scarce ones. Let's see what came out of this in the case of Realme C21Y and C25s.
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Specifications | |
|---|---|---|
| Realme C21Y | Realme C25s | |
| Network | 2G, 3G, 4G | |
| Firmware | Android 11 with Realme R | Android 11 with Realme 2.0 |
| Screen | 6.5″, 1600x720 pixels, 20:9, IPS, 400 nits | 6.5″, 1600x720 pixels, 20:9, IPS, 570 nits |
| Chipset | UniSoC Tiger T610, 12nm CPU: 2 x A75 x 1.8 GHz + 6 x A55 x 1.8 GHz GPU: Mali-G52MP2 |
MediaTek Helio G85, 12nm CPU: 2 x A75 x 2 GHz + 6 x A55 x 1.8 GHz GPU: Mali-G52MC2 |
| Ram | 3/4 GB LPDDR4X |
4 GB LPDDR4X |
| ROM | 32 GB | 64/128 GB |
| SIM and memory card | Triple tray (2 x nano-SIM + microSD) | |
| Camera | Triple Primary: 13 MP, f/2.2, 5 lenses, PDAF, 1080p@30fps video recording Macro: 2MP, f/2.4 Depth Sensor: 2MP, f/2.4 |
Triple Primary: 48 MP, f/1.8, 6 lenses, PDAF, 1080p@60fps video recording Macro: 2MP, f/2.4 Depth Sensor: 2MP, f/2.4 |
| Selfie | 5 MP, f/2.2 | 8 MP, f/2.0 |
| Battery | 5000 mAh | 6000 mAh |
| Charging | 10W microUSB | 18W USB Type-C |
| Wireless interfaces | WiFi (2.4 GHz) bluetooth 5 |
WiFi 5 bluetooth 5 |
| NFC | there is | |
| Biometrics | Fingerprint scanner (rear) | |
| Sound | mono speaker 3.5mm headphone jack |
|
| Water protection | Not declared | |
| Dimensions and weight | 164.5 x 76 x 9.1mm 200 g |
164.5 x 75.9 x 9.6 mm 209 g |
| Price | ||
Equipment and design
Smartphones are shipped in yellow boxesdifferent shades with a different internal device and a different set of accessories. Together with the C21Y, the user receives only documentation, a SIM needle, a USB cable and a 10W charger, and the C25s also comes with a silicone case, plus the power of the bundled charger is increased to 18W.
Realme C21Y comes in blue and blackcolors, the C25s has a different set of colors: gray and gray-blue. The rest of the design is almost the same. Although there is one more very important difference: the C25s speaker is located, as it should be, on the bottom edge, while the C21Y has it on the rear panel. It is much easier to close it with your finger, in addition, the sound becomes inaudible if you put the phone on a soft one. Stereo, of course, is neither there nor there. Plus a different texture of the back, plus a difference in thickness (C25s is thicker due to the increased battery) - that's all the external differences.
Now about what unites them.The cases are made of plastic, the material is of high quality and extremely practical. It is far from a fact that having bought the C21Y, you will want a case - you can easily carry the phone without it. The arrangement of buttons and other elements is standard and convenient. The fingerprint scanner is located on the rear panel, unlocking is almost instantaneous - as is usually the case with capacitive fingerprint scanners. There are 3.5mm headphone jacks, as well as triple trays (two nano-SIM plus microSD). Additional microphones are not provided, only the one on the bottom panel.
The screens of the two new products are the same size(6.5″, 20:9), resolution (1600x720 pixels) and technology (IPS), but not in brightness - the C25s received a brighter panel. Otherwise, the displays are truly identical, not only on paper, but also in terms of user experience. There are not enough stars from the sky, but they are pleasant - the colors are not distorted, at angles they almost do not fade and are not inverted. For the budget segment, these are extremely decent panels.
Software
Both smartphones run on Android 11.The Realme C25s uses the proprietary Realme UI 2.0 shell, based on ColorOS and offering many additional features such as fine-tuning the desktop (icons, fonts, stacks, etc.), recording video from the screen and global phone search. The Realme C21Y firmware is called “Realme UI R Edition”, and it is actually pure Android with minimal manufacturer intervention: only the icons and the design of the “About phone” section in the settings have been changed. But you know, I'm not against pure Android at all, it's equally pleasant to use the software on both smartphones. Scroll through the comparison gallery of screenshots and judge for yourself.
Realme C21Y
Realme C25s
Cameras
Both smartphones received triple cameras:a pair of 2-megapixel ear plugs (macro and depth sensor), as well as the main camera - 13 megapixel for Realme C21Y and 48 megapixel for Realme C25s. Considering also the superiority of the older model in aperture ratio (f / 1.8 vs. f / 2.2), I think no one will be surprised that the C25s shoots better. It has a wider dynamic range, less noise, less oversharpening, better detail in many cases. At the same time, the C25s tends to sometimes turn up the saturation of colors, while the C21Y does not, and its color reproduction is better. When shooting at night, this effect also appears, however, the detail completely leaves the C21Y, and somehow it’s not up to color reproduction. In general, it seems to me that both phones demonstrate a decent level of photography for their price range. Gallery of examples:
Realme C21Y
Realme C25s
Macro cameras with 2-megapixel sensors shoot well, but crops from the main cameras are no worse. In general, useless plugs.
Realme C21Y
Realme C25s
The front cameras of both smartphones are quitesimple: 8 MP for C25s and 5 MP for C21Y. Talk on Skype or send a proof to your mom that everything is fine with you - both cameras will fit. But it’s unlikely to take a beautiful selfie against the background of something, after all, the modules are quite simple.
Realme C21Y
Realme C25s
You can write videos on Realme C25s in qualityup to 1080p@60fps, on the C21Y up to 1080p@30fps. At 60 fps, of course, it’s more pleasant to watch, but constant autofocus works better on the C21Y. The quality of the recorded sound is definitely for the C25s, the audio track of the budget model is not very pleasant to listen to. I note the absence of EIS - on the one hand, the video shakes a lot because of this, and on the other hand, there is no terrible ghosting. Lack of stabilization is sometimes better than a bad digital stub.
All examples of photos and videos from Realme C21Y and C25s cameras
Performance and tests
So we got to the most interesting!More precisely, in the case of Realme C25s, it’s not particularly interesting - there is a MediaTek Helio G85 chipset, already familiar to us from Redmi Note 9 (review), Tecno Pova 2 (review), Infinix Hot 10S (video) and more. But the Realme C21Y has the UniSoC Tiger T610 chipset, which was very rare until this spring, but due to the shortage of components, smartphone manufacturers have begun to increasingly turn to it. Perhaps, the use of pure Android in C21Y is connected with this: the manufacturer simply did not bother with adapting its firmware for UniSoC.
Usually UniSoC chipsets are something very, verybad, but the Tiger line (like its 5G brother Tanggula) was designed to change this view. On paper, she succeeds: the characteristics of the Tiger T610 and Helio G85 are quite similar (except that the Tiger has a lower frequency: 1.8 GHz versus 2 GHz), but UniSoC is much cheaper. And, you see, the productive A75 cores in a smartphone for ten are very cool. If anyone hasn't noticed, then usually the processors in budget smartphones (Helio G35, Snapdragon 450, UniSoC SC9863, Exynos 850) consist entirely of energy-efficient A53 / A55 cores. And here it is! Well, let's look at the benchmarks:
Realme C21Y
Realme C25s
We have parity in computing cores, which, inin general, it is surprising for smartphones that differ in price by one and a half times. But the graphics data (3DMark Wild Life Stress Test) correlates better with prices: C25s is noticeably more powerful. There is practically no throttling either there or there, and smartphones heat up minimally (I once received a notification about overheating, but the phone was a little warm - strange). The behavior in games of the devices is almost the same: in simple ones everything is fine (tested on Brawl Stars), heavier ones, of the PUBG level, also run without any problems, but already with a non-ideal frame rate and non-maximum graphics. Shadowgun Legends sometimes lags on the maximum graphics, but in general it is played comfortably. Well, Genshin Impact just crashes when downloading game data - I never had the patience to download it to the end. Sorry. And yet, you see, playing at maximum speeds in Shadowgun Legends on a smartphone for ten is something new.
Realme C21Y
The battery capacity of Realme C21Y is5000 mAh, Realme C25s has 6000 mAh. The older model shows really impressive battery life numbers: I got almost 10 hours of screen time in three days - and this is with games, a camera and other demanding tasks. C21Y is discharged faster, it will be problematic to pull it out for three days (but it is possible). Rather, you will have to charge your smartphone once every two days.
Realme C25s
Charging, unfortunately, is slow:The 10W unit charges the Realme C21Y in exactly two hours, the 18W unit takes a little longer to charge the Realme C25s battery (I got 145 minutes). This, by the way, is strange: battery capacities do not differ as much as charging capacities, so the C25s should in theory charge faster than the C21Y. But I also noticed abnormally slow charging in Realme C25.
By the way, get ready to charge Realme C21Yyou have to use the vintage microUSB connector. When BBK runs out of these ports, I don’t know, but I’m glad that USB Type-C is already used without exception in C25s-level models. Both smartphones support NFC and can be used for contactless payments. I did not notice any problems with the quality of communication, the signal reception is confident.
Conclusions
This pair of smartphones shows howthe manufacturer to behave correctly if the components of his smartphone become more expensive. You can make the smartphone itself more expensive - and this is the path that Realme C25s has taken with a price of about 15,000 rubles. But in my opinion, that's quite a lot for an HD screen, one useful camera, and slow charging. Or you can look for alternative components - yes, the output will be a strange device with pure Android and microUSB, but it will be possible to offer a similar level of performance and NFC for only 10,490 rubles. And this is a very tasty proposal, I think.
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© Oleg Lazarev.