Following a number of teasers earlier this month, Realme has indeed confirmed that they’ll be bringing the Realme 9i to our shores later this month. Not only that, Realme are including the fairly bold claim that the Realme 9i will ‘redefine the under-RM1,000 smartphone category’. The launch event will happen on the 19th of January at 2pm, with a livestream on the Realme Malaysia Facebook page.
Realme Malaysia has already announced at the start of the year that they will introduce a device with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 680 system-on-chip powering it; we now know that it’s the Realme 9i. The Snapdragon 680 is a relatively new piece of silicon, having been launched by Qualcomm only last October. It’s a 4G-only processor fabbed on the 6nm process node, the same used by other processors in its class such as the Snapdragon 778G+, which are more expensive but does offer 5G connectivity.
According to Realme, the Realme 9i will offer up to 46% better performance and up to 62% less power consumption compared to its predecessor thanks to the Snapdragon 680 SoC. They’ve also confirmed that it’ll have a 5,000mAh battery with 33W fast charging. While that’s all they revealed for now, we do know more about the Realme 9i as Realme Vietnam has already launched the device.
The Realme 9i product page on Realme Vietnam’s website mentions that it has 6GB of LPDDR4X memory that can be ‘expanded’ to 11GB via the RAM expansion feature. It’ll also come with 128GB of storage with a microSD card slot too. The screen meanwhile is a 6.6-inch, FHD+ display with a refresh rate up to 90Hz. In the camera department, it has a triple rear camera setup, with a main 50MP, f/1.8 camera flanked by a 2MP, f/2.44 macro lens and a 2MP, f/2.4 monochrome camera. Selfies meanwhile get taken care of by a 16MP, f/2.1 front camera.
Pricing meanwhile remains a mystery of course, other than that it’ll be under RM1,000. A quick check on Shopee Vietnam shows that the Realme 9i retails for VND6,490,000, which is approximately RM1,194.87. We’ll have to wait for the 19th of January though to find out it’s actual local pricing, but in the meantime you can check out the Realme 9i for yourself on the Realme Vietnam website.
