Narzo N53 Review: New Challenger for the Under Rs. 20K Throne?

The Narzo Series from Realme is known to offer good performance for the price. The Narzo series often offers good cameras, a gaming chipset, and a beefy battery. The N53, while trying to do the same, has also made some compromises that have allowed the competition to slingshot ahead.

Howdy, welcome to our Narzo N53 review. We’ve been using the phone for over a week now and have compiled what we think are the pros and cons of this phone. Alright, let’s get started by looking at the specifications below.

ALSO READ: Redmi 12 Review: Best Phone Under Rs. 20,000

Realme Narzo N53 Review

Flashy Design

• 167.3 x 76.7 x 7.49 mm
• Decent build
• Plastic back

The design of the phone is really good. The phone has a line texture finish at the back that shimmers and shines at different light angles. At just 7.5mm, Realme claims this is the thinnest phone they’ve made till now. 

The camera island has three circular rings with a chrome finish and houses the camera and flash modules. 

Well, the phone is made of plastic. However, the feel of this phone is good. The finish on the back makes it look like it’s made of glass and the sides also look like it’s made of metal.

The Narzo N53 features a pretty eye-catching design with its line texture finish that comes to life when hit by light.

The right side house the power button which also doubles as a fingerprint scanner. It’s fast and accurate and we had no issues with it. Just above the power button are the volume rockers. 

The left side houses the Dual SIM (Nano-SIM) slot.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The bottom houses the headphone jack, microphone, charging port, and single speaker while the top is clean. 

Decent Display

• 6.74 inches IPS LCD
• 90Hz refresh rate
• HD+ resolution
• Noticeable Chin

The phone comes with a standard IPS LCD HD+ display. But at least, the display refreshes at 90Hz. The display gets decently bright but under direct sunlight, it can be a bit difficult to view the screen as the peak brightness is only 450nits but it’s still useable. 

The auto brightness works well but is very slow. It takes a few moments for the display to change brightness automatically. The bezels surrounding the display are thin except for the chin. Oh yeah, it’s a waterdrop notch for the front camera.

The 90Hz IPS display is fluid but not very sharp at HD+ resolution. 

The viewing angles are decent. The phone comes with Widevine L3 so you won’t be able to stream your favorite movies and shows in full quality. Watching youtube videos was a pleasant experience. There were not any frame drops or stutters even when watching 1080p@60fps videos. 

Average Performance

• Unisoc Tiger T612 (12nm)
• Octa-core (2×1.8 GHz Cortex-A75 & 6×1.8 GHz Cortex-A55)
• Mali-G57

The phone features the octa-core Unisoc Tiger T612 (2 x A75@1.8 GHz+6 x A55@1.8 GHz) and the performance is average. The phone comes with low RAM and had micro stutters here and there.

The main weakness of the phone is the storage. The lower 64GB variant was already at 67% capacity over the few days with the phone. The phone also can’t hold apps in memory for long. You do get a RAM expansion option(virtual memory) but we didn’t enable it as the storage was already running low. 

The phone has poor write speeds, as during our testing, we got a sequential read of 305MB/s and a write of 89.7MB/s which is not very good. However, 30min CPU stress test throttled the phone to 82% of max performance indicating decent thermal management.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

GAMING

In PubG, HD graphics with High framerate, we got 29.2 avg fps. Gameplay was pretty smooth. The phone didn’t get very hot but we did notice some hiccups here and there but it was nothing unplayable. Still, we dialed the settings down to smooth graphics with a High frame rate and got a 29.7 avg. fps with very smooth gameplay. This is the best performance the phone can deliver but the framerate didn’t see much change compared to HD graphics. 

We also tested the gyro controls. There is a very slight delay while using Gyro. If you plan on playing the game casually, it won’t bother you much but for competitive gaming, you will feel that slight latency. Overall, the game was enjoyable and a 35-minute session took 7% from the battery. So you can game for pretty long sessions, not that we recommend doing so. 

Moving on to Call of Duty, we were able to get around 60fps on both low and high graphic settings. The game was pretty responsive and didn’t face many stutters. No issues here and it was a fun experience. 

Asphalt 9 with High settings resulted in 24.6 avg fps. The game ran smoothly, with a few lags during animations and lots of particles around the display but the gameplay was still enjoyable. You can tone down the graphics to get some more fluid gameplay. 

Casual games like Subway Surfers played smoothly as well.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Camera

• Rear Camera: 50 MP, f1.8, PDAF
  • Unspecified secondary camera
  • Video: 1080p@30fps
• Front Camera: 8 MP, f/2.0
  • Video: 720p@30fps

The phone comes with a dual-camera setup. A 50MP f1.8 main shooter with an unspecified secondary camera. Only the 50MP one is usable so we’ll talk about that.

MAIN CAMERA

Photos are bright but lack the dynamic range. It’s not bad but could’ve been better with the software processing. Daytime shots have decent sharpness and the phone captures fine details quite well given the price. 

50MP shots don’t have more details compared to the normal binned images. Putting a side-by-side comparison, the images are super identical even when zoomed in. 

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

We get a dedicated night mode which is awesome at this price point. Bright objects have their highlights controlled and the overall image is a bit brighter with boosted shadows.

The noise is cleaned and the details are well-maintained. Shooting in very low light conditions however, the image gets noisier as the phone compensates by boosting the dark areas and pulling the details by brightening the image. 

PORTRAITS

For a budget phone, the portraits are good. The edge detection is not the cleanest we’ve seen but it’s still decent given the price point. The images don’t look overprocessed and the skin tones are natural as well.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The background blur can be adjusted and you’ll want to adjust it as the largest aperture size setting looks super fake. For the price, the N53 takes decent portrait shots, especially considering how bad the N55 portraits were in our testing.

FRONT CAMERA

The phone comes with an 8MP front camera. Photos from the front camera are average and seem to be of a neutral profile. The phone supports HDR in the front camera as well.

Images are a bit noisy even in daylight and images lack sharpness and details. It’s not bad by any means as it is only an 8MP sensor and photos are usable for social media.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The selfie camera also supports portrait mode. A lot of phones require face detection for the portrait mode to work but it’s good to see this phone can do portraits even with a mask on. 

At first glance, the edge detection looks good, but if you zoom in, you can see smudges around areas where the phone struggled to correctly determine the edge.

VIDEOS

The phone supports only up to 1080p@30fps videos. There is no stabilization so videos can get quite shaky if you walk and record.

The videos lack details and came out slightly overexposed for our taste. As soon as you use a laptop or monitor of 1080p resolution and play the video, the quality drops significantly.

Battery

• Non-removable Li-Po 5000mAh battery
• 33W fast charging

In the battery department, we were able to squeeze over 7 hours of SoT with mixed usage of benchmarks, gaming, and camera usage. The phone has a large battery and the hardware specifications are quite low, so the battery lasts a while. If you’re a light user, you won’t need to charge the phone for over a day and when you do need to charge it.

The phone comes with support for 33W fast charging and a 33W SuperVOOC charger in the box. The phone takes a bit over 1 hour and 15 mins to charge fully.

Decent Software

• Android 13
• Realme UI T edition

The phone comes with Android 13 out of the box with Realme UI T edition which is pretty toned down in terms of features but still comes with the standard Realme bloatware of Josh, Moj, hot games, etc. Just why? 

The phone ran smoothly most of the time but sometimes felt as if it was struggling to do even basic tasks. The software needs some ironing out to better fit the low hardware but it’s by no means a deal breaker. 

The phone also features the mini capsule of Realme that shows up while charging the phone. It’s still in a gimmicky phase but has the potential to be good.

So that was our review of the Realme Narzo N53? How’d you like that? Let us know in the comments below!