Recensione Realme C100X: la batteria è il suo vero superpotere

In recent years, even the budget smartphone segment has changed quite a lot, because nowadays, rightly, spending little no longer means being willing to accept any compromise. You still want a smooth display, good battery life, and above all a smartphone that in daily use doesn’t seem old as soon as you take it out of the box.

With the new C100x realme, however, Realme has chosen a rather unusual path, because instead of trying to wow with the specs, it has placed a very strong emphasis on one element that, in my opinion, in this price range matters much more than many benchmark numbers: the battery life.

The battery is indeed a solid 8,000 mAh, accompanied by a 6.8-inch 120 Hz display, a 50-megapixel main camera and 45W charging. In short, just by reading the spec sheet you can clearly understand what kind of smartphone we have in front of us: it doesn’t want to be ultra-fast nor particularly sophisticated, but it wants to last a long time and do the things that you really need every day.

Recensione Realme C100X

Design e materiali

The first thing you notice when you pick it up is inevitably its size. It’s not a small smartphone, nor is it particularly light, weighing 219 grams, but honestly I expected something worse given that inside there’s an 8,000 mAh battery. The 8.78 mm thickness remains, in fact, fairly compact and, after a bit of use, the weight becomes less bothersome than the numbers might suggest.

There’s a plastic shell at the back, so not exactly high-end materials, but realme has nonetheless tried to give the product a touch of personality. The colorways Golden Coast and Deepblue Tides play with reflections and surface finishes and, at least visually, avoid that completely anonymous cheap smartphone look.

The fingerprint sensor is positioned on the side and is a solution I continue to prefer on products of this kind, because it is simple, immediate and does not force you to search for the right spot on the display. The overall feel of robustness is also good: we have IP64 certification against dust and splashes, and realme claims a drop resistance of up to two meters.

Clearly IP64 doesn’t mean you can take it to the pool, but on a phone in this price range it’s still a protection feature that’s nice to have, especially considering the kind of audience it’s likely targeting.

Display

The display is a 6.8-inch LCD, so nice and large, and in my opinion it’s one of the aspects that characterize this C100x the most. If you watch a lot of videos, use social media a lot or simply prefer a large screen, from this point of view it’s hard to complain. The real surprise, however, is the 120 Hz, because it helps a lot to give a sense of fluidity beyond what you’d expect from looking at the rest of the hardware. Navigating menus, scrolling Instagram or simply moving around the interface feels quite pleasant.

However, you have to deal with an HD+ resolution of 720 × 1570 pixels, and on 6.8 inches the difference versus a good Full HD+ is noticeable. Text and small details are not very sharp, especially if you come from a higher-end smartphone, while probably someone coming from an entry-level won’t pay too much attention. The declared maximum brightness is about 900 nits, and in most situations you can use it without major issues, while under direct sunlight there are some difficulties, also due to viewing angles that are not exceptional. It is one of the classic limits of these cheap LCD panels.

It’s a shame about the single speaker as well. The volume is sufficient, but if you watch a lot of videos or series on your smartphone, the absence of a stereo system is noticeable.

Hardware e prestazioni

Inside this new realme C100x we find the Unisoc T7250, an octa-core platform built on a 12 nm process with two Cortex-A75 cores up to 1.8 GHz and six Cortex-A55 at 1.6 GHz, accompanied by the GPU Mali-G57 MP1. It isn’t a processor born to surprise in benchmarks and it wouldn’t even make much sense to evaluate it from that perspective: its playgrounds are WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, web browsing, mail and all those operations that really represent the majority of daily use.

In these scenarios the C100x handles things fairly well, helped also by the display’s 120 Hz, which tends to mask part of the platform’s limits by delivering smoother animations and scrolling. When, however, you start asking for more, especially by quickly switching between heavy applications or keeping several processes open, some slowdowns become evident. Gaming should be interpreted in the same way: simpler titles don’t pose a problem, while with more complex three-dimensional games you necessarily have to reduce graphics details and expectations.

The version intended for our market comes with 4 GB of RAM and 256 GB of internal storage, a storage capacity particularly interesting in this price range. There is also support for microSD, and the only drawback is the absence of 5G, which on this model is absent due to the limitations of the adopted CPU. A fairly significant limitation for 2026, where networks finally have almost complete 5G coverage across Italy (and beyond).

Software

One thing that pleasantly surprised me is the software, because the C100x already comes with Android 16 and realme UI 7. On an affordable smartphone, it’s not something to take for granted, especially because products of this kind are often purchased by people who intend to keep them for several years.

Realme UI we know quite well by now: it’s a fairly feature-rich interface, with many customization options, eye-protection features, brightness management, performance optimization, and even a few AI-based tools. There are, however, quite a few pre-installed apps, perhaps a bit too many, though fortunately most can be removed. It’s a situation we now see quite often on smartphones in this price range, so it’s not particularly surprising.

The interesting thing is that the optimization software manages to coexist fairly well with hardware that isn’t particularly powerful and, in normal use, the phone feels smoother than the specs might suggest. There remains, however, a question mark regarding future updates: at the moment I have not received precise official guidance on the number of major updates or the guaranteed years of security patches, so it’s an aspect I would keep in mind especially if you plan to use it for a long time.

Fotocamera

Even in the photography department, realme has made a very simple choice: instead of adding secondary sensors just to increase the number of cameras on the spec sheet, we find a main one of 50 megapixel f/1.8, while on the front there is a 5-megapixel camera. And honestly, on a phone in this price range, I prefer it this way.

With good light the main camera does its job: the photos have a level of detail more than sufficient to be shared on social media or simply saved on the phone and realme tends, as often happens, to give colors a bit more vibrancy. Not always is the result truly faithful to the real scene, but I doubt that the typical buyer of the C100x is looking for color rendering like a smartphone designed for photography. In fact, many images are probably even more pleasant to view directly on the display. When the light goes down, however, the situation changes. The absence of optical stabilization and the sensor limitations become more evident, detail decreases and the finer textures start to lose definition. Night mode helps, especially with exposure and colors, but don’t expect miracles.

Even videos make it pretty clear what the target audience is: Full HD at 30 fps from the main camera and 720p/30 fps from the front camera. For a video call, an Instagram story, or a quick clip it’s perfectly fine; if you’re looking for a smartphone to create content, I’d look elsewhere.

Autonomia

Finally we arrive at the reason this smartphone exists: 8,000 mAh are a lot, especially considering that not long ago 5,000 mAh virtually represented the standard for the category. In daily use this means being able to stop constantly checking the remaining percentage and, with usage that isn’t particularly aggressive, easily stretch it to a second day as well, or in extreme cases even beyond.

Wired charging reaches 45W, and inevitably filling such a large battery still takes time: for a 0 to 100% charge, something around two and a half hours is required, slightly above average, but acceptable given the battery capacity and the product’s positioning. Also convenient, given the battery size, is the wired reverse charging, which lets you use the phone almost like a small power bank to power another compatible device.

Prezzo e considerazioni

realme C100x will arrive in Italy in the configuration 4+256 GB at 259.99 euros, with a launch price of 229.99 euros at retailers such as Unieuro, Expert and Trony, while on Amazon it will be available at 239.99 euros. At 259 euros, in my view the discussion becomes a bit more complicated, because we are approaching a tier where it is possible to find smartphones more powerful and, above all, equipped with 5G. Around 230 euros, however, the proposal becomes decidedly more interesting, especially if battery life is at the top of your priority list.

Because in the end, the C100x is a smartphone built on fairly obvious compromises. The display is large and smooth, but only HD+. The internal storage is plentiful, but the RAM stops at 4 GB. The battery is enormous, but the processor is decidedly modest. The camera is fine for everyday use, but it’s unlikely to be the reason you’ll choose it. And most of all, it lacks 5G. But there is also a positive aspect in all this: C100x knows exactly who it’s for.

If you’re looking for performance, gaming, or photography, it’s not the right phone. If, on the other hand, you’re mainly interested in having a smartphone with a large screen, plenty of memory, and above all a battery that seems never to end, then realme’s offer makes a lot more sense. And probably this is exactly the feature you’ll remember after using it: not how fast it is or how well it takes photos, but how rarely you’ll have to worry about charging it.

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