With no good alternative, I pulled a $200 Realme P3 out of my desk drawer, a phone I keep around for testing apps.
But when the repair shop called to say my Samsung was ready, I wasn’t sure I wanted to switch back.
We buy top-tier phones built like supercars, then spend all day driving them in 20 mph city traffic.
It was my Galaxy Watch.
Realme's battery optimization aggressively kills background apps to squeeze more life out of an already massive 6,000 mAh battery.
Back in April, an accidental drop left my Galaxy S25 Ultra with a shattered display and a two-week repair estimate from the service center. With no good alternative, I pulled a $200 Realme P3 out of my desk drawer, a phone I keep around for testing apps. Making it my daily driver sounded like a painful compromise. But when the repair shop called to say my Samsung was ready, I wasn’t sure I wanted to switch back.
Related I dug out my old Android tablet, and it replaced 3 expensive gadgets I dusted off an old Android tablet and it quietly replaced three gadgets I was ready to spend serious money on.
Daily tasks don't need flagships
The downgrade barely changed my day
Digvijay Kumar / MakeUseOf Credit: Digvijay Kumar / MakeUseOf
Most of what we do on our phones all day is messaging, social media, and streaming. We buy top-tier phones built like supercars, then spend all day driving them in 20 mph city traffic. And that's pretty much what I found with my Realme P3.
It runs a Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 chip with a 120Hz AMOLED display, and for my everyday routine, the S25 Ultra's Snapdragon 8 Elite didn't have much to flex on. Sure, it's a more powerful processor, but Instagram doesn't care which chip is loading the feed. I shot the same scenes on both cameras over a few days. In good daylight, I sometimes struggled to tell the difference without zooming in or checking the files side by side.
Where the experience really surprised me was the battery life. The P3’s 6,000 mAh cell got me through a day and a half of heavy use. Its successor, the Realme P4, already ships with 7,000 mAh. Meanwhile, flagships five times the price still come with smaller batteries and no charger in the box.
Software updates used to be the strongest case for spending more, but that argument no longer holds up. I checked for software updates expecting to be a version behind. Turns out Samsung now promises six years of OS updates even on budget models like the Galaxy A07, which costs less than a pair of AirPods.
The compromises aren't on the spec sheet
What I missed wasn't the hardware
Digvijay Kumar / MakeUseOf
So far, the Realme had held its own. But the longer I used it, the more the cracks started to show. The biggest surprise had nothing to do with the phone. It was my Galaxy Watch. Samsung locks key health features to its own phones, so switching to the Realme meant losing ECG readings, blood pressure monitoring, and sleep apnea detection overnight. The camera controller I used to frame group photos from my watch stopped working. I changed my phone, but my watch got dumber.
Another thing I noticed: my notifications weren't reliable either. Realme's battery optimization aggressively kills background apps to squeeze more life out of an already massive 6,000 mAh battery. WhatsApp, email, calendar reminders — they all need to stay active in the background to push your notifications through. Once the phone kills them, messages just sit there until you open the app yourself. Sure, you can dig into battery settings and mark each app as allowed to run in the background. But if a phone needs that much hand-holding just to deliver a message, it has its priorities wrong.
Digvijay Kumar / MakeUseOf
Worse still, the phone wasn't just missing features; it was busy selling me things instead. The Realme shipped with 69 pre-installed apps, and its lock screen doubles as advertising space through a feature called Realme Glance. Ads from the apps store interrupt you between actual messages. When you spend $1,000 on a phone, the manufacturer has already made their margin. But at $200, you are part of the margin.
The cost of not being annoyed
The Samsung service center handed me a $300 bill to replace a single sheet of glass. That bill cost more than the entire phone sitting in my pocket.
Then again, the thousand-dollar gap between these two phones isn't about speed, battery life, or camera quality. What it actually buys is silence. Sure, no ads on the lock screen, no strangled notifications, no crippled watch. But does that silence really justify five times the price? Because the $200 phone handled 90% of the same work, outlasted the flagship on battery, and if it broke, I'd buy another one and still have money left over from what Samsung charged me for a screen.
Standing at the service counter with the pristine Galaxy in one hand and the plastic Realme in the other, I looked down at the bill. For the first time, I couldn't decide which compromise was actually more expensive.
