Hate your phone’s camera island design? This flagship lets you swap it out like Lego

Innovation is dead, one could easily argue in the context of phone designs. In addition to the glass slab becoming widely accepted as the standard design for a big chunk of smartphones made and sold today, the fast lane launches and the constant battle to uproot competition have led manufacturers to focus on other areas than design. At the same time, certain outliers, like Nothing, challenge that notion by experimenting with unusual camera designs, secondary displays, and unusually tiny screens. Now, another leading Android manufacturer is experimenting with a subtle change that can radically alter the phone’s look by altering how the camera appears.

OnePlus’ sister brand, realme, has just begun teasing its upcoming flagship with a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. In addition to the new chipset, the realme GT 8 Pro is also the brand’s first phone to feature a camera developed in partnership with a camera brand. And while its design looks typical from a distance, realme is showing off an element that makes it rather peculiar.

The realme GT 8 Pro’s rear camera module supports interchangeable enclosures. The metal island surrounding it is held together with two screws and can be replaced with any other design. That means, although the phone comes with a square camera assembly by default, owners will have the option to swap it out for another shape or color.

Some of the options showcased by realme include a transparent, circular, hexagonal, or even a flower-shaped covering. Here’s a video that realme posted on its Weibo account teasing the feature.

There is a variety of trinkets, mostly metal, but realme hasn’t explicitly highlighted how — or how many — it plans to dish out for the buyers. Another concern is about availability, as realme could limit these to its home country, China, even though the phone is expected to be globally available.

Since the brand has previously released special designs of its flagship phones, dubbed “Master Edition,” we might see that replicated again. Meanwhile, the standard realme GT 8 appears to skip out on this advantage.

As for more clarity about it, we should have some when realme officially announces the GT 8 series in China next week. In addition to the flagship chipset, the realme GT 8 Pro is confirmed to feature cameras tuned by Ricoh GH, while featuring the same primary camera as the OnePlus 15. It is also expected to come with a 200MP telephoto camera, identical to flagship Vivo phones. While the brand hasn’t talked much about other aspects, we expect battery and charging speeds comparable to the OnePlus 15 and Android 16-based Realme UI (essentially a ColorOS clone).