Realme C53 is an affordable smartphone that looks like the most expensive iPhone

No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you—Apple hasn’t revealed new colours for its iPhone 14 Pro. This is instead the Realme C53, an entry-level smartphone that shows the C55 was just the beginning of the Chinese company taking inspiration from Cupertino.

The influence is unmistakable—a flat-sided design, a large rectangular camera bump and the three camera circles in exactly the same place as the iPhone 14 Pro’s. It’s a clever piece of design trickery, however—the C53 has just two cameras, with the flash forming the third “lens”.

Speaking of cameras, the C53 has a 50MP main camera with an f/1.8 aperture. Realme did not specify what the second camera is, but I can only assume it’s a depth sensor. Flip the phone and you’ll find an 8MP selfie camera with an f/2.0 aperture.

The said selfie camera is housed within a teardrop-shaped cutout on the 6.74-inch Full HD+ IPS LCD display, which has an impressive 90Hz refresh rate, a 180Hz touch sampling rate and a peak brightness of 560 nits. One feature that Realme has already cribbed from the iPhone 14 Pro is the Dynamic Island-style Mini Capsule, although here it takes the form of a notch instead of a pill shape; as before it shows information like battery charging status and your step count.

Inside, you’ll find a little-known chip, the octa-core Unisoc Tiger T612, built on a 12nm process and clocked at up to 1.82GHz. It’s paired with 6GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 128GB of storage, the latter expandable by up to 1TB through a MicroSD card slot in the dual-SIM tray.

All this is juiced by a 5,000mAh battery that supports up to 33W SuperVOOC fast charging. The C53 also features 4G, WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity, a single bottom-firing speaker and a side fingerprint sensor; it ships with Android 13 skinned with the Realme UI T Edition. Measuring just 7.49mm thick, the C53 is available in Champion Gold and Mighty Black.

Realme Malaysia has confirmed that our market will be one of the first to receive the C53, with a launch on June 6.