We have been testing Realme’s latest motor sport-focused flagship mobile phone on our magazine assignments, and the results are nothing short of phenomenal
Story — Saeed Akhtar
Photography – Siddharth Dadhe
Realme has never been shy about making its GT series phones conversation starters. There was the one with the paper back, the one styled like a travel case, and now the GT 8 Pro in its Aston Martin Aramco F1 Limited Edition variant. That mouthful of a name also boasts of a partnership with camera brand Ricoh, and a removable camera bump that you can swap out with a screwdriver included in the box. That last detail probably tells you everything about Realme’s ambitions here: this is a phone that wants to be noticed.
Under the hood, the GT 8 Pro runs on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset, paired with 16 GB of random access memory (RAM) and 512 GB of storage. A 7,000-mAh silicon-carbon battery backs it all up, and in our real-world testing, it lasted two full days between charges even with a lot of shooting for our social channels. Wired charging at 120 W brings the battery back to full in less than an hour.
The 6.78-inch QHD+ AMOLED display runs at 144 Hz and peaks at 2,000 nits in high-brightness mode, more than enough for use in direct sunlight. It is equipped with Android 16 and Realme UI 7, making the GT 8 Pro the first Realme device to arrive with the new software out of the box. But what’s interesting in the case of this limited-edition model is its Aston Martin-themed user interface (UI) on top. It lends the whole device a touch of uniqueness that no mere theme can emulate, and it is bound to draw the attention of every petrol head and motor sport fan out there.
Ah, yes, the cameras: the principal reason we have been using this phone on a daily basis. The GT 8 Pro’s primary 50-megapixel shooter handles most daylight scenes competently, although it tends to lean towards saturated colours and can clip highlights in contrasty light. The 50-megapixel ultrawide is a step up from the outgoing model’s eight-megapixel effort. The noteworthy addition here, however, is a 200-megapixel periscope telephoto at 3x optical zoom, a meaningful upgrade over the competition, even if image quality suffers noticeably beyond 6x.
The Ricoh collaboration brings the GR camera’s film-like colour profiles and its snap-focus mode to the primary camera. It’s a genuine differentiator for a certain kind of user, even if it does nothing to address the telephoto’s inconsistencies at range.
Performance in everyday tasks is smooth. Sustained load under gaming or benchmarking stress, however, still generates significant heat—a recurring issue for this generation of Snapdragon devices across multiple brands, not just Realme.
At Rs 80,000 for this limited-edition model and Rs 73,000 for the standard GT 8 Pro, these are not cheap phones by any stretch. Nevertheless, their top-notch specification and performance apart, what they offer in terms of uniqueness and bragging rights, not to mention that revered “Aston Martin F1” plaque on the back, is well worth the asking price.
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