Great Xiaomi 12 Pro Review
So I have reviewed the Xiaomi 12. full in-depth review but now it is time for the larger model Xiaomi's 12 pros so this has a 6.73-inch screen which is a top 12 bit one billion color AMOLED screen that's 120 hertz it's an impressive display there's a bit of a curve to it we've got a 50-megapixel camera as our main one
on the rear which is the sony IMX 707 50 megapixels two times optical camera which is a bit of an odd choice because most people would just use two-times digital zoom which is normally actually pretty good nowadays and a 50-megapixel ultra-wide it has a really great build to it with gorilla glass vectors and an in-screen fingerprint reader all powered of course by the new snapdragon
8 gen 1 a four-nanometer chip and this model here that I've got has eight gigabytes of ram and 128 gigabytes of us 3.1 storage is it a good phone or does it suffer from the same issues that I encountered with the smaller Xiaomi 12 model let's find out in this in-depth review and inside the box, you will find here a sim tray tool and a clear case that of course fits it
perfectly it's got all the cutouts that it needs and they've even reduced the thickness of the plastic where the antenna lines are not to affect the signal strength there which probably third party cases wouldn't even bother about doing that there's a few other things in here a little bit of paperwork and whatnot but that is all in Chinese and then the cable that we get typical Xiaomi high-quality type c2 type a cable and our charger this one is not a bad size 120 watts so it takes approximately 20 minutes to fully charge the Xiaomi 12 pro yes it is that fast now build quality of these Xiaomi phones their new flagship I do like it's a little bit more subdued compared
to some of their earlier designs I mean the mi 11 still is one of my favorites but I do think that these look great they look quite classy the phones so blue finish with the Xiaomi 12 here and the matte black one I really like this finish so it doesn't show or pick up any fingerprints really it seems quite good in that regard and we have the curvature to the screen on the ends of it so in hand feels a little bit better now this black when you hold it up to the sun at
certain angles you can see in the light a bit of a sparkle coming through which is just underneath the surface of that glass I think it does look really good than our camera layout here on the back I do like the fact that we've just got the three-camera modules here now and not have like five or four or useless cameras that you wouldn't really use so they do have the main camera 50 megapixels it is that new imx 707 we've got a 50-megapixel ultra-wide and then a 50 megapixel two
times optical which is a bit odd I guess they're saving the five times or the ten times optical for the Xiaomi 12 ultra that is probably where we'll see it Xiaomi branding here on the back, it's quite subdued as well you don't really see it it doesn't stand out a lot and then the outside frame this is all metal you can see some antenna lines here but the really nice high-quality finish and build
with these new flagships down the bottom, we've got our type c port unfortunately still no video outcome on Xiaomi it's USB 2.0 spec so not only does it not have video out it's also well pretty damn slow should be a lot faster microphone one of two Harman Kardon tuned speakers and then our sim tray which takes two nano sims okay no micro sd card support but hey we knew that they just don't do it with flagships but we get it on their budget and mid ranges which is good at least
up the top or transmitter secondary mic and that second Harmon colon speaker now these buttons that are on the right side good location I can get my thumb quite easily to the power on button volume up and down they have not done a pixel if you've seen the pixel or you know the pixel they decided to be clever google and reverse it around compared to everyone else but we didn't have that at least with great Xiaomi and they're made out of metal they do feel really good those buttons
and then moving over to our display this is a top AMOLED display 1 billion colors 12 bit 120-hertz Dolby vision hdr 10 plus and up to 1500 nits maximum brightness wow so it's a display that offers a hell of a lot now one thing that I have seen what's happening with this display is a bit of banding if you jump in here to the display settings you'll notice that oh hang on where is the dc dimming option they've got it but it's hidden away in developer options
unfortunately, so you sometimes might see on camera but abandoning especially depending on what you're recording with you'll see a ton of it now in sunlight you can make it out quite easily even though here yes it's got this banding going through it like crazy trust me in person you don't actually see that you're not gonna see that at all but stands out looks great and you can
read everything in the sunlight now we've got the color scheme options here which I do love to see from Xiaomi plenty of different options there too that we can tweak and adjust this display to your own preference and finally they've given us this I am very happy to see 90 hertz so I can put it on to 90 hertz and that's the best of the fluidity of the UI and battery saving as I get onto that later on, in this review, I'll tell you what the battery life at 120 hertz is like and it's not
amazing as you'd expect it does take a toll on the battery so excellent top tier display in this do you see a huge step up from say the mile even ultras display of the m11 display to this one not really those differences in the color reproduction the top versus what we had before you're not really going to see it on such a small scale here now if we're talking about a 65-inch tv then that might be different but still don't get me wrong great to have an excellent screen with
a lot of tech in it now you might see at times that it looks like it's going to stutter well that's because sometimes it does actually do that now gestures I've really had no problems with it's getting better we've had now two big firmware updates and I've had a bit of a problem with some apps like for example like play store all right saying it's not fully compatible now 64-bit architecture okay that's interesting I never saw that before the recent patch has
just done that now and this has been very janky they're loading on this and the scrolling is just absolutely looked at that's just terrible and after two patches Xiaomi has still not fixed this and it's because it's the Chinese rom so the Chinese team obviously they're not focusing on google apps because that and Gmail are terrible and another pretty poor one too is even Twitter that I've been running on this I do find that it sometimes has quite a bit of shutter lag and you know it's not perfect yet now a couple of times I have seen this system have
a bit of animation lag too as well that I'm not too happy about so clearly to me mini 13 has quite a few bugs and a lot of work still needed onto our loudspeakers now so you would think the larger phone would have the better-tuned Harman Kardon speakers right wrong it's actually the smaller Xiaomi 12 sounds to my ears louder and marginally
better than the 12 pros here's a sample at both of them at hundred percent volumes this was the last patch that came through which they do claim is a mini 13 stable version but yeah it's far from stable still feels like a bit of a beta now battery life you're looking at 120 hertz with this fixed battery life test that I always do in my reviews, this is pc mark set the brightness to 200 nits let it run okay eight hours just over eight hours in real-world use you're looking about
six-seven hours maybe of on-screen time at 120 hertz now if you cut that refresh rate down to 60 you get then about 10 hours 9 hours and becomes quite a bit better so if you're someone that prefers battery life over that real fast and smooth 120 hertz definitely do that otherwise I keep it always on 120 hertz after all that is what you're paying for but 90 hertz with this model is a great sweet spot that Xiaomi 12 does not have it's only 60 or 120 hertz so great
we have that in-between option now GPS typical Qualcomm that has been now for years that uh it works well good average signal strength and the accuracy will not be any better than three meters it's just how it is with them it's a restriction that they have and geek bench five scores so not bad at all this is quite a good single core score there that's coming from that snapdragon 8 gen 1.
and this is the internal storage speed so I've got 128 gigabytes of 3.1 here and blazing fast speeds are really good now these are not the highest I have seen but look at those random reads and writes they are super good over 300 megabytes per second so that's not going to bottleneck anything at all now the wildlife score here
Xiaomi 12 pro gets uh close to almost 10 000 and an average frames per second of 56.4 super good so a big step up with that GPU with these smaller light workloads but once it gets a bit heavy yeah things do happen which we'll get on to later on you get well throttling and here look at the GPU score too that we get with antutu so almost a million point score the big jump, of course, is this CPU no sorry GPU the CPU I'm just thinking hasn't really changed that much
from the snapdragon triple eight, it's not really that much faster at all that could get a very similar score there so it's the GPU will gain the performance but later gets hot and it throttles down and becomes pretty much snapdragon 870 level anyway so there's no LTE band 20 with this model
big mistake buying this if you do live in Europe and you need that the global version will have it okay but this is an import version that I got so that's why there's no late band 20 with the modem but I got onto 5g and 5g does at least work for me charge time from 11 to 100 blazing fast only 21 minutes now if you get this model it's about 35 40 minutes to charge it at 67 watts but 120 watts super fast they've also got that new chip in there that helps balance things out make sure
it's not overheating when charging and optimizes the charge rates for it so that's really quick and onto our gaming performance so this is where we do run into a bit of a major problem actually so a game like gen chin impact or just running very stressful other games or demanding GPU benchmarks will rear its ugly head this phone it's big problem so the snapdragon 8 gen 1 will overheat
and this phone will kick you out of a game and display an overheating message after about really depends after sometimes 15 to 20 minutes that will happen overheats kicks you out of a game and I just simply find that completely unacceptable Qualcomm's chip is far too hot it's just like the snapdragon 810 days and I really don't think Xiaomi put in enough copper in this to keep
it cool enough perhaps they wanted to keep the phone nice and slim and to do so they had to well skimp on a bit of copper skimp on a bit of cooling in there and as a result, you want to play those demanding games you can but there's a time limit to it before it starts to cook itself and moving over to cameras now so with the Xiaomi 12 pro here it's the same 32-megapixel front-facing camera as the Xiaomi 12 the smaller flagship from them so we do have a maximum of only
1080p at 30 frames per second right now but you can also use 60. I'm just using 30 because the timeline that I shoot is in 30. so unfortunately I thought we would actually be getting 4k with these front cameras being the fact that they're 32 megapixels now a different sensor but no no
4k 30 or 60 with the front-facing cameras now a lot of other flagships most of them nowadays will have that so Xiaomi is definitely lagging behind the quality I have noticed that these front-facing cameras in bright sunlight tend to overexpose a little bit it can happen quite a bit to some of those changes like right now I look at how it's blowing out the background
completely and look at my face here it's being overexposed so they definitely do need I feel to tweak and optimize these cameras both front and rear I'll swap over to the rear cameras now and just give you a sample of what you can expect from the Xiaomi 12 pro you can see the optical and electronic image stabilization as a walking head is doing an excellent job very smooth looking footage this is 60 frames per second so as they're panning around we should not see any jitter it tends to happen more when you're shooting in 30 frames per second
now the bit rate is still the same as 30 frames per second and I've got to say it they've gone backward with the audio quality because they are now using just the 96 kilobits per second yet again and this is after a big firmware update so I'm really disappointed about that now if I tap here I can zoom not back but I can go forward here and you can go to two times that's
digital but it's still using the main sensors not actually swapping over to that two times digital sensor so apart from the audio bitrate being now 96 instead of 320 kilowatts per second the footage 4k here does look pretty good this is now the two times the optical camera so we can get a bit closer and maintain those details without digital zoom and walking ahead you can see the electronic image stabilization doing a pretty good job to remove the shakes
and the trimmers as I walk along and then the ultra-wide camera this one I find does tend to have a few more stutters when you pan around so with the Xiaomi 12 pro you can shoot 4k 60 frames per second with the ultra-wide with the Xiaomi 12 it's limited that 13-megapixel sensor to just 30 frames per second 4k so this is using a 50-megapixel camera so the end of the story what have we got on our hands here we have a very unpolished phone both of them even
the Xiaomi 12 this one overheats in about nine minutes with stress tests on the GPU which takes about 19 minutes thankfully but I think Xiaomi's reached that point where they're just pumping out so much hardware clearly to me the software team cannot keep up we've got android 12 now we're on a new chipset from Qualcomm admittedly a bit of a disappointment in the chipsets thermal so far
for me at least but I think the team is flooded if they're going to have 20 Xiaomi 12 models how are they going to keep up are they keeping up I don't think they are to me clearly me why 13 is like a beta so far Xiaomi's got time on their hands they can improve things certainly and when the global model comes out I really hope they do turn things around I'm a huge Xiaomi fan been reviewing their phone since me to s the mi2s it's a long time now
and I can see with this phone I think Xiaomi's starting to get a little bit complacent if I dare say it they could have done more with it they really could have done more they've decided they're going to take the path of Samsung and apple maybe and go you know just an incremental A little update it really does feel like this is not that much better in its current state that is
then the meat 11. I personally right now at this moment I would stick with my me 11 or me 11 ultras I would wait and see what's going to happen and because Xiaomi is probably going to release about five different flagship models of this one you know the 12 t series the 12 ultras the 12 x the 12 light wait and see what happens there and I really hope that they can just optimize this and improve it I'm sure they are I'm sure the team's really working hard on it but the
cameras just aren't there those bugs I've seen I'm not feeling it this time around when a theme 11 was out when the Xiaomi 11 came out it certainly was to be a much more impressive device than what I'm feeling here with the 12 pros.
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