It’s hip to be noticed in the smartphone world. And the Realme 14 Pro Plus certainly turns heads in a very cool way: it features a backplate that changes color as the temperature drops.
But, as cool as the design is, it’s still more hip to be square — you have to nail the fundamentals. As we’ll look at in our Realme 14 Pro Plus review, Realme’s latest midrange phone is competitive in key ways at the $500-$600 price point, but a number of hiccups big and small leave it vulnerable to the many other competing smartphones at that price.
Design and build
As much as we love what’s inside a good smartphone, the Realme 14 Pro Plus has captured eyes and produced headlines as the color-changing smartphone. The back of the phone has a marbled design with a cream color that gets an infusion of blue streaks when the ambient temperature dips below 16 degrees Celsius (around 70 degrees Fahrenheit). That called to mind the old Coors Light ads — when the mountains turn blue on the label, the beer is cold enough to drink. So, like beer, I threw the phone in the refrigerator. Blue streaks as advertised! There are also purple (exclusive to India) and grey color options, but sans the color changing tricks.
Cool enough, but let’s get to fundamentals. The Realme 14 Pro Plus is a 6.83-inch phone that is 8mm thick and weighs 194g, making it lightweight and comfortable to hold for long periods of time — the curved edges around the phone help with that, too. There’s virtually no bezel around the display, which is a blessing and a curse. Despite Realme’s nods to accidental touch prevention, I ended up accidentally pressing and holding the home button many times. If you usually use a phone of this size with two hands by bracing the bottom of the phone with the thumb of your non-dominant hand, that thumb is probably going to set the home button off more than you’d like. A little bezel is OK!
Despite having a plastic frame and back, the Realme 14 Pro Plus is durable on paper — it is rated IP68/69 for protection against dust, water, and water pressure, which is new this year. Also new is MIL-STD-810H certification for durability, protecting the phone against drops. The phone seems hardy enough to me, although the protective Gorilla Glass 7i on the display fell short — the phone had a small scratch near the top of the display from just a couple weeks of use after I removed the included screen protector, which had itself gotten nicked up after only a couple days of use.
Performance
The Realme 14 Pro Plus uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 chipset, which is the perfect mix of performance and efficiency at this price. That chipset supports 5G connectivity and is powerful enough to run most mobile games well, while being less demanding than the flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite. As we’ll discuss later, that leads to much better battery life.
That Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 chipset, along with 12GB of RAM, is plenty enough for even the more demanding of mobile games. It might not be enough for enthusiasts, though — Genshin Impact at the highest settings was smooth, but never hit 60 fps. Still, gameplay was consistently between 40 and 50 fps, which is probably going to be sufficient for most folks shopping for a midrange phone.
The Realme 14 Pro Plus also has 360-degree NFC for mobile payments (but only in some markets, so check before you buy), an in-display fingerprint scanner, and eSIM compatibility. You can unlock the phone using your fingerprint or facial recognition, and both work quickly and consistently.
As with the flagship Realme GT 7 Pro, the Realme 14 Pro Plus has GT mode, which locks the phone to max screen resolution, max refresh rate (120Hz), and a performance boost. Like with the GT 7 Pro, it’s probably only worth using while gaming or watching fast-paced action like sports games, but the difference is less noticeable on the 14 Pro Plus, the less powerful phone of the two. It didn’t seem to affect the battery life of the 14 Pro Plus much one way or the other.
Display and audio
The Realme 14 Pro Plus has a 6.83-inch 2800×1272 OLED display with a max brightness of 1,200 nits. Localized brightness can get as high as 1,500 nits, but there’s no sort of HDR certification on this phone, so I wouldn’t put too much stock into that affecting the picture quality.
I was pleased with the display quality in general for a midrange phone, although not having HDR certification does hurt, even at this price. I also noticed that the display occasionally dimmed unexpectedly before brightening up again. I suspect this is a software problem when using adaptive brightness on the display. I only noticed it maybe one or two times per week, though, so how much that will bother you depends on your tolerance for little hiccups like that.
For audio, the on-device stereo speakers aren’t bad. They get impressively loud, although there is a noticeable amount of distortion and fuzziness at the highest volumes. I don’t expect great bass on smartphone speakers, but I was a little disappointed to hear that highs came out a little muted at any volume. In general, not bad for smartphone speakers at this price, but far from standout.
Battery life
Combine a huge 6,000mAh battery with an efficient chipset, and you get good results. The Snapdragon 7s Gen 3, as mentioned above, is a great match for a midrange device, and when paired with a battery this big, I never encountered any sort of battery anxiety. The phone lasted well over a day with normal use, and if you’re careful, I think it’s possible to push it to two full days on one charge.
Gaming, as always, will be the biggest battery drain. Even with gaming, I got good results — an hour of Genshin Impact on the highest settings, with the display at full brightness, only used 14% of battery capacity. An hour of video at max brightness only used 7% of battery capacity.
Once the battery does get low, it doesn’t take long to bring it back up. Realme includes an 80W SuperVOOC charging brick in the box, which can charge the phone back to full from near zero in less than an hour. There’s no support for wireless charging, though, so keep that super speedy charging brick handy.
Camera
The camera array is where the Realme 14 Pro Plus shines — overall, quality punches above its weight at its price. The rear camera array includes a 50MP f/1.8 main camera with phase-detect autofocus and optical image stabilization, an ultrawide 8MP f/2.2 camera with a 112-degree field of view, and a periscope telephoto 50MP f/2.7 camera with phase-detect autofocus and optical image stabilization, which is capable of up to 3x optical zoom. It’s worth mentioning that the camera array is good if you’re in the market for a new phone, but for owners of last year’s Realme 13 Pro Plus, there are very few differences in the camera array from that phone to this new model.
The main camera uses the Sony IMX896 sensor and produces really strong shots. With good lighting, I found light and color balance were great — no washed out skies. Details come out clear enough at a quick glance, although you can find artifacts if you zoom in or look closely. I came away feeling like I was getting solid performance for the price.
The 8MP ultrawide camera isn’t quite as impressive, but I think the mixture of post-processing and camera quality here beats out a lot of other ultrawide cameras we see on midrange phones. There’s some bluriness in faraway objects, and light balance isn’t as impressive, resulting in parts of the picture that turn out too dark. Color reproduction is great and pictures overall look pleasing.
The 50MP periscope zoom camera, which uses the Sony IMX 882 sensor, is a really valuable add for a $500-$600 phone, and the results don’t disappoint. Like with the main camera, there are some artifacts and a lack of clarity when you drill down into finer details, but when taken as a whole pictures come out clear and light balance is on point. Even at 3x zoom, not much clarity is lost, thanks in large part to the addition of autofocus and optical image stabilization on this camera. Realme also has an AI Ultra Clarity 2.0 editing feature that can remove blurriness from zoom photos after they’ve been taken. It makes a small but noticeable difference.
Pictures taken in night mode were OK — nothing to get excited about, but no worse than what you’d usually find at the midrange level. There’s a notable drop in clarity and focus, at least when taking landscape photos. Indoor low-light photography is better thanks to a triple flash system unique to Realme, which uses AI to detect the details of a shot and intelligently use flash to control for exposure and temperature, leading to flash photography that doesn’t look sterile or washed out.
Portrait mode was another strong point. Subjects were outlined clearly, with an impressive amount of detail. I’ve used quite a few midrange phones that have struggled a lot with focus in portrait mode, but that wasn’t the case here. I never had to fuss with how far I was from the subject, and rarely ended up with subjects that had obviously blurred edges.
On the front side of the phone, there’s a 32MP selfie camera that now has autofocus, a welcome upgrade over last year’s model. That helps make photos taken with the front camera come out clear much more consistently.
Realme has also loaded up on AI editing features in the phone’s Photos app, including the AI Ultra Clarity feature we mentioned above, which helps reduce blurriness in zoom shots. Like many other phones these days, there’s an AI Eraser feature that can remove objects or people, using AI to fill in the background. And, like usual, results vary but are rarely impressive — removing large objects always results in a blurry mess, but even removing smaller objects can leave a noticeable mark.
Software
Software is where a lot of midrange phones run into trouble, and that’s true with the Realme 14 Pro Plus, too. I do like that the phone runs Android 15 out of the box, the latest release that some phones from last year still haven’t gotten, but there are some issues with the Realme UI 6.0 overlay.
Like usual, those issues mostly come from the software trying to do too much. Most of the issues are minor, but constant, annoyances. For example, the phone will automatically lower media volume if you’re using headphones to protect your ears, and there’s no clear way to turn this off. As grateful as I am for Realme’s concern for my ear health, I use bone conduction headphones for that reason already! And I need to use them with the volume all the way up, or background noise drowns them out. As well-intentioned as the feature is, it should be easier to disable.
Another well-intentioned feature that doesn’t always land: notifications that background apps are draining battery. During the review period, the phone told me several times that Spotify was running in the background and draining battery and prompted me to close it. Well, yes, that is how Spotify works when it plays music. Like the volume adjustment above, it’s not a bad idea, it’s just not perfectly executed. At least the phone doesn’t proactively close Spotify like it adjusts the volume!
What I did like is that Realme UI 6.0 now asks if you’d like to split notifications and quick settings between the left and right side of the screen or not. I’ve never been a fan of the split, so I was glad to see I had the option to choose during setup.
As we’d expect with midrange phones, there’s a lot of bloatware to sort through — maybe a little more than we’d like at this $500-$600 price range. There are a lot of pre-installed apps, some of which can be hidden but not uninstalled, and for the first couple days of use, there are notifications encouraging you to download popular apps. There are also ‘hot apps’ and ‘hot games’ folders of recommendations that can be removed from the home screen, but remain in your app drawer.
There’s also something called a ’92 lock screen’ that’s on by default. It shows you a rotation of images on your lock screen, sort of similar to a Windows PC lock screen showing you pictures of different locations around the world, with links to more information if you’re curious. Tapping on these brings you to ad-packed articles that look either hastily written or AI-generated. I felt like it was also a little too easy to accidentally tap on those images. That lock screen can be disabled in settings fairly easily.
Sustainability
Realme has made some big improvements here, but the Realme 14 Pro Plus still might not be a phone you can count on using for more than two or three years. The upgrade to an IP68/69 rating and the new MIL-STD-810H durability certification are huge additions to be sure, although how easily the Gorilla Glass 7i got scratched gives me some pause.
Unfortunately, Realme doesn’t seem to be offering any security upgrade or OS guarantees. We’re sure the phone will be supported for at least a year or two, but with many manufacturers now providing anywhere from three-year to seven-year guarantees, we’d like to see more assurances here.
Pricing and availability
The Realme 14 Pro Plus launched in India earlier this year, starting at ₹28,017. The European launch was announced at MWC 2025 — in countries where the Realme 14 Pro Plus lands, it’ll start at €530, although there is a special €430 for early purchasers. That starting price gets you the 12GB RAM/256GB storage configuration — upgrading to 512GB of storage raises the price to €580.
Bottom line
At the $500-$600 price range, the Realme 14 Pro Plus impresses with just the right mix of performance and battery efficiency, with an excellent camera array headlined by the 3x periscope zoom camera. The OLED display takes full advantage of the phone’s power, and it’s bright and sharp enough to impress when playing games or watching videos.
It’s the smaller details that hold the phone back. A little too much bloatware, a screen a little too easy to scratch, and a little too much of a heavy-handed approach from the Realme UI 6.0 — none of these things by themselves are dealbreakers, but taken together they are noticeable, especially in a crowded midrange smartphone field.
If you’re in the EU and can snag that early bird deal, it’s an easy phone to recommend, especially if you really want a periscope zoom camera and don’t want to pay flagship prices.