Realme C55: Is this cheap Android with ‘Dynamic Island’ coming to Malaysia soon?

When Apple showed off the iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max last year, the new Dynamic Island feature had everyone talking. It was actually a pretty cool and innovative take on solving the front camera cutout problem that turned it into part of the system UI. If you want to experience Dynamic Island for yourself though, the iPhone 14 Pro’s starting price of RM5,299 was a clear barrier to it.

Enter the Realme C55, which has just launched in Indonesia. It looks pretty typical at first, with a single punch hole cutout up front housing a selfie camera. But Realme is introducing their own take on Dynamic Island with the C55, calling it the Mini Capsule. With Mini Capsule, the Realme C55 incorporates a similar Dynamic Island UI found on the iPhone 14 Pro, with it expanding horizontally to provide information to you such as charging speeds, notifications, data usage and more.

There’s no word just yet on whether it’s coming to Malaysia, but there’s good reason to believe it will land on our shores pretty soon. The Realme C55 has already been spotted on the local SIRIM database, indicating that it’s already ready for a local launch; we just need to wait for Realme Malaysia to let us know more about its imminent arrival. As for pricing, in Indonesia at least, the Realme C55 starts at IDR2,499,000 (~RM731).

That low price tag is a clear sign though that this is very much an entry level device, and the rest of the spec sheet shows that. It packs a large 6.72-inch FHD+ display sure, but it’s not an OLED panel with Realme instead using an IPS LCD display pushing a 90Hz refresh rate instead. As such, it’s peak brightness of 680nits pales in comparison to its rivals packing AMOLED displays.

Under the hood meanwhile, the Realme C55 in Indonesia has a MediaTek Helio G88 system-on-chip, a 12nm processor without 5G connectivity. This gets mated to up to 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM with up to 256GB of storage too. At the very least, you are getting a microSD card slot for up to 1TB in expandable storage, along with a virtual RAM feature that provides another 8GB of virtual RAM if needed. It also comes with Android 13 out of the box, with Realme UI 4.0 skinned over it.

Elsewhere, there’s a dual rear camera setup, though you’ll really only be using the main 64MP camera most of the time as the secondary shooter is a 2MP portrait sensor. The front camera that sits in the center of Realme’s Mini Capsule feature meanwhile is an 8MP selfie shooter. Keeping the lights on meanwhile is a 5,000mAh battery with 33W SuperVOOC charging. You’ll also find a side-mounted fingerprint sensor, a 3.5mm audio jack along with NFC connectivity.