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Realme 15T Review: All That Glitters Is Not Gold

Realme 15T Review: All That Glitters Is Not Gold

Name: Realme 15T Review: All That Glitters Is Not Gold
Item: Realme 15T

The Realme 15T has a high-capacity battery, an updated processor and improved durability. Find out if it can deliver the goods in our review.

Written by Sheldon Pinto, Edited by Ketan Pratap | Updated: 21 January 2026 13:04 IST

Realme 15T Review: All That Glitters Is Not Gold

The Realme 15T is now priced at Rs. 22,999 in India

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Highlights

The Realme 15T has a slim IP69-rated design
The phone lacks the raw performance competitors offer
Battery life is good but not great

The Realme 15T was marketed as a budget smartphone but thanks to a price rise now retails at mid-range pricing. Compared to the Realme 14T, it does have a few upgrades and downgrades. Realme has retained its IP69-rated design, added a high-tech and high-capacity battery and a new camera. The only downgrade is a slightly smaller display compared to the previous model. Are these upgrades necessary? Or, are they present just to fill up a spec sheet? Read on to find out if Realme's 15T is worth your money.

Realme 15T Design

The Realme 15T's design has changed over the previous Realme 14T. Its corners are more rounded, there's a new finish called Flowing Silver, and there's a squarish camera deco. Its frame and rear panel are made of polycarbonate, but its camera deco is made from aluminium alloy.

The new camera deco is made from aluminium alloy

The rear panel's finish, despite being made of polycarbonate, looks like it's made of mother-of-pearl (nacre). Despite its plastic body, the phone feels mid-range, not budget. The only bit that brings its budget roots to the surface is its slightly thicker display borders, which appear even on all sides. The metal camera module is quite slim despite housing three sensors, and so, this phone barely wobbles when placed on a flat surface. The lack of a protruding camera module makes its 7.89mm profile appear even slimmer.

OnePlus Nord CE 5 Review

The Realme 15T has a slim and modern appearance

The matte finish rear-panel and flat sides make the phone a bit slippery to hold. Realme has retained the 14T's IP69 rating for dust and water. These are top-of-the-line durability ratings, meaning the phone can even withstand pressured jets of water. But you have to keep in mind that Realme will not cover any damage due to water ingress under its warranty.

Realme 15T Performance

The 6.57-inch AMOLED display does a good job of rejecting fingerprints and gets plenty bright outdoors. It is a flat panel, and so there are no distracting reflections either. The borders of the panel aren't uniform, with the bottom being the thickest and the top one being the thinnest. Being an LTPS panel, it only switches between 60, 90 and 120Hz. Watching videos was an enjoyable experience with deep blacks and slightly saturated colours when using the default Vivid screen colour mode. Weirdly, despite offering a high-brightness panel, there's no HDR support when streaming video, but you do get Widevine L1 with Full HD playback quality. Audio through the stereo speakers is sufficiently loud, but does not sound rich.

The Realme 15T has a bright AMOLED panel with slightly thick borders

The software experience is decent overall. Given its budget roots, be prepared to see tons of pre-installed, third-party games and apps, even if you opted out during the setup process. Thankfully, all of these can be uninstalled, and I was not spammed by random notifications during the review. Software commitment is a bit limited, given that you get 3 years of updates, but the phone still boots to Android 15 out of the box in 2026. The phone also provides a basic AI Edit Genie feature used for voice-based image editing. While it does work as advertised, it takes a while to process edits and will not understand slightly complex commands.

The Realme 15T comes with a lot of pre-installed games and third-party apps

The Realme 14T's 6nm processor did not stand out in the past, and the slightly upgraded MediaTek Dimensity 6400 Max does not bring anything new to the table either. The chipset is paired with UFS 2.2 storage (128/256GB) and LPDDR4X RAM (8/12GB).

Benchmarks	Realme 15T	Motorola Edge 60 Fusion	OnePlus Nord CE5
Display resolution	FHD+	1.5K	FHD+
Chipset	Dimensity 6400 Max (6nm)	Dimensity 7400 SoC (4nm)	Dimensity 8350 Ultimate (4nm)
AnTuTu v10	5,55,544	6,49,652	14,12,373
PCMark Work 3.0	10,526	16,841	13,435
Geekbench 6 Single	810	1,087	1,317
Geekbench 6 Multi	2,083	3,049	3,989
Geekbench AI CPU (Quantized)	1,037	NA	NA
Geekbench AI GPU (Quantized)	485	NA	NA
3DM Wild Life	1,373	3,630	Maxed Out
3DM Wild Life Unlimited	1,357	3,675	11,038
3DM Steel Nomad Light	152	NA	NA

Gaming performance is decent for a device at this price point, but it could have been better. Given the benchmark scores, the Realme 15T is not really built for gaming, but it handles Call of Duty: Mobile (CODM) at Medium graphics and frame rate just fine. The game only offers Low and Medium settings for graphics but shows Max settings for framerates. While playing CODM, the game runs smoothly with some occasional lag; however, the touch sampling rate is slow, and you will struggle with FPS titles.

The Realme 15T's selfie camera gets an upgrade

The Realme 15T's camera hardware remains similar to the 14T. It gets a new 50-megapixel selfie camera, which is an upgrade from the 14T's 16-megapixel sensor.

Realme 15T primary camera samples (tap images to expand)

The primary camera shoots vibrant images in daylight that show slightly punchy colours with decent dynamic range. There is enough visible detail in the bright sports and the shadows, but the resolved details are a bit too low. Pixel peep, and you will find soft textures and some blurred patches.
Even when shooting close-ups of objects, the sharpness just isn't there. And so, while the photos appear fine on your phone, they just don't pack enough detail when zoomed in. And this is why the 2X digital crops are poor overall. The primary camera also has trouble locking and maintaining focus, and the lack of optical image stabilisation (OIS) makes low-light images visibly soft, low on detail, and big on noise.

Portrait mode photos captured using this camera show good detail and sharpness thanks to all the processing, but there is a noticeably blurry halo around subjects.

Realme 15T selfie camera samples (tap images to expand)

The selfie camera captures slightly contrasted images with good dynamic range in daylight. Edge-detection is fine, but there is a soft and noticeable halo-like blur around the edges. Videos captured at 1080p at 30 fps have decent stabilisation but have blown-out highlights. Details are not ideal, but the frame rate is steady. 1080p 60 fps video has a higher frame rate but lacks stabilisation, so it appears very shaky even when panning. Low-light video appears quite soft, lacks detail and dynamic range and is very noisy. Selfie videos look fine, but have overexposed backgrounds.

The Realme 15T comes with a massive 7,000mAh silicon-carbon battery

Combining a 6nm chip with a state-of-the-art silicon-carbon battery does not help the 15T either. In the PC Mark Battery Life test, the 15T managed a decent 22 hours and 52 minutes, till the battery reached 80 percent (which is when the test ends). However, the Motorola Edge 60 Fusion with its 5,500mAh battery managed a similar 22 hours and 21 minutes, indicating that the 7,000mAh battery should have done better and is being underutilised because of the 6nm chipset. The OnePlus Nord CE5, which is priced a bit higher than the Realme 15T, lasted 27 hours and 10 minutes in the same test. With daily use, the phone lasted a whole day of heavy use and still had enough power to last the first half of the next day. With casual use and given that it isn't feature-packed in terms of capability, you can get a few more hours out of it, which is good for a mid-ranger.

Charging speeds are good, even though the bundled 80W charger is capped at 60W. The phone managed a 46 percent charge in 30 minutes and reached a fully-charged state in 1 hour and 42 minutes, which isn't too shabby when charging a 7,000mAh battery.

Realme 15T Verdict

Not too long ago, Rs. 25,000 would get us phones like the Realme 9 Pro+, which offered capable cameras, good battery life, smooth software, one interesting design feature and overall, excellent value for money. Today, thanks to rising component costs, we are stuck with devices like the Realme 15T that claim to offer value but don't.

After our testing, it's easy to conclude that Realme 15T, despite its upgrades, does not offer enough value to warrant its Rs. 22,999 starting price. Motorola's Edge 60 Fusion offers much better performance, cameras and value at this price. And if you can spend a bit more, the OnePlus Nord CE5 is a much better choice with plenty of raw performance and much better battery life at an additional Rs. 2,000.

Realme 15T

REVIEW
KEY SPECS
NEWS

Design
Display
Software
Performance
Battery Life
Camera
Value for Money

Good
Slim IP69-rated design
Good battery life
Bright 120Hz AMOLED display

Bad
Not ideal for gaming
Tons of presinstalled apps
Short software update commitment window

Read detailed Realme 15T review

Display 6.57-inch

Processor MediaTek Dimensity 6400 Max

Front Camera 50-megapixel

Rear Camera 50-megapixel + 2-megapixel

RAM 8GB, 12GB

Storage 128GB, 256GB

Battery Capacity 7000mAh

OS Android 15

Resolution 1080x2372 pixels

More Realme mobiles Realme mobiles price in India

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Further reading: Realme, Realme 15T, Realme 15T 5G, Realme 15T Design, Realme 15T Software, Realme 15T Specifications, Realme 15T Performance, Realme 15T Display, Realme 15T Cameras, Realme 15T Battery

Sheldon Pinto

Email Sheldon Pinto

Sheldon Pinto is based in Mumbai, and has several years of experience in reviewing smartphones and gadgets. As a Senior Reviewer at Gadgets 360, you will always find him deeply immersed in his reviews, switching from one phone to another. When the battery dies out, Sheldon is always browsing the web for a good sci-fi movie or reading up on cars and bikes. He also loves creating lists of interesting places to eat and travel. Sheldon is available on Twitter at @shellshocd, and you can mail him at ...More