The young brand, Realme, has given us a lot of surprises since its establishment. It first started out as a smartphone manufacturer, but now the brand is ambitiously expanding to markets beyond smartphones. In 2021, it has launched a bunch of new products in new categories. The Realme Book, the brand’s first-ever laptop product, was recently announced with incredible value for money. To achieve its very first step in the market, the Realme Book targets the affordable market, where things are highly competitive. Since we’ve seen so many excellent manufacturers splitting up a large chunk of this market, we are curious whether the Realme Book can stand out from the crowd and win its own position. Just follow our review and find out the answer.
Realme Book Slim Review: Design
At first glance, the Realme Book did impress us with its great build quality. Since these days even affordable laptops have a similar design to other premium laptops, the real differentiating factor lies in the laptop’s attention to detail and build quality. In this regard, the Realme Book is one of the most impressive models in its price range. The laptop’s design looks clean and highly integrated, thanks to the whole metal body.
The smooth aluminum alloy feels pretty premium with a united matte finish, which would not only prevent from getting fingerprints stains and dust but also theoretically ensures stable performance, due to its good heat dissipation.
Known as Realme Book Slim, the Realme Book also brings an ultra-slim design with 14.9mm thickness (thickest point: 15.5mm). Matching with the front size of 307 x 229mm and the weight of 1.48kg (1.38kg for the 8G version), the compact laptop is pretty good for portable use. But surprisingly, in the compact body (a common size for a 13-inch notebook), Realme installed a 14-inch 2K IPS display with a resolution of 2160 x 1440. Except for the bottom frame with the realme logo, the three bezels (left & right: 5.3mm) around the panel are quite narrow (Screen-to-body ratio: 90%), which makes the display look much more stunning than most of its competitors.
However, the compact design forces some compromises. The number of available ports probably won’t please some users. There’s only one USB 3.0 port and a 3.5mm headphone jack on the right side. On the other side, the laptop offers a Thunderbolt 4 (charging port) and another USB-C 3.2 port.
To fix that, an additional interface dock may be needed with the Realme Book.
In addition, the included 65W PD charger also applies a compact design for ease of carrying, which, more importantly, can be shared for charging both the laptop and your smartphone with a USB-C charging port.
The keyboard layout of the Realme Book uses large keycaps that feature good travel at 1.3mm. The keys offer a pretty fast and smooth response without producing much noise while typing. But for some users who require a strong rebound, the typing experience may not be so pleasurable. The keys are backlit and Realme offers two levels of brightness for users under different situations.
The large touchpad below the keyboard is one of my favorite points. It provides an ample touch area which is also responsive and smooth. And during our limited experience, we didn’t face any mistouches.
Realme Book Slim Display & Speakers
Let’s take a closer look at the 14-inch display. Honestly, the display of the Realme Book is one of the top options we can find at this price. It supports up to 100% sRGB gamut with outstanding color accuracy (actual test: ΔE=1.45), which is pretty close to some professional monitors for image processing. As an office-work or business model, the 3:2 aspect ratio is also a better option than the 16:9. The most intuitive experience is that it can display multiple tasks more comfortably.
The only unfortunate limitation is the 400-nit max brightness, which isn’t really enough for use under bright ambient light.
For audio, the Realme Book is equipped with dual Harman-tuned speakers with the support of DTS Stereo Surround Sound technology. The actual audio sound is loud and rich. Although it still is not comparable to some premium models, it’s already better than most options at the price point.
Realme Book Slim Performance & Gaming Review
As a competitive laptop taking aim at good productivity, the Realme Book has offered the best that it can at this price. The whole lineup of the Realme Book is powered by the 11th-gen Intel Core processors, but you only have Core i3-1115G4 and a Core i5-1135G7 for options. The model in our hand is an Intel i5 version with 16GB LPDDR4X RAM and 512GB PCIe SSD ROM, which is also the top configuration of the lineup.
In AIDA64’s stress test (FPU stress test), this i5’s single-core frequency could reach up to 4.2GHz, which would be a remarkable improvement for heavy productivity uses. During the stress test, the laptop had sustained high-performance output with excellent cooling capacity, which thanks to the cooling system mainly constituted by dual fans inside the body and the connection with dual 8mm-diameter heat pipes. And notably, the cooling system stayed pretty quiet and didn’t produce unacceptable noise.
Another important detail reflected in the test is that the CPU could run up to 28W TDP. Considering it comes with Intel’s Iris Xe integrated graphics instead of separate Graphics, it’s the best performance that the i5-1135G7 CPU can achieve.
In PCMark 10, the Realme Book scored 4766, where it got 9628 for the Essentials Test, and got 6437 for the productivity test. In another Benchmark, CineBench R20, the CPU of the laptop scored 2192, which is a pretty good result among all the i5-1135G7 models.
As for gaming, we chose to run FPS Test of the game CS:GO on the Realme Book. The laptop could achieve an average framerate of 50fps under the game’s 1080P high graphics. And under low graphics, the framerate could stably maintain at 55-60fps.
To summarize the results in different benchmarks, we’re quite sure that the Realme Book is sufficient to meet the general needs of office productivity and light entertainment, while running heavy-loaded games is still a bit of a struggle.
Although the Realme Book is the brand’s first laptop coming with Windows 10 system pre-installed, the brand promised that the lineup is in the first list of laptops to be updated with Windows 11.
In addition, Realme pre-installed an exclusive application to achieve seamless collaboration with a Realme Phone. The PC-Phone Connect application allows to seamlessly mirror the phone screen to the notebook where users easily share and open files on the phone with PC programs. But just note that it’s compatible only with Realme GT series for now.
Realme Book Slim Battery Life Review
The Realme Book is equipped with a 54Wh battery. Realme claimed, under office use, the notebook could last for 8.5 hours. But in our actual uses, it was around 1 hour less than its claimed battery life, which is probably because we added up more usage scenarios like web-surfing and streaming video playback. Nevertheless, considering its slim body, such battery performance is still impressive.
Last but not least, we have a reminder for users who are going to buy a Core i3 configuration of the Realme Book. The i3 variant doesn’t support the latest Bluetooth 5.2 connectivity, the ultra-high-speed of Thunderbolt 4 port, or even the new WiFi 6 network. Considering the absence of Core i7 configuration, we highly recommend going for the Core i5 version of the Realme Book if you are attracted by the beautiful price and its powerful performance.
Realme Book Slim: Verdict
As Realme’s first entry into the notebook market, the Realme Book surprisingly shows its mature product power. The optimized Core i5-1135G7 processor plus up to 16GB RAM and 512GB ROM brought back the smooth experience to budget notebooks. Unlike those mid-rangers using an MX450 independent Graphics as a gimmick (bringing very limited improvement and serious power and heated issues), it emphasizes the balance of good portability, stable performance and overall power consumption.
While taking the attractive price into account, it’s definitely one of the best options for portable productivity and light entertainment for the price.
You can get the Realme Book from Realme or via retailers like Giztop.
