It’s full speed ahead for Realme, which is quickly becoming one of the top names in Android smartphones. We opened 2025 by getting our hands on the Realme GT 7 Pro, the first flagship Android smartphone using this year’s top-of-the-line Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset. It set a high bar, too — despite a good but not great camera array, it proved to be a powerhouse of a phone at a competitive price.
Now we’re getting a look at the Realme GT 7, and it turns out that this phone isn’t necessarily a huge step down from the Pro version. Realme is keeping their foot on the gas with a special edition GT 7 designed with the Aston Martin Aramco F1 team, too. Does that make the phone a must-have for F1 fans? Read our Realme GT 7 Dream Edition review to find out!
Design and build
Fans of the Aston Martin F1 team won’t be disappointed — the Realme GT 7 Dream Edition is the same shade as the team’s hallmark color, a deep green that looks sharp regardless of your F1 allegiance. The back of the phone has an aerodynamic, car hood look with a slightly raised center. It’s subtle (the raised center isn’t higher than the camera array), but enough to give the phone a distinct look that fits with the F1 aesthetic.
Rather than the aluminum found on the Pro model, the GT 7 gets a plastic frame. The phone still has a sturdy feel to it, though — the plastic doesn’t feel cheap like it can on many other phones.
But, if you want to err on the side of caution, Realme includes a silicone case with the phone. Unfortunately, the case is all black, covering up the Aston Martin green that makes the phone so distinctive (aside from the green on the camera array). At least there’s a cutout in the case to show off the silver Aston Martin logo on the back, but I suspect most Aston Martin fans will want to go without and show off the team color.
The Realme GT 7 is a 6.78-in phone, same as the Pro model, but weighs a bit less at 206g. That’s despite having a larger battery, as we’ll get to later — the lighter weight might be from the use of plastic instead of aluminum. Also like the Pro model, the GT 7 is rated IP68/9, making it dustproof and waterproof, and protected against high-pressure water. We’re still getting Corning Gorilla Glass 7i protecting the display, which isn’t our favorite — Corning’s Victus glass is a lot better against scratches, and can be found on other flagship Android phones.
Performance
As it is with a lot of mid-range smartphone options, the Realme GT 7 is tuned for efficiency. Rather than the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset in the Pro model, this phone gets the Mediatek Dimensity 9400e chipset (the phone can be configured with 12GB or 16GB of RAM). The e indicates efficiency, but that doesn’t mean this phone is underpowered.
In daily use, I didn’t notice much difference between this and any flagship Android smartphone. Most folks will only notice the difference when gaming, and even there, the GT 7 doesn’t represent a huge step down. Playing Genshin Impact for a couple hours at max settings and brightness and a frame rate cap of 60fps mostly felt good, although the frame rate typically only hovered around 50fps — the Pro model was able to sustain consistent 60fps gameplay at max settings. Playing at medium or high settings is recommended, with performance tanking for cutscenes at max settings.
You can wring a little more out of gaming with Realme’s suite of gaming settings. Hyper HDR mode makes a noticeable difference, adding more pop to backgrounds and details. You can also boost performance within the gaming settings, or just turn on GT Mode system-wide, which maxes out display resolution, frame rate, and overclocks the CPU. Like with the Pro model, GT Mode is only worth using for gaming — I would leave it off to conserve battery power otherwise, although battery life isn’t as much of a concern with this phone versus the Pro model.
Playing Genshin Impact at max settings for a couple hours did warm the phone up quite a bit, despite Realme’s IceSense Design graphene cooling system. The phone never got uncomfortable to hold, although the heat did seem to affect performance a little over time.
As far as connectivity goes, the phone works with sub-6 5G and dual-band Wi-Fi 7 (no 6GHz Wi-Fi), and has 360-degree NFC and two nano SIM slots. For travelers, the GT 7 works with Oroaming, which makes it easy to purchase data plans and connect to networks in other countries quickly, without the need for a SIM card. The optical fingerprint reader on the display works quickly and consistently, like with the Pro model. It’s a solid package, although if you do need to use the phone for wired data transfers, keep in mind that this phone uses a slower USB 2.0 Type-C port.
Display and audio
The display on the GT 7 is almost the same as the one on the Pro model — a 6.78-in 2780×1264 LTPO AMOLED display with up to a 120Hz refresh rate. It doesn’t get quite as bright as the Pro model, with max screen brightness at 1,600 nits. I didn’t find that to matter too much — the color contrast is still amazing when using HDR, and the phone is perfectly readable in direct sunlight. A maximum of 6,000 nits of brightness is advertised, but that’s just localized brightness for contrast, not for the whole display at once. The display is also compatible with Dolby Vision image processing and the HDR10+ standard.
Like with the Pro model, the display is fantastic. Games and videos looked incredible, especially with HDR in use. It’s one of the most crisp smartphone displays I’ve seen on any phone I’ve reviewed, and is one of the best reasons to buy the Realme GT 7.
The stereo speakers on the GT 7 are excellent. As usual, there’s a speaker on the bottom and a speaker where the earpiece is, and both are well balanced and get very loud without the sound becoming distorted. There’s a clarity to the sound that you don’t usually get with on-device smartphone speakers, making the GT 7 a terrific all-around entertainment device.
Battery life
The GT 7 has a massive 7,000mAh battery, larger than the 6,500mAh unit on the Pro model. Combine that with the more efficient Mediatek Dimensity 9400e chipset and you get nigh unbeatable battery life. I never got anywhere near 0% over the course of one day, and in most cases comfortably got through two full days of use on one charge. Long bouts of gaming or movie watching will generally limit you to just one day, as we’d expect.
Even then, it takes a lot to drain this phone. Watching an hour of video at max brightness only used up 5% of the phone’s battery capacity, while an hour of gaming at max brightness and max settings only cost 16% of capacity, both better than what I typically see even on other mid-range devices.
Even when battery life does get low, it doesn’t take much to get it back into action. The phone can be used with up to a 120W charging brick, which will fully charge the phone in less than an hour. Good thing the wired charging is so quick, because once again, wireless charging has been left off the feature set.
Camera
The Realme GT 7 has a three-camera array — a 50MP wide-angle camera with phase-detect autofocus and optical image stabilization (which works with Dolby Vision), a 50MP 2x zoom telephoto camera with phase-detect autofocus, and an 8MP ultrawide camera with no autofocus. On the front, there’s a 32MP selfie camera, also with no autofocus.
The main camera took terrific shots — colors were sharp and accurate, and details were clear. You can choose to take pictures in crisp mode or vibrant mode, the latter of which gives you more color saturation in your shots. I tended to prefer crisp mode, but they’re both good enough — which you should use depends more on your preference.
The zoom camera also didn’t disappoint. I got the same clarity and bright colors as I did with the main camera in the 2x zoom (1x and 2x pictures below, respectively). Sometimes even on more expensive phones I notice at least a tiny bit of blurriness in zoom shots, but I couldn’t find much to complain about here.
The only downside with the telephoto camera is that you’re limited to 2x optical zoom on the GT 7 — everything past that is digital zoom. You do get a pretty solid 3x zoom camera on the GT 7 Pro, so if camera versatility is a priority when smartphone shopping, you might want to track down the Pro model.
The 8MP ultrawide camera wasn’t as great with balance and exposure, but it looks like the phone’s post-processing has a bigger hand in the results. Colors in the photo were way more saturated, which does something to cover up the imperfections — look hard enough and you can see a lot of blurriness in the photo, I’m sure in no small part due to the lack of stabilization.
I had a little trouble with portrait mode. While the GT 7 seemed to focus quickly, I felt like the subjects came out a lot more blurry than I anticipated. The subjects were outlined really well, with very little blurring around the edges, but I definitely would’ve liked more clarity in the subjects. I’m sure you could get there with a steady hand and better lighting, but I usually like to see better results from a quick point-and-shoot picture at this price point.
Night shots weren’t too bad. I didn’t find a lot of glaring problems with lack of clarity, and I liked that the photos didn’t have the sort of faux daylight look that often comes from taking pictures in night mode. The fireworks weren’t overexposed, either, which was a big positive — tough to catch something bright and fast-moving at night, but the GT 7 hung in there.
There’s also an AI Landscape mode — below is the same shot I took with the ultrawide camera above, but in this mode. It doesn’t help that much with blur, but it definitely helped with brightness and contrast. There’s an artificial sharpness to the finished product that’s a bit distracting, but I thought on balance it was an improvement over the initial photo.
You’ve also got the now-familiar suite of AI editing tools, including an eraser to get rid of objects and people, AI Ultra Clarity to spruce up details, and Unblur to fix blurriness. In addition, there’s now an AI glare remover and a tool to remove reflections. And, like usual, same feedback — sometimes the AI features work OK, and sometimes the photos come out looking like blurry and obviously edited messes. Generally speaking, the smaller the edit, the better the result.
I think these AI editing features are getting better, though — the AI eraser did a good job of removing the cars in the picture below. AI Ultra Clarity seemed to mostly make pictures brighter, but not so much that it throws off the balance of the shot. Overall, not a bad showing from Realme as AI editing goes.
Software
The Realme GT 7 runs Android 15 out of the box with the Realme UI 6.0 overlay. It’s a light overlay, and not too far removed from what’s going on with stock Android. You’ve got the redundant system apps and strange additions like the 92 lock screen (which we covered in our Realme 14 Pro Plus review), but most of what wasn’t desirable can be easily deactivated. And, I was glad to see that Realme has continued to become one of the better Android phone makers when it comes to bloatware — there is only a handful of pre-installed apps and app stores, and everything but the Realme system apps can be uninstalled.
Our Aston Martin GT 7 Dream Edition also got a pretty sharp custom theme, covering the phone and app icons in green and black (sometimes with custom designs for the app icons). It’s a great look that matches perfectly with the phone — unfortunately, the theme only works with apps already on the device. It’s a bit of a shame that other apps you’ll download will clash with the decor, but that’s not much of a complaint.
One new AI feature to look at is the AI Planner — by taking a screenshot of your phone, the GT 7 can pull information and create calendar events, reminders, and notifications. The feedback is the same as it always is for AI features — sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. You always need to check for accuracy after using it, which makes me prefer just making calendar events myself.
Sustainability
Realme has been making up ground quickly here. With the GT 7, they’ve upped their support to four guaranteed OS upgrades and six years of security patches, which surprisingly is even more than they guaranteed for the Pro model. Physically, the phone should withstand that much time of wear and tear thanks to a solid build and that IP68/9 rating, although we’d still like to see some of Corning’s better protective glass on the display.
We do have to mention that the box the Aston Martin GT 7 comes in is massive (it has a pull-out drawer for the accessories!) and uses more materials than necessary, but hey, for an Aston Martin phone, you have to indulge a little.
Pricing and availability
The Realme GT 7 can be purchased in 12GB RAM / 256GB storage, 12GB RAM / 512GB storage, and 16GB RAM / 512GB storage configurations. The GT 7 got a wider global release, and there are some Amazon shops importing the phone for folks in the United States. It looks like the 12GB/256GB configuration is right around $750, which tracks with prices in other markets. At the high end, you can find the phone for around €900, or around $1,000. That makes the GT 7 fairly pricey among other Android phones. As you might expect, tracking down the Aston Martin GT 7 Dream Edition is going to be a little tougher, and will probably run you a lot more on resale sites.
Bottom line
The Realme GT 7 is a terrific phone — it’s very powerful even with an efficiency-focused chipset, has a gorgeous display, and doesn’t suffer from too much bloatware. The camera array still lags behind the best of the best, with Samsung’s Galaxy phones and Google’s Pixel phones still dominating there. But, that might be a worthwhile trade-off if you value battery life more, because getting two days on one charge is going to be easy enough for most folks.
The only problem might be the price. Bargain hunters might be able to find the Pro model for cheaper at this point, and while that means worse battery life, you’re getting more power and a better zoom camera for less money. We suspect the deals will be coming in short order for the GT 7, too, so while the phone is easy to recommend in a vacuum, we might wait until you can find it at a lower price.
Deals aside, it looks like Realme is starting to cement itself as a high-end Android smartphone competitor alongside Samsung and Google in terms of pricing. Given the quality of their phones lately, that’s warranted, but also means that bargain hunters might be better off looking to other brands like iQOO, Tecno, or Poco.