Hands on: Xiaomi 12 Pro Review
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First Impressions
The Xiaomi 12 Pro is a flagship that has a lot to live up to going by previous models in the series, but we’ve been very impressed by what we’ve seen so far.
Key Features
Introduction
Xiaomi is a company famous for bringing top end innovations to match key contenders like Samsung’s Galaxy-range, to a slightly more affordable price point. The Xiaomi 12 Pro continues this trend as the firms’ latest flagship.
But with the?Galaxy S22 Ultra ?having blown us away earlier this year you may wonder is Xiaomi’s latest flagship a true contender for the crown of?best Android phone ? Here’s what we made of it after some hands-on time with the new Xiaomi 12 Pro.
Price and Availability
The Xiaomi 12 Pro has a starting price of $999 (~￡765) for the 8GB RAM and 256GB storage version, while there will also be an option with 12GB of RAM as well.
The Pro version and the standard Xiaomi 12 will be available to buy in the UK starting from this April, with more details soon to follow.
Design and Screen
The Xiaomi 12 Pro has an attractively understated design. The rounded edges and smooth matte finish helps it to feel very comfortable in the hand – and what’s more it doesn’t pick up the fingerprints that its glossy rivals are very prone to doing. The camera module does protrude a little from the back , but not obnoxiously so, and overall the impression that you get is one of an attractive device that doesn’t feel the need to shout about itself.
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Arguably, that’s because the performance itself can do enough shouting all on its own, and that’s certainly the case for the screen. The large 6.73-inch?LTPO ?AMOLED ?panel has a stunning WQHD+ resolution (that’s 3200 x 1440p), a maximum refresh rate of 120Hz, and a maximum brightness of 1,500?nits . The?HDR10+ ?support and?Dolby Vision ?should make it ideal for watching videos or streaming series, while the 480Hz touch sampling rate should make it responsive enough for playing games to a high level as well.
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When using this screen, you’re thoroughly aware of this superior performance, with scrolling being very smooth, shapes being very sharp, and the display being as bright as you’d like. My preference is also for a flat screen, rather than one like this that curves slightly at the sides – but it’s undeniable that you’ll have a blast watching videos or playing games on this display. I’ll be curious to see how it performs with more through use and during our lab tests, where we’ll check its actual peak brightness and color accuracy using a colorometer.
Camera
The Xiaomi 12 Pro offers three 50-megapixel sensors in its rear camera set-up, one being a wide angle, one ultrawide, and then a telephoto snapper with 2x optical zoom.
This evidently seems to promise both a high degree of competence regardless of how you’d like to shoot your subject. From what I’ve tried so far, the cameras do look to be good, providing natural-looking shots in favourable daylight conditions across the range of these sensors. But I haven’t had a chance to test all the camera’s modes or see how it performs in low light, so I’ll have reserve judgement on how it compares to key rivals, such as the?Pixel 6 Pro ?and S22 Ultra for now.
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Performance
The Xiaomi 12 Pro runs on Qualcomm’s top mobile chipset, the?Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 . With this processor on board, you should feel confident you’ll get very strong performance. Based on my experience using other phones powered by the chop, whether you’re just doing daily undemanding tasks across a variety of apps, or putting it through its paces on an intensive mobile game it should be more than fast enough. In the brief time we’ve had it to hand, we have not encountered any hiccups at all.
The Android 12 software on this handset has the?MIUI 13 ?skin, and although it comes with a fair amount of pre-installed apps that you might not really have need of, I haven’t found this user interface to be all that intrusive. More encouraging is the fact that Xiaomi has guaranteed at least 3 Android OS updates and 4 years of security patches with this device, which is raising the bar compared to some other Android manufacturers.
Battery
The battery is fairly large, at 4600mAh capacity, but we’ve not yet had the chance to really see how it stacks up when running through benchmark tests or standard daily usage; sometimes specifications like these can somewhat flatter to deceive.
The fast-charging specs look eminently impressive, with this device capable of insanely speedy 120W charging when its wired up, and still-striking 50W fast-charging when its sitting on a wireless Qi pad. These are some of the best charging rates we’ve seen on a smartphone, so we can’t wait to try them out in action to see whether this handset really can be fully charged in just 18 minutes as the manufacturer suggests.
Early Impressions
From what we’ve seen so far, the Xiaomi 12 Pro looks like a very tempting device. Not only is its starting price lower than key rivals such as the?Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus , but it seems to perform well across all the key metrics that we’ve briefly tried out, from the triple camera sensor to the lush screen, to the processing power. Stay tuned for our full review to see whether this phone could be the go-to Android smartphone of 2022.
Jargon buster
mAh
An abbreviation for milliampere-hour and a way to express the capacity of batteries, especially smaller ones in phones. In most cases the higher the mAh, the longer the battery will last but this isn’t always the case.
OLED
Organic Light Emitting Diode is panel technology that allows each individual pixel to produce light rather than relying on a backlight. This enables the screen to accurately display blacks by turning off the pixel, resulting in improved contrast compared to conventional LCD panels.
Dolby Vision
Dolby Vision is a variant of HDR, adding a layer of dynamic metadata to the core HDR signal. This dynamic metadata carries scene-by-scene (or frame-by-frame) instructions from content creators on how a TV should present the images to improve everything from brightness to contrast, detailing and colour reproduction.
HDR10+
HDR10+ is a HDR variant created by 20th Century Fox, Panasonic and Samsung as a free to use, open platform alternative to Dolby Vision. Like Dolby Vision, it adds dynamic metadata on top of the core HDR10 signal that tells a TV how it should adjust the brightness, colours and contrast of content for the most optimal picture quality.