Realme has been expanding its smartphone portfolio of late, and it’s pretty evident by the number of phones it has launched in the past couple of years.

Earlier this year, the company added the GT Neo 3 as a successor to the GT Neo 2 in the GT lineup. The Neo 3 packed plenty of improvements over the Neo 2 and delivered generally better performance, thanks to the MediaTek Dimensity 8100 chipset, good battery life (with insanely fast 150W charging), and above-average cameras.

Now, months later, Realme has a new (read affordable) variant of the Neo 3 in the lineup. It’s called the Realme GT Neo 3T, and the “T” branding here rather implies that the device is an affordable alternative to the Realme GT Neo 3 with a refreshed back design and a lower price point.

Carrying a starting price of Rs 29,999, the GT Neo 3T gets you a Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 5G chipset, a 5000mAh battery with 80W SuperDart charging, a triple-camera system on the rear, and Android 12. But how do these features translate to real-world performance, and do they justify the device’s asking price? Our Realme GT Neo 3T review should help answer that.

At first look, the GT Neo 3T looks identical to the Realme GT Neo 2 from last year. It features the same plastic back panel and a polycarbonate mid-frame as the GT Neo 2. However, unlike the Neo 2, which featured a stripe design with the “Dare to Leap” slogan on the back, the GT Neo 3T gets a new design pattern inspired by the chequered flag.

As a way to make this pattern stand out, Realme offers two colorways for the Neo 3T: Dash Yellow and Drifting White. Our unit is in the Drifting White color, and we like how it gives the design a visually striking appearance without being too flashy. For those who prefer a more subtle color and build on their smartphone, there’s a third color option for the GT Neo 3T: Shade Black.

Realme GT Neo 3T’s similarities with the GT Neo 2 extend to the cameras as well, as it gets the same rectangular module—positioned vertically—with three cameras and a flash at the back as the Neo 2. One thing about this camera module you’ll notice as soon as you pick up the device is that it protrudes from the body a bit, which makes it wobble if you try using it when it’s placed flat on a table. Of course, putting on a case—like the one bundled with the phone—fixes this and, at the same time, also helps protect the device from scratches and scuffs.

Taking a look at the sides reveals the volume up and volume down keys along the left edge and the power button on the right. All three buttons on the device provide good tactility, and their placement also seems perfectly fine. There’s a noise-canceling microphone on the top edge of the device, whereas the bottom has a microphone accompanied by a dual-SIM card tray, a USB-C port, and the speaker grille.

The GT Neo 3T also comes with an in-display optical fingerprint scanner, similar to the Realme GT Neo 2. While the scanner is quick and reads your fingerprint just fine, it’s positioned a little close to the bottom edge, which requires you to perform awkward thumb gymnastics to unlock the device. Besides, just like the GT Neo 2, the Neo 3T also misses out on ingress protection.

As for the in-hand feel of the device, the GT Neo 3T, despite being made out of plastic, doesn’t feel particularly cheap to hold and use. It’s got a nice curve at the back, which, combined with its 8.65mm thickness, makes it easy to grip and handle—even for one-handed use.

The GT Neo 3T’s similarities with the Neo 2 don’t end with just the design; they also carry forward to the front of the device. As such, the Realme GT Neo 3T gets the same 6.62-inch E4 AMOLED display from Samsung as the GT Neo 2 with an off-centered punch-hole cutout in the top-left corner for housing the front-facing camera.

It’s got fairly tiny bezels along the left, top, and right edges, thanks to a higher (92.60%) screen-to-body ratio, while the bottom chin remains relatively thick. If you watch a lot of content or enjoy playing games on your smartphone, you’ll have a good experience with the GT Neo 3T.

Specifications-wise, the Neo 3T’s display offers a 1080×2400 px screen resolution with 1300 nits of brightness along with support for 100% DCI-P3 color gamut. It refreshes at 120Hz and supports a 360Hz touch sampling rate to offer better responsiveness during gaming. Although the 120Hz refresh rate certainly makes the experience snappy and fluid, having the screen refresh at 120Hz all the time also consumes more battery. To remedy this, Realme offers the Auto Select mode under the display refresh settings, which automatically chooses the best refresh rate for an app itself and helps save some battery.

When it comes to color accuracy, we find the GT Neo 3T’s display quite accurate—especially the Natural screen color mode. It gets sufficiently bright, offers enough contrast, and maintains an overall natural appearance. Plus, if you prefer more lively colors on your phone’s screen, there are a few other color mode presets you can try as well, or if you don’t like them either, choose the Pro mode and select one of its presets based on your preference.

During our testing, we streamed plenty of content across various OTT platforms and YouTube on the GT Neo 3T. Thanks to its speakers, we also enjoyed the overall viewing experience on its display. Additionally, we also tried out the display’s HDR10+ support—with YouTube—and it, too, worked really well.

Outdoor visibility of the GT Neo 3T’s display is also good, and the screen gets bright enough and offers good legibility to be used outside comfortably on a sunny day. And last but not least, the display comes with Corning Gorilla Glass 5 protection on top to offer protection against accidental drops and scratches.

At its core, the Realme GT Neo 3T runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 5G chipset. The Snapdragon 870 was released back in 2021, and it’s the same processor found on the GT Neo 2 as well. Additionally, two of Neo 3T’s biggest rivals in the same segment—iQOO Neo 6 and POCO F4 5G—also use the same processor under the hood.

The Snapdragon 870 is built on a 7nm node from TSMC and has an octa-core CPU that constitutes 1x 3.2GHz Kryo 585 prime code, 4x 1.8GHz Kryo 585 silver cores, and 3x 2.4GHz Kryo 585 gold cores. For handling graphics performance, it uses an Adreno 650 GPU clocked at 670MHz.

Assisting the Snapdragon 870 on the Realme GT Neo 3T is 6GB / 8GB of RAM and 128GB / 256GB of internal storage. Although the 6GB or 8GB RAM should suffice most people’s requirements, you have the option to increase it virtually if it seems insufficient to you, thanks to Dynamic RAM Expansion. However, do note that this isn’t as effective, and you won’t get much out of it. On the other hand, if you find the storage space insufficient, there’s no support for a micro-SD card on the device to expand the storage, sadly, so you need to make do with what’s available.

We conducted numerous benchmark tests on the Realme GT Neo 3T to see what the internals translate to in terms of synthetic performance. On AnTuTu, the Neo 3T scored 712773, which is lower than iQOO Neo 6’s 745060 but higher than POCO F4’s 735714. It recorded a single-core score of 991 and a multi-core score of 2394 on Geekbench 5, which, again, is lower than Neo 6’s 892 and 3122 and POCO F4’s 1019 and 3384 single-core and multi-core scores, respectively.

Additionally, we also put the Neo 3T through the CPU throttling test to test if it throttles when put under heavy workloads for long periods of time. For the test’s default duration of 15 minutes, the Snapdragon 870 throttled down to just 87% of its max performance. Even with extended sessions, like the one time we ran the test for around 30 minutes, the throttling further went down by just 3%, which is quite impressive.

In the real world, this translates to sustained performance during gaming and other resource-intensive tasks, like photo editing and video editing, on the device. Part of the reason that makes this possible on the GT Neo 3T is Realme’s in-house cooling solution, which basically employs a large vapor chamber—made out of stainless steel—inside the device that helps it dissipate heat faster and better.

Talking about our experience, we were pleased with Snapdragon 870‘s performance on the GT Neo 3T. It excelled at almost every task we threw at it, and even with some of the games we played, like Call of Duty, for instance, the performance was more than satisfactory. Gaming for more than 30 minutes did cause the back panel to heat up a bit, but not to the temperatures where it became uncomfortable to hold.

As for the rest of the stuff, the Realme GT Neo 3T comes with 5G connectivity, Wi-Fi 6, and Bluetooth v5.2. It offers face unlock, in addition to the in-display fingerprint scanner, for authentication, which is reliable and works well. The bottom-firing speakers sound nice and clear, and further add to the content-consumption experience. And finally, the GT Neo 3T also has Tactile Engine 2.0, similar to the Neo 2, which offers pretty good haptics, something many smartphones in this price range fail to deliver.

On the software front, the Realme GT Neo 3T runs on Realme UI 3.0 based on Android 12 out of the box. Realme’s been constantly updating Realme UI for the past couple of years to improve the overall user experience, and it’s finally reached a point where the software is now also smooth, intuitive, and easy to use.

On the GT Neo 3T, the Realme UI 3.0 feels polished and offers plenty of customization options to help you personalize the UI based on your preference. Additionally, it also comes loaded with a few other features, such as Flexible Windows, Smart Sidebar, and Split Screen, along with those that Realme is currently testing (as part of the Realme Lab) to help users get the most out of their device.

But having said that, the Realme UI on the GT Neo 3T isn’t entirely perfect either. It’s filled with too many bloatware apps that come pre-installed on the device and weigh down the overall experience. Although granted that installing third-party apps on the device is quite common on budget and mid-tier smartphones these days, as it helps manufacturers subsidize the cost of their devices, having them in such large numbers on any device has two consequences: unwanted notifications and difficulty in finding apps you use regularly.

Fortunately, Realme allows you to uninstall some of these pre-installed apps on the GT Neo 3T. We did this on our device with some apps that kept sending notifications incessantly. We recommend you go through the list of all apps on your device, too, and disable/uninstall the ones you don’t use and those that send unsolicited notifications multiple times a day to clean up your device and continue using it without being spammed by app notifications.

Another gripe we have with the software is that every time you install a new app on your device, it scans the app to ensure it’s safe to use. But while doing so, it also shows you the same information on a card you need to dismiss to get to using it, which can be annoying and unnecessary.

The Realme GT Neo 3T comes with a 5000mAh battery, similar to the GT Neo 2 from the last year. However, unlike the 65W SuperDart charging on the GT Neo 2, the Neo 3T gets an upgraded and faster 80W fast charging solution.

According to Realme, the 80W SuperDart charging on the GT Neo 3T can top up its 5000mAh to 50% in just about 12 minutes. We found this claim almost accurate in our testing, as the 80W charger took around 14 minutes to charge the battery at 3% to 51%. Similarly, it took about 42 minutes to charge the battery, from 6% to 100%, which is impressive.

Talking about the battery life, the Realme GT Neo 3T offers a decent one that can last anywhere between 5 and 7 hours, depending on your usage. In one of our use cases that involved casual web browsing, using social media apps, listening to music, and light gaming, the phone lasted around 5 ½ hours on a single charge. On the other hand, on days when we didn’t game, it gave us just about 6 ½ hours of screen time, with some juice still left in the battery when we hit the bed.

In essence, if you’re a light user, the GT Neo 3T battery can comfortably get you through a day’s use without requiring you to top it up in the middle of the day.

Realme employs a triple-camera system on the GT Neo 3T, the same setup seen on the GT Neo 2. It features a 64MP primary sensor with an f/1.79 aperture, an 8MP ultrawide with a 119° field-of-view and f/2.25 aperture, and a 2MP macro with an f/2.4 aperture and a 4cm fixed focus. And towards the front, you get a 16MP shooter with an f/2.45 aperture for selfies.

Starting with the macro sensor, we’d say that the one present on the GT Neo 3T—similar to many other devices in this price segment, for that matter—is straight-up bad. It takes terrible photos with poor details and colors, and there’s not much you can do with it.

On the other hand, the 64MP primary sensor on the device takes decent shots in daylight conditions with adequate details. The pictures mostly come out sharp and have good contrast levels. Similarly, colors also appear to be reproduced quite well.

However, the sensor sometimes over-saturates objects a fair bit. As a result, certain colors and objects come out too boosted in the images, sometimes making them appear unnatural.

As for portrait shots, the GT Neo 3T takes dull images that lack not just in detail but also contrast and sharpness. Surprisingly, the camera seems to get the bokeh effect pretty much on point in most shots.

Most of this holds true in low-light conditions as well. The sensor manages to shoot decent pictures at night, but the images mostly come out slightly oversaturated and represent shadows inaccurately.

Plus, you can even notice noise in some shots, and there are instances when you’ll also see some sort of smoothening effect happening around the edges of the images.

This is where Realme’s Night mode comes to the rescue: it improves the sharpness, removes some noise, and boosts colors a bit to give you a slightly better-looking image that you can use on social media without editing.

In terms of zooming capabilities, the 2x zoom mode on the Realme GT Neo 3T generally produces decent-looking shots in daylight or good lighting conditions. Still, there are instances when the images come out a bit softer, get the colors wrong, and miss out on details compared to the primary sensor. However, they are still usable after a bit of tweaking.

When you switch to ultrawide on the GT Neo 3T, the story’s a bit different, as there are a few noticeable differences in the image quality between the images produced by it and the primary sensor. One of these differences that stood out for us was the change in color temperature. While the 64MP primary sensor maintains a cooler tone, the ultrawide tends to shoot relatively warmer-looking shots.

Similarly, when you see images from the two sensors side-by-side, there’s a noticeable drop in sharpness levels and details. You can also notice noise creeping in on the ultrawide shot as the surroundings get darker.

Moving on to the selfies, the 16MP snapper on the GT Neo 3T captures decent shots while keeping the skin tone intact. It manages to retain the details in most shots quite well, but there are times when the contrast goes for a toss when you’re in very bright lighting conditions.

Low-light selfies come out decent in the regular mode, but there’s some noticeable noise in the shots. Surprisingly, the Night mode fails terribly and doesn’t perform better than the regular mode, as you’d expect, since, in an effort to expose the shadows properly, it ends up increasing the brightness, which, in turn, ends up messing with the skin tone, colors, contrast, and the details completely. Realme also offers a portrait mode on the front camera, and it works fine as long as there’s a good amount of contrast between the subject and the background.

Video shooting capabilities on the Realme GT Neo 3T are surprisingly better. Realme says the device can record 4K videos up to 60fps with the main camera and 1080p with the ultrawide. We shot a few clips in 1080p, which came out pretty nice. The brightness and contrast levels across most of these clips were pretty balanced, and the sensor also managed to retain the details and sharpness quite well. However, the stabilization wasn’t the best on the primary sensor, especially in videos shot in 4K, due to the lack of OIS. When switched to the ultrawide sensor, the videos came out a bit vibrant and contrasty to our liking.

Lastly, talking about the Camera app, Realme offers the same set of controls, capture modes, and options on the GT Neo 3T as seen on other Realme phones. The app’s UI is smooth and easy to navigate, and you can also customize what capture modes are available on the screen based on your preference. If you prefer to have more control over your shots, there’s a PRO shooting mode in the app, too, that you can use instead. However, we weren’t too pleased with this mode.

All in all, the Realme GT Neo 3T can give you some fine-looking shots with good lighting that you can share on your social media without having to edit them. However, it isn’t the phone you may want to consider if photography is at the top of your priority list.

Realme offers the GT Neo 3T in three configurations, and they are priced like this:

Taking the base model into account, which costs Rs 29,999, the Realme GT Neo 3T gets you a nice and vibrant display with nice-sounding speakers for content consumption. This chipset can easily handle everyday tasks (as well as casual gaming), has a good battery life, adequately fast charging, and decent cameras.

However, when it comes to the design, there isn’t anything particularly unique about the Realme GT Neo 3T, which can be a deal-breaker for some people. Similarly, Realme has also cut some corners with regard to the device’s build quality, like the missing IP protection, for instance, or lack of OIS on the primary camera, when stacked against its competitors; not to mention, it also has a terrible bloatware situation with the Realme UI 3.0, all of which are inexcusable for some people when making a purchase decision.

All things considered, though, we’d say the Realme GT Neo 3T is a good buy if the shortcomings we just highlighted don’t bother you much. However, it doesn’t make a solid case for itself when you bring the competition into the picture—considering the pricing of GT Neo 3T’s higher variants that sit over Rs 30,000. And in that case, POCO F4 or iQOO Neo 6 appear better offerings, on the whole.

But having said that, as of writing this, Realme is currently running discounts on some of its smartphones, including the GT Neo 3T. As part of this offer, the price of the base variant Neo 3T comes down to just Rs 23,999. And for that price, the Neo 3T is a steal. Another device currently available for a discounted price is the Realme GT, which seems to be a nice alternative to the GT Neo 3T for those who need better performance for the same price.

Buy Realme GT Neo 3T

The Realme GT Neo 3T is the spiritual successor to the GT Neo 2, featuring the Snapdragon 870 5G chipset, a 5000mAh battery with 80W SuperDart charging, and triple-rear cameras. But is it worth its asking price? Check out our review to find out.

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