It was just a matter of time: Realme’s latest smartphone comes with a feature called Mini Capsule, and it’s a dead ringer for the iPhone 14 Pro’s Dynamic Island.
The phone (via The Verge and GSM Arena) is called Realme C55, and it’s a nicely designed mid-ranger, with a 6.72-inch LCD display, a Mediatek Helio G88 chipset, 6/8GB of RAM, 128/256GB of storage, a dual, 64/2-megapixel main camera, an eight-megapixel selfie shooter, and a 5,000mAh battery. It launched in Indonesia and, according to Realme European chief Francis Wong, it’s coming to Europe “soon.”
The most notable feature of the Realme C55, however, is the Mini Capsule, as it’s the first widely available smartphone to copy the iPhone’s Dynamic Island. Without it, the Realme C55 has a typical, centrally positioned punch-hole selfie camera; when the Mini Capsule expands, it can display info such as charging power and status, data usage, and step count.
You can sort of have a Dynamic Island-like feature on any Android; we’ve seen apps that hide the selfie camera cutout and expand it with additional functionality. But the Realme C55 comes with the feature built-in natively, which might be a beginning of a trend.
It’s also worth noting that Realme shares a parent company, BBK Electronics, with Oppo and Vivo, so a similar feature could be coming to one of these brands’ phones soon. China’s Huawei is also rumored to be launching a Dynamic Island-like feature on its Nova 11 series of smartphones.
Realme C55 costs 2,499,000 Rupiah in Indonesia, which is roughly $162. There’s no word on pricing in Europe yet.
