Realme is working on a proper flagship for early next year, will cost more than current GT models

Realme is working on a flagship phone, this was revealed by company executive Xu Qi at the China Mobile Global Partners Conference. The exec promised a number of new high-end products that will be launched early next year, but kept most details under wraps.

For now all that Xu Qi revealed is that the flagship phone will cost around CNY 5,000. That converts to $780/€675/₹58,000, so it will be below the most expensive flagships. And it will probably use the 125W UltraDart fast charging system, which is conspicuously also set to launch early next year.

You may be thinking that Realme already has flagships, but that’s not quite right. The Realme GT has a flagship Snapdragon 888 chipset, but it lacks a flagship camera. The company has dabbled with 108 MP sensors and periscopes, but it doesn’t really have one do-it-all flagship.

This was all according to the dual flagship strategy, under which the company divided its high-end offerings into performance flagships and camera flagships. The aforementioned Realme GT (one of the performance flagships) can be had for as low as CNY 2,500, half of what the upcoming flagship will cost. The most expensive Realme phone in China is currently the X50 Pro 5G, which starts at CNY 3,600.

, which reported on the Realme’s flagship plans, speculates that this is an attempt to grab some of the high-end market share that Huawei lost. Xiaomi, Oppo and vivo are doing the same too.

By the way, this move into flagship territory will put Realme against progenitor Oppo and sibling OnePlus (for the record, the Oppo Find X3 Pro costs CNY 5,500, while the OnePlus 9 Pro is CNY 4,300).