Realme has always been known for offering value-packed smartphones. As a spin-off from Oppo, it shares a similar DNA with OnePlus but primarily operates in lower price segments, offering competitive features at a more affordable price point. After a slight shift in identity, Realme is back to making compelling flagship killers – a category that OnePlus pioneered and dominated for a long time. The latest offering, the Realme GT 6, boasts an impressive set of features that enable it to compete head-on with high-end flagship phones. Beyond its impressive hardware specs, this phone, priced around $650, incorporates AI features that propel it into the flagship segment. These AI features seamlessly integrate with core Android functionality, enhancing your experience without overwhelming you with gimmicks. AI is a term often overused in marketing, so making it truly useful is a fundamental challenge. Realme takes on this challenge by integrating AI into existing Android features, aiming for practical utility rather than simply adding another feature to the list.
Realme’s headline feature is Screen Recognition. Despite its rather generic name, this feature is surprisingly powerful. It’s designed to analyze the content of any screen across various apps, including media and text. Realme assigns a simple and intuitive gesture to activate Screen Recognition – simply tap and hold the screen with two fingers. When activated, the screen content freezes, and a scanning animation appears. But the real intelligence lies in how you interact with the scanned content. When you select an image (or a still frame from a video) or text and drag it to the edge of the display, you activate what Realme calls the AI Smart Loop. The Smart Loop intelligently identifies the type of information being dragged and automatically suggests the most relevant apps. For instance, if you find an interesting image online and scan it with Screen Recognition, Smart Loop will recommend social media or chat apps for sharing. You can even drag the image over the icon of an app like Instagram, and Smart Loop will offer specific actions like sharing it to a Story, your feed, or as a post. This same functionality extends to other apps like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), WhatsApp, Telegram, and more. No longer do you need to go through multiple steps to reply to a tweet with a relevant meme! Similarly, Screen Recognition detects email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses, suggesting appropriate apps for each. It automatically recommends Google Maps when it detects a physical address, proving incredibly useful when you encounter a business on platforms like Facebook or Instagram. A powerful feature allows you to drag any image over to Google Lens, letting it work its magic. In addition to app suggestions, Smart Loop allows you to add media and text to a File Dock. Think of it as a persistent clipboard, accessible from the side of the screen, that retains saved information until manually deleted. This is incredibly useful when you need to copy multiple items from a page in any order. While Smart Loop’s suggestions are generally helpful, they aren’t always accurate. To bypass this, simply drag the image over the arrows, and the loop rotates to showcase more apps, similar to a rotary dial phone. You can cycle through the app options and drop the media wherever you want. These features resemble Android’s long-press app shortcut feature, a core component of Android for years. Realme’s implementation makes the process more appealing by streamlining the steps involved in saving media, copying text, or scanning information. Instead of multiple taps, a single tap followed by a few drags of your thumb across the screen is all it takes to save or access a multitude of things. The gestures are intuitive and require minimal practice to master.
Removing unwanted objects from images is a common feature on many phones, and Realme aims to perfect it. The GT 6 offers AI Smart Removal, cleverly eliminating distracting elements from your pictures. But with nearly every Android phone maker and even Google Photos offering this feature, what can Realme truly achieve? Realme claims to outperform existing options, and it genuinely does. The punchy colors in an image capture the essence of a joyful evening as the sun emerges after a rain shower. However, a fast-moving Honda car disrupts the serene ambiance. Using Google’s Magic Editor to remove the sedan resulted in an awkward outcome. But when Realme’s AI eraser was used, the results were far more natural and convincing. The tool seamlessly removes the car without leaving any trace, flawlessly blending the median and trees in the background. To confirm this wasn’t a fluke, another image was tested. Using Google’s Magic Editor, the removal process resulted in a patch of grass and car remnants, creating an abstract mosaic of unrecognizable surfaces. However, the image modified with Realme’s object eraser, as seen below, extends the canvas more naturally, even recreating fallen leaves on the asphalt for a believable appearance. It’s unclear what makes Realme’s implementation more effective than Google’s, but it’s definitely the preferred choice. The level of finesse in AI regeneration on the recent desktop versions of Adobe Photoshop is comparable to Realme’s performance, which is remarkable for a phone.
The camera was one of the first features on Android phones to be labelled with AI. For almost a decade, brands have boasted about AI in photography and videography, when in reality, its applications were limited to color filters and blanket settings to enhance visual appeal. Google, with its expertise in computationally enhancing camera output, remains an exception. While more brands are catching up with Google through partnerships with camera companies and dedicated phone processors for better images, Realme claims to use AI to improve camera performance itself. One standout feature is its AI-enhanced video mode. In extreme low-light conditions, the Realme GT 6 significantly improves video quality in two ways. First, the AI Night Vision feature boosts the amount of light captured by the camera. Second, the recorded videos appear much sharper and more detailed. Improving videos is significantly more challenging than achieving similar effects in photos. It requires the phone to process dozens of frames per second, relying heavily on hardware. The Realme GT 6’s ability to enhance video visibility to a notable degree, even without powerful hardware or a dedicated co-processor, is commendable.
Spending almost every waking hour staring at screens has become a common reality. Given the negativity surrounding blue light in modern society, eye protection is a growing concern. Modern devices offer blue light filters, brightness limiters, and other mechanisms to mitigate the effects of screens. Flagship devices even auto-adjust colors based on your surroundings and time of day. So, what more can phone companies do to ensure eye safety? Realme has an answer, and its eye protection feature incorporates AI as well. In addition to standard blue light filtering and automatic screen color adjustment, Realme uses the front camera to detect signs of fatigue. When it detects yawning or infrequent blinking, it interprets these as signs of exhaustion and adjusts screen colors accordingly. This feature works with or without the existing bedtime mode, particularly when reading, watching videos, or using social media. It also considers ambient light and other indicators of tiredness. The extent of blue light filtering is more subtle and increases gradually compared to bedtime mode, gently easing your eyes into a more relaxed state. It would be ideal if Realme also included features to fade colors to help you fully detach from the phone at night, but the current implementation is a step in the right direction.
In recent months, we’ve seen a surge in AI applications on phones. While the industry emphasizes the need for thinking phones, these features have largely been limited to flagship devices with ample processing power. Realme, on the other hand, is making a genuine effort to make AI accessible to a broader audience. While the features are limited at this stage, they steer clear of gimmicks and focus on practical features you might actually use. Realme shares resources with Oppo and OnePlus, which means these features might become available in the US through upcoming OnePlus phones, not necessarily limited to flagships.
However, there’s a significant caveat. Realme relies on Oppo’s self-trained large language model, AndresGPT, which is more proficient in Chinese than in English. Additionally, most data processing happens in the cloud, at least for non-flagship phones like the Realme GT 6. As the AI race intensifies, data privacy is a critical concern that brands must address. Until then, it’s advisable to avoid scanning personal data or media with these AI-powered features.
Despite these concerns, Realme’s AI features show promise and can significantly enhance how we use our phones, streamlining tasks and making them more efficient. This is how Realme excels in the smartphone AI game. Unfortunately, purchasing this phone may prove more difficult than expected, as Realme doesn’t officially sell it in the US. In Europe, the Realme GT 6 starts at 600 euros (~$645), with the top-tier model reaching 800 euros.
