Ulasan realme C100

The realme C100 is out, and it’s got to be the most affordable smartphone packing a huge 8000mAh battery. Spoiler alert: that actually translates to longer battery life.

But aside from that, how does it fare when it comes to everyday use?

Let’s find out in this review.

Design and Construction

We have to admit, the realme C100 doesn’t look like a budget phone, at least from afar. Our unit is in this Purple colorway and sports a reflective, feather-like pattern on the back that shimmers depending on how the light hits it.

It also has a rectangular camera island on the upper left corner, although don’t be fooled, it only houses one actual camera underneath. realme says the camera module is made of metal, and it actually feels like it.

Notice the third “lens”? That’s the so-called Pulse Light, which illuminates for stuff like notifications and music playback among others.

Once you hold the device, that’s when you’ll realize it’s not as premium as it looks, and that’s okay. It uses an all-plastic build with flat sides and a flat screen.

For I/Os, facing the screen, you’ll find both the power button and the volume rocker on the right, the hybrid SIM tray is on the left, while the mic, USB-C port, and speaker grille are on the bottom. There’s nothing to see on the top side.

Even though the phone uses a plastic build, realme surprisingly put strong overall protection on the C100. It sports up to an IP69K rating for dust, water submersion, and even high-temperature water jets.

It also gets a military-grade rating for some level of drop resistance. And wait, there’s more: its display has ArmorShell glass on top and it even comes with a screen protector film pre-installed out of the box.

Display, Multimedia, and Biometrics

Speaking of the screen, the C100 sports a 6.8-inch IPS LCD panel with an HD+ resolution, so things won’t be as sharp, but I think it’s decent enough for daily use.

We have no complaints about stuff like watching videos or scrolling through socials. The viewing angles here are good, and the colors remain consistent no matter the angle you’re looking at. It’s also fairly bright for an LCD panel, having up to 1200 nits in high brightness mode, so the screen remains visible outdoors.

However, navigating around doesn’t feel as snappy. The screen does feature up to a 120Hz refresh rate, but you’ll notice some micro-stutters here and there.

The bezels here are quite thick, especially at the chin, and it only has a single, downward-firing loudspeaker, so watching movies won’t be immersive. Plus, the Widevine level is capped at L3, so watching Netflix is limited to SD quality.

When it comes to the listening experience, it’s what you would expect for a budget device. The single loudspeaker isn’t as loud even at 400% volume, and it sounds muddy overall with poorly defined highs and mids, and no bass at all.

For biometrics, there’s the power button that doubles as a fingerprint sensor, joined by face recognition. Unlocking the phone using either method is quick and reliable, especially the fingerprint sensor.

That said, there’s a bit of a delay—as soon as your finger touches the sensor, the screen unlocks after a split second.

Cameras

Moving on to camera performance, the realme C100 features a 50-megapixel main camera on the rear paired with an auxiliary lens of some sort, joined by an 8-megapixel selfie shooter.

In well-lit environments, the main camera surprisingly does a decent job at capturing subjects. Mainly thanks to AI processing, the outputs come out respectable with decent sharpness, nice colors, and acceptable level of dynamic range.

Shot on realme C100

Jun 15 – 16

When taking the shot, it may look like it has blown-out highlights, but once it processes the photo, it’ll try to bring out the proper highlights and shadows, giving you a decent shot. It can shoot up to 2x, but that’s when it starts to introduce some harsher grain, making it look less sharp.

Selfies are also decent. Not a lot of sharpness here, but it does your skin color and texture some justice.

For videos, both the front and rear cameras are capped at 1080p at 30 frames per second. With a lack of stabilization of any form, videos tend to be shaky, so you’ll need some steady hands.

The overall sharpness is respectable, though the colors can sometimes be washed out. Zooming in using the camera controls is slow for some reason, but overall, it can reliably focus on subjects.

Performance and Benchmarks

Now, let’s talk about performance. Under the hood, the realme C100 is equipped with the MediaTek Helio G92 Max combined with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of expandable storage. It’s almost a two-year old chip, but it can still perform. Well, kind of.

Apps tend to load quite slowly, usually taking a couple of seconds to open. Maybe that’s because the phone is using an eMMC storage which is relatively slower than UFS. Although, once it loads app resources properly, the phone is fairly responsive in our experience.

Multi-tasking is definitely possible on this phone, using split screen with a floating window on top. No obvious lags but like I said earlier, there can be micro-stutters at times. RAM management is also handled fairly well with multiple apps running in the background without aggressive app reloading.

One thing’s for sure though. This phone is not designed for gaming. As you can see in our benchmark results, the C100 barely passed the 400,000 mark in AnTuTu V11. And in 3DMark Wild Life, it only got an average frame rate of about 4 FPS. So, that says a lot already.

We tried playing Mobile Legends, which is a lightweight MOBA game. Setting it to the Lowest graphics settings possible, the gameplay didn’t feel smooth, even with the so-called “GT Boost” enabled.

The same goes with Pokémon TCG Pocket, which is a card game by the way, the phone wasn’t able to run smoothly. The game was unresponsive and there was obvious lag throughout our gameplay.

Thermal management is great since it doesn’t have to push much power in the first place. But what’s interesting here is the “phone cooling” feature that’s recommended to use after a heavy workload such as taking a video for a long time for example.

It takes a couple of minutes to cool the phone down. It works by terminating active apps and temporarily limiting the CPU and GPU clock speeds as indicated on the Settings.

For the most part, the phone can still handle your entertainment needs and a little bit of productivity apps which is more than enough for its segment.

OS, UI, and Apps

Software-wise, the C100 ships with realme UI 7 on top of Android 16. The software experience is respectable with a bunch of customization options for the lock screen, app icons, and you can even change the control center layout.

Although as expected, it comes with a considerable amount of bloat with pre-installed apps like TikTok, Shopee, Netflix, and a bunch more that are grouped in app folders.

The UI design honestly looks nice and feels quite intuitive as well, despite the phone not being the fastest out there. There’s split screen and floating windows support and we didn’t encounter any heavy stutters when multi-tasking.

It also comes with a couple of AI tools such as AI Editor inside the Photos app and AI Assistant for Notes.

That said, you can definitely get some work done using the C100.

Connectivity and Battery Life

Battery life is where the realme C100 really shines. Inside is a whopping 8000mAh unit that provided us some serious uptime.

In our PCMark battery life test, it lasted 26 hours and 9 minutes, and it even lasted longer in our video loop test, passing the 34 hour mark. That’s an impressive battery life, and since our workload didn’t require much processing power, it could go on for a couple more days before charging it again.

Speaking of, it supports 45W of wired charging which refills the battery in about an hour and a half. Not to mention, it supports reverse-wired charging to charge other devices and accessories.

While it also supports bypass charging, it wasn’t really much of use in our opinion since you can’t really game on this thing. So, there’s that.

Connectivity-wise, the phone supports dual nano-SIM with 4G LTE, Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth 5.3, and GPS. It even comes with a microSD card slot for storage expansion.

Pricing

So, before moving on to our verdict, let’s talk about pricing.

Sadly, we don’t have the official pricing info just yet for the realme C100. For reference, last year’s realme C75 retailed for PHP 8,999 (8GB+128GB), so we can expect the C100 to be priced around the same range.

But with the “RAMaggeddon” that’s been going on, we think the price is likely gonna be higher than before.

Conclusion

So, what do we think about the realme C100? The realme C-Series has long been a compelling option in the budget category. The realme C100 is no different, but it could’ve used some improvements.

The performance, while mostly decent, is held back by an aging MediaTek chip, and the audio-visual experience isn’t the best.

In this case, however, the pros outweigh the cons. It sports a nice design with insanely strong protection, surprises with decent camera performance, and most importantly, impresses with solid battery life.

This is looking great for those who just want a functioning daily phone, capable enough of handling the basics.

What we liked:

• Solid battery life
• Decent camera performance
• Strong overall protection
• Lightweight software experience, and multi-tasking features

What we didn’t like:

• Limited performance due to aging chipset
• Mediocre audio-visual quality

realme C100 specs:
6.8-inch HD+ IPS LCD
1570 x 720 pixels, 120Hz refresh rate
1200 nits brightness (HBM)
ArmorShell Glass
MediaTek Helio G92 Max
Mali-G52 MC2 GPU
8GB LPDDR4X RAM
256GB eMMC 5.1 storage
Expandable via microSD
50MP f/1.8 rear camera, AF
8MP f/2.0 selfie shooter (punch hole notch)
Dual nano-SIM (hybrid slot)
4G LTE
Wi-Fi 5
Bluetooth 5.3
GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, QZSS
USB Type-C
Side-mounted fingerprint sensor, face unlock
IP69K, -69, -68, -66 dust and water resistance, high temperatures
MIL-STD-810H drop resistance
realme UI 7, Android 16
8000mAh battery
45W charging (wired)
Supports reverse wired charging
Supports bypass charging
166.48 x 78.23 x 8.63 mm (dimensions)
~219g (weight)
Purple, White, Brown (colorways)