realme C67 Review: A great budget phone in 2024?

There are times that I find flagship phones hardly enticing anymore when there’s just so little upgrades over their predecessors despite having huge price increments, that’s when I take a look at budget phones and see how far they have come.

For the past two weeks, I have the realme C67, a sub RM800 4G smartphone that looks pretty ordinary to most eyes and one won’t bat an eye on its modest hardware specifications, but in reality, it is a pretty good phone that deserves some attention by budget phone hunters.

The review unit I received has very nice gradient green color back that realme has fancily called it Sunny Oasis, the gold rim around the cameras is too flashy to my liking and mismatches the back design, but otherwise, the phone has a sleek 7.59mm profile and doesn’t weigh like a brick, it is also IP54 rated against water and dust, so it can definitely take a few splashes in shower or an accidental coffee spill.

Sporting a 6.72-inch FHD+ display that refreshes at 90Hz, the realme C67 certainly loses out to some similar class phones in terms of display technology, but it is by all means not a bad screen as it isn’t as reflective and has decent indoor brightness. What impresses me is how responsive it is to my touch when I scroll my Facebook feed and typing a long e-mail, complemented by the phone’s strong haptics, it makes it a very enjoyable device to use.

Oh yeah, let’s not forget to mention that ‘Mini Capsule 2.0’, which is an unnecessary lengthy bar interface that shows up between the front camera punch hole cutout that shows a limited number of things, such as music playback, weather and battery status, which I find it ironic that realme is considering this a USP of the phone despite being a bad carbon copy of Dynamic Island on iOS.

I have come across many budget phones with stereo speakers, and they can sound worse than mono speakers, the realme C67’s stereo speakers fortunately plays true stereo sound but isn’t as punchy as I’d like it to be, but I would give it a pass considering it is a mid-entry device. Fortunately, there is a 3.5mm headphone jack that drives decent power and sound quality to my Tangzu Wuzetian earphones.

Powering the realme C67 is the Snapdragon 685 chipset paired with 8GB RAM and 256GB of storage, the phone also ships with Android 14 out of the box, which is really commendable as most phones of this price range would still ship with Android 13 at this time.

During the review period, the phone has been reliable though I still encounter very minor stutters in apps, there’s never time that I find it being slow as compared to the flagship phones I’m reviewing at the same time, and that’s what matters the most to budget phone users. For lightweight gaming, the realme C67 will let you do Candy Crush just fine, just make sure you don’t crank the graphics settings in Honkai: Star Rail and it will be a fine budget gaming phone.

Probably the most disappointing part of the realme C67 is the camera setup, though the main 108MP camera works fine in general lighting conditions, and it takes pretty acceptable low light shots, I wished the secondary camera could at least be a 5MP ultrawide camera instead of a garbage 2MP black and white lens that presumably improves contrast in photos, which can already be resolved by software algorithm.

The front camera takes a modest 8MP resolution and 1080p resolution videos, it is sufficient for those who takes casual selfies and TikTok short videos, though it isn’t the best budget selfie camera phone that we have seen.

Battery life on the realme C67 is decent with a 5000mAh battery, which is very common on almost every mid-range phones today and can easily deliver up to two days of lightweight usage, the only bummer here is that realme is still sticking to 33W SuperVOOC fast charging, though it is still arguably better than many phones that still charges at 18W, there’s really no harm supporting double the charging wattage to make it slightly more compelling.

At RM799, is the realme C67 the champ of the budget mid-range phone segment? Not quite.

No doubt it is a really affordable phone judging the features you are getting; it’s got quite the competition to beat.

For instance, the similar priced Redmi Note 12 features a better-looking design and a 120Hz AMOLED display albeit with a lower resolution main camera and smaller screen, Honor’s X8b offers 512GB of storage for a reasonable RM200 extra cash with a more functional triple camera setup, and let’s not forget the Nubia Neo 5G that offers better connectivity and performance at just RM100 more.

The realme C67 is not an easy recommendation, but it sure is a good smartphone that should be on your list if you are cash strapped for a new smartphone that offers decent performance and large storage, you can’t go wrong with it but like I said, there’s just too many good alternatives within the price range that doesn’t make it the most compelling device to go for.

Get the realme C67 at Lazada and Shopee.