realme 15 Review – It’s A Sidegrade

Unboxing

Just earlier this year, realme released the realme 14 smartphone, and just half a year later we’re looking at its successor – the realme 15. The new smartphone has gone through a bit of design changes, although as far as unboxing is concerned, you’ll be seeing the same yellow box before revealing the smartphone in full.

Here’s the full list of accessories, sans papers this time: 
– 80W charger (Europlug)
– USB-C charging cable
– SIM ejector pin
– Phone case
– realme 15 main unit

Walkaround

The realme 15 has been given a different look this time around with subtle aesthetics, with the sci-fi lines now gone, and in comes the faux brushed metal look with a new dual-camera setup. There is a third lens at the bottom, but that is not a camera lens – instead, there is a multispectral sensor to complement the camerat.

In any case, the camera array is complemented by a fairly robust flash setup involving two LEDs in different color temperatures (one on the cooler side and one on the warmer side), along with a ring-shaped RGB LED surrounding the second camera, although this is functioning as a status light rather than a supplementary camera light source.

The side profiles show standard layouts, with microphones on top, another microphone, speaker, USB-C and SIM slot at the bottom, along with buttons on the right, and nothing on the left. It’s also a fairly thin phone, measuring 7.66mm while managing to pack a huge 7,000mAh battery inside.

Like its predecessor, the realme 15 comes with realmeUI 6.0 based on Android 15, although this time there’s more presence of Gemini AI as smartphone makers and Google actively pushes the feature across the lineup, like the icon you see on the bottom left corner by default.

Specifications

realme 15 (RMX5106, 12GB+256GB)

Full specifications available on product specifications page.

Performance

System

Let’s say we’re slightly baffled by the switch from Qualcomm to MediaTek this time around, with the Dimensity 7300+ chipset scoring slightly less than what we saw in the Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 from the preceding model. Perhaps the change of core layouts from 1X+3P+4E to 4P+4E have affected the smartphone’s performance characteristics, but let’s see what CPU and GPU results show to make further conclusions.

CPU

Amongst the mid-range phones, the realme 15’s MediaTek Dimensity 7300+ chipset didn’t show any meaningful lead in the performance; in fact, it regressed slightly from its predecessor’s Snapdragon-based chipset. This puts it next to Samsung’s year-old Galaxy A35 based on Exynos 1380, along with POCO X7 with a highly similar Dimensity 7300 Ultra chipset.

GPU

It’s not good news either if you’re expecting improved GPU performance: the Arm Mali-G615 in this case performs worse than the Adreno 810 found in realme 14’s Snapdragon 6 Gen 4, although in both cases ray tracing is not supported (though you won’t be expecting that in budget phones today). In terms of performance stability, the 99% rating means it performs consistently regardless of how long you play, and in our testing the phone barely felt warm to the touch.

Battery

Battery life is another aspect that we found largely unchanged from its predecessor – despite having a larger 7,000mAh battery capacity, the overall runtime of the smartphone is still pretty much in the same ballpark as the realme 14 with 6,000mAh battery onboard. Perhaps this has to do with the MediaTek Dimensity chipset being slightly less-power efficient overall compared to the Qualcomm Snapdragon model from before, although there is a big improvement in charging speed thanks to the now-80W fast charging support.

User Experience

Software

The initial setup process will require you to take a close look in some sections to avoid installing unnecessary bloat, starting with the ‘Recommended Services’ section. If you don’t want the random lock screen wallpapers feature, I strongly suggest disabling right from this step – while you can disable it later on, the process will be quite annoying to go through. It’s worth a good minute to take a close look on what you want enabled, and if you’re unsure, you can disable them first, as some of the features will ask you to enable them once needed.

For the App Market section, carefully select what you want installed, or just hit the skip button on the top right (this is another example of dark patterns in action). Same goes to the ‘Review Additional Apps’ section, which for this realme 15 has been cut down quite a lot from the previous model we reviewed not too long ago. It should be noted that even when you skipped installing these optional apps, there will be more bloatware pre-installed waiting for you once the setup process is complete. If you intend to debloat, there’s more to do later on.

A lot of the UI behavior in realme UI is what I’d classify as “annoyances”: upon entering the home screen for the first time, you get reminded of realme’s App Market despite Google Play already exists; the app even sends notifications despite never being opened once, and that’s before the user even agrees to the statement of use when opening the app for the first time. Remember the lock screen feature we said to disable earlier? The operating system will once again remind you of this feature despite explicitly disabling it from the setup process.

In the apps screen you’ll see quite a number of bloatware – 19 of them to be exact, even though most people will keep the likes of TikTok, Shopee and Spotify. (Shoutout to IR Remote app, not many phones feature IR blasters these days.) You’ll need to spend some time to disable apps and notifications of promotional nature (if you dislike them, which I do), as there’s quite a few of them and notifications in particular may not all appear at once.

Camera

The UI of the realme camera is a pretty typical one, with basic controls on the right (USB-C port side), and advanced controls on the left (chassis top side). Not every UI rotates accordingly though, such as the flash control – which includes a new “Fill Light” mode that activates both LEDs designed for portrait photography, similar to vivo’s Aura Light design. The filters and effects are located within the viewfinder, while the “AI Party Mode”, essentially a set of filter and effect combination that you use for, presumably, parties.

That aside, there is a mode switch on the left that allows users to pick between Crisp and Vibrant photo modes. We think this mostly comes down to how the camera deals with colors, as seen in the example below:

The Vibrant mode gives a brighter look, which is especially obvious in the colors of the artificial grass; whereas Crisp sticks to more natural colors, although in my opinion this ended up underexposing some of the darker parts of the images.

Putting HDR to the test with the two images above, and my observation is that the phone tends to clamp the shadows too much while retaining the dynamic range of the image. As a result, when dealing with artificial light, the light sources are reproduced accurately while the rest of the image end up underexposed in comparison, making the photos look rather dull.

Above is the usual zoom and night lighting test, and we can see the phone struggle with bloom in specific compositions, such as the ultrawide zoom and the rooftop ‘TERRACE’ sign. The white LED also ended up looking blueish in both cases, and for the ground-level sign, it’s a bit underexposed as a result of aggressive clamping.