In an age where smartphones look increasingly similar to each other, it’s hard to find a fresh design. But there are a few brands who like to experiment with their designs, eager to stand out from the crowd.
Realme is definitely one of them. But instead of trying to find a fresh design by themselves, the brand decided to cooperate with the famous industrial designer, Naoto Fukasawa, aiming to give consumers a fresh take on smartphone design. And on the Realme GT Master series, we felt this freshness, where the smartphone, owing to its design, felt a lot more personal than just another computing machine.
Today we’re going to review and compare the two models in the Realme GT master series. First one is the Realme GT Master edition, while the other one is the Realme GT Master Explorer edition. Let’s find out what more they have in addition to the brilliant design, and what makes both these Master models stand out from the rivals in its respective price segments.
Realme GT Master & Explorer Editions: Design
Let’s first start with their designs. It must be said that in the highly competitive Android camp, the hardware performance between models in the same price range is basically very similar. Therefore, the design is a key element that’ll give it an edge. This time, both the master and explorer models have a special version that presents Fukasawa’s design. We’re lucky to get the Fukasawa version of the master model, so in this design section, we will mainly show you the master model in our hand which is co-designed with Fukasawa.
Considering the front is completely occupied by the display, Fukasawa’s ‘unconscious design’ philosophy is naturally directed on the back of the model. This time, he is inspired by the everyday travel luggage, with the phone’s rear featuring horizontal grid patterns. The vegan leather material is not only visually pleasing, but also comfortable to hold in your hand. In fact, the soft material at the back reminds me of common objects from our everyday life like a handbag, or a luggage, and even your car’s interior.
While I agree that the leather-like material used on the back is not exclusive to the GT Master model, but the unique luggage pattern is like adding a soul to the design. It no longer lacks imagination like those phones with a basic colored leather finish.
And in actual use, thanks to its excellent built quality, this design ensures I have a good grip, which prevents any unwanted drops.
Realme GT Master vs Explorer Editions: Hardware Differences
There are some general details that distinguish the two models in terms of their designs. For example, the Master’s frame is made of plastic while the explorer model uses a metal frame.
The front faces of the two models are slightly different as well. The GT master edition is equipped with a 6.43-inch flat hole-punch 120Hz display, while the Explorer version uses a slightly bigger edge-curved one. Both of them get Samsung’s Amoled panel, which offers excellent colors. When playing HDR content, both models were smart enough to activate HDR colors. Considering their competitive pricing, especially for the Master model, it’s quite surprising that they get top-notch displays. Meanwhile, both of them support up to 120Hz refresh rate, which also brings excellent UI fluency.
As for their audio performance, the dual-speaker setup of the explorer version no doubt is much better than the single speaker on the standard master version. But considering their pricing difference, the GT Master’s performance is still acceptable.
As for their performance, the standard Master version is powered by the Snapdragon 778G chipset, while the explorer version features a Snapdragon 870 chip. According to the benchmarks we ran, it’s obvious the explorer model’s performance driven by the 870 chipset was able to compare to other famous flagship killers. However, the master model’s scores were surprisingly competitive as well. The performance was almost equal to the average level of last year’s Android flagships. The biggest surprise is the CPU multi-core performance of the master model, which almost caught up with the explorer version.
In actual gaming, both models can run PUBG Mobile without any issues. In Genshin Imapct, the 870 chipset didn’t disappoint us, and under default performance mode, it can run the game stably at 48.4fps with excellent thermal management. While on the Master model, the result of the 43fps was better than our expectation. And when we turned on GT mode on the explorer model, the gaming performance got a significant boost.
Realme GT Master vs Explorer Editions: Camera
The camera setup is the biggest difference between these two models. The explorer model features a better main camera and adds a wide-angle lens with higher resolution. Actually, the main camera of the master model comes with 64MP Samsung GW1 sensor, which has an even higher resolution than the Sony IMX766 sensor. So let’s look at their samples.
Main Camera
For the main camera, we have to say that the gap here is not so significant under good lighting conditions. Both the devices produced great colors with decent sharpness. Only under some complicated scenarios, the Explorer model is able to deliver higher dynamic range to cover darker details with less image noise. In addition, if we look closer, we can see that the explorer edition did a better job when dealing with the fringing issue, while the master model might relatively degrade the edge-picture quality.
Night Scenes
When coming to night scenes, the gap of the main cameras was more obvious. The explorer’s main camera could achieve better overall brightness and reserve better shadow detail. But if we didn’t directly compare it with the explorer model, the master model actually performed pretty well and could be one of the best camera phones in its price range.
Ultra-Wide Angle Camera
Well, the competition of wide-angle cameras is uncontested in this comparison due to the explorer model’s 16MP resolution. The samples shot on the explorer model generally had a purer image with sharper detail. But there was still some good detail in the samples shot from the master model too.
Both the phones are equipped with a 2MP macro lens as a third camera. From the samples we shot, we found that the samples from the master model looks better than the explorer model. It has brighter colors with purer blur effect.
In addition to the camera performance we mentioned, this time Realme creatively developed an exclusive photographic mode for the GT master series, which is the street mode. It’s a convenient shooting mode that truly takes advantage of the phone as a smart portable camera.
Users can dual-click the volume button to quick start the street mode. Once you enter the street mode, you can see the special filters that has been applied over the camera preview interface. It features digital image stabilization to smartly recognize motion of objects shot in the preview screen and then accordingly apply an appropriate shutter. Meanwhile, the street mode provides 4 focal lengths as preset. It’s definitely a surprising mode for users who like to point and shoot quick shots with a single phone. The filters preset in the GT master and explorer editions are pretty special. But please note that with the filter, the image looks emotional but has a relatively lower dynamic range than the images shot under auto mode. And unfortunately, the street mode is not available in video shooting. I really recommend Realme to open the street mode for video shooting.
Realme GT Master vs Explorer Editions: Battery & Charging
As for the battery and charging, there’s no obvious difference between these two models. Although the Explorer model features a slightly bigger battery, the master model achieved a better result in our battery life test, which probably is the credit of the efficient 778G chipset. In the charging test, both were fully charged with the same 67W charging efficiency in 30mins.
So that’s all about the comparison between the Realme GT master and the GT Master Explorer. Both of them are outstanding models in their respective price ranges. By far, the Explorer model is one of the best flagship-killer models that I would recommend, while the GT Master is my best budget pick since it’s quite literally the only budget model that comes with a unique stand-out design.
