last year xiaomi was the first smartphone company to release a new phone and this year was no difference with the new xiaomi 12 series devices going on sale new year’s eve and while last year xiaomi debuted their 11 series with just one model this year they announced three the xiaomi 12x xiaomi 12 and most notably this the xiaomi 12 pro which packs a new ltpo display triple 50 megapixel camera setup 4 nanometer run snapdragon 8gen1 chipsets 50 watt wireless charging 120 watt wired charging and everything you could think of in the box with all that said it’s time to deep dive into my extremely detailed full review of the xiaomi 12 pro [Music] the xiaomi 12 pro comes in four different color variants you can pick it up in a blue a pink which is actually labeled purple a black all of which are frosted glass or the version that i have which is green and it is indeed vegan leather doesn’t quite look green it looks more grayish than greenish to me but i kind of like the elegant subtle style of it nevertheless slapping on that case which comes included in the box not many phones do that these days it is a silicon case and it’s not the classiest around but it’s something to use on day one though if you do pick up the vegan leather variants i don’t suggest you use it since it feels so darn good on the top of your finger we are of course paired with a 4 600 milliamp hour battery we have 120 watt wide charging this time around which can supposedly charge within 18 minutes which we’re gonna test out right now and before we get going with it we
do have a boost charging speed option over here if the screen looks dim it’s because i have it set to auto brightness i’ve also disabled optimized charging and we’re starting things off at one percent because xiaomi devices at zero percent take a good two or three minutes to actually boot up from zero for some strange reason nevertheless kickstarting things off over here making sure we set to one percent you can see that wonderful 120 watt charging symbol on the device that animation at the bottom left we do have a wattage meter and it’s not really hitting anything past 100 watts we reached 50 in just six minutes and 49 seconds which is great 12 minutes and nine seconds to get to 80 which is absolutely fantastic trickling off all the way to 100 we didn’t see 120 watts on that charging watt meter on the left-hand side but we reached 100 in just 17 minutes and 32 seconds but it doesn’t really seem like that new charging chip did much to aid in temperature since it gained 28.6 degrees in celsius other than the new charging chip we do have a new mainstream chip that being qualcomm’s latest four nanometer run snapdragon 8 gen1 chipsets also
have a new vapor chamber on board as well as lpddr5 ram ufs 3.1 storage but unfortunately there is no ip68 dusting water resistance certification like we saw on the xiaomi mi 11 pro i really thought this was going to be a new standard for xiaomi nevertheless we are still treated to that wonderful gorilla glass invictus display we do have an aluminum frame wrapping around the device as well as a gorilla glass back or a vegan leather back whichever one you decide to pick up just bear in mind that the vegan leather is a tad bit thicker though it is a tad lighter too and arguably the star of the show is the triple 15 megapixel setup that being an ultrawide main and telephoto the ultra wide and telephoto both using the same sensor that being a iso cell jn1 sensor and the main sensor treated to the world’s first smartphone running a sony imax 707 sensor which is the only lens over here which supports optical image stabilization and hopping straight into the 50 megapixel native ultra wide shot looks pretty good been down 12.5 megapixels four to one biting looks even better 50 megapixel main down to the four to one bin looks even better thanks to ai of course 50 megapixel telephoto using two times optical zoom over here and bending down for two times optical zoom once again you guessed it looks even better five
times digital zoom over here doesn’t look too bad ten times looks alright 20 times is still bearable i’ve seen worse out there this is the max zoom that we can actually do backtracking to the 50 megapixel ultrawide bending down the ultrawide over here of this leg i must say the ultrawide looks really good but it’s not the widest that i’ve seen around the main looks fantastic it does look better with it bend down but you’ve also got to remember that it’s kind of a gloomy day in shanghai at the moment so things don’t look quite eye poppy and color poppy that is but it still seems to use artificial intelligence to get all the colors just right we do have a portrait mode over here which actually zooms in by two times using that telephoto lens optically of course and shooting of this little xiaomi character over here is pretty much perfect edge detection for him we can also use a full body mode though this uses the main sensor for portrait mode still looks pretty good and though we’ve seen macro modes on xiaomi devices even macro lenses for some strange reason there’s no macro mode around this time around we do have clone mode which does a decent job in clone mode for video as well though capped at 720p and 30fps it pretty much clones as it says we have bokeh mode as well as magic zoom mode which uses two lenses pretty nifty if you ask me and we do have 720p 30fps time freeze mode and it’s um it’s still in the works i guess you could say parallel world mode shot at 1080p 30fps
this is one of the coolest features i’ve ever seen on a device not to mention this a freeze frame mode i didn’t have someone to work with but that lady seemed to do the job just right aka 24 fps is the highest res that we have 4k 60 fps is the smoothest frame rate that we have and ultrawide can do 4k 60 as well all three of which i just showed you using the movie frame mode switching to regular mode over here ultra wide 4k 60fps nice and smooth super clear over here and of course we also have 4k 60 frames per second using the main camera which looks even better than the ultrawide sensor since we’re using that imx 707 sensor 8k 24fps without the movie frame looks fantastic though i really wish we could get ak 60 fps hopefully this changes going forward steady video mode off now it is on but it seems to be zooming in by two times and now steady video pro mode seems to be going to ultrawide it’s not the steadiest video i’ve seen around but it does the job 8k 24 fps at night doesn’t look the best it’s a bit jittery but in all fairness it’s very bright and super super clear moving to 4k 60 is when you can see it’s not bright but it is extremely clear super detailed as well but it’s not that bright but it’s still bright enough i guess you could say he has 4k 30 fps as soon as you drop down the frame rate of course the thing gets a lot brighter the video footage that you are filming at it does a decent job as
you can see with 4k 60 fps ultrawide once again it looks like it’s night and it is night it’s 10 pm when i recorded this video so 30 fps looks even better but i would stick to 60 and i don’t say that very often because 60 is usually way too dark at night but we do have a night video mode option of course capping things at 30 fps over here ultrawide at night looks okay and yes the new snapdragon chipset does apparently boast five times better night photography and it seems to do an absolutely fantastic job with ultra wide and with the main sensor when it comes to optical zoom it looks okay though you really have to keep your hand steady as you can see with five times digital over here a little bit of a shaky hand gives you a pretty bad image 10 times digital zoom is the actual max zoom that we can use for night mode we can still zoom to 20 times at night but not with night mode it looks okay here is an ultra wide again now we gonna zoom into that moon
over there super moon mode is only available from five time so we use night mode all the way up to five times now flicking to super moon zoom over here it looks it looks okay it looks a bit artificial if you ask me the sky looks a bit too black 20 times is the max that you can do with super moon zoom and we do have night mode photography for close-up subjects which it looks alright too i guess you could kind of say that the camera system of this device is more than on par with other flagships around we have a power button volume rock on the right hand side as well as a dual sim 5g standby tray at the bottom no expandable storage so we do have a water resistant seal even though there is no ip certification unfortunately usb 2.0 speeds at the bottom first dual speaker at the bottom second deal speaker at the top paired by homocotton and software by dolby atmos and we still have an io blaster but unfortunately no headphone jack we do have a 26 millimeter selfie camera and this time around it is 32 megapixels up from last year’s 20 megapixels and it does a pretty fantastic job better than other phones i’ve seen out there with 60 megapixel cams and honestly the portrait mode
looks almost near perfect what’s up guys this is tech nick and today i’m currently out and about testing out the photos and videos on the brand new xiaomi 12 pro at the current point in time we are testing out the selfie video on the xiaomi 12 pro it is capped at 1080p and 60fps unfortunately even though it is a flagship of 2022 there is no 4k selfie video recording of course there’s 4k at the back but nothing for the selfie but 60fps at 1080p is still pretty decent if you ask me 4k would be nice nevertheless let me know what you guys think of the audio and video quality when recording using the selfie cam on the brand new xiaomi 12 pro while we are capped at 1080p 60fps we can use that 1080p 60fps using a movie frame which is pretty cool we also have bokeh portrait video using the movieframe though capped at 720p and 30fps the new snapdragon chipsets can actually do cinematic video being portrait video at 4k oh xiaomi have just completely neglected that 1080p 60fps video at nights it’s pretty much pitch black you have to use 30fps at night if you do kind of want to see yourself and though we do have bokeh portrait that we can use at night there is no night mode option for any of the selfie video options but it looks okay night mode off using the selfie cam is i’ve seen a lot better night mode on i’ve seen a lot better and portrait mode at night is arguable and flash on is the only option you have for portrait mode which looks pretty terrible but the selfie cam
during the day is absolutely fantastic though i wish there was a 4k video option nevertheless moving on to miui 13 kickstarting things off with and always on display which you can see over there and using our fingerprint sensory unfortunately is not ultrasonic but it is an optical sensor and it does get the job done we have loads of different always on display options and we have a couple new wallpapers as you can see over there this looks pretty fantastic if you ask me thanks to beauty of science as you can see over here beauty of science i’ve actually seen beauty of science on oppo devices if i’m not mistaken there is a bunch of them that you can choose from this one looks absolutely stunning if you ask me probably my favorite wallpaper of all time and as soon as you open up your device looking at that wallpaper on your home screen looks fantastic we have a couple different molten glass wallpapers which is also new they look okay they’re not up my alley though and we still have our super wallpapers the five of them that we saw last year though they say stay tuned for new releases i thought this would come with me or 13 out of the box i guess i was wrong i still like the geometry one and unlocking using face unlock works pretty well but unfortunately that camera that actually recognizes your face for face unlock is not hidden under the display like we saw on the xiaomi mix 4.
Nevertheless that display is definitely something new and better than the mix force 2 it is a wqhd plus 6.73 inch ltpo 2.0 amino 20×9 aspect ratio curved display it is an e5 amoled panel which is supposedly 25 more efficient than last year’s e4 panel and yes it is not quad curved thank goodness i hated the curves at the top and the bottom of last year’s xiaomi mi 11 series we are treated to 1.07 billion colors it is of course a 10 bit display not to mention this is one of the brightest displays i have ever seen reaching a max peak minutes of 1500. but unfortunately the screen to body ratio has actually reduced and like i mentioned earlier there’s no under display selfie cam of course we do have a wqhd plus 1440p resolution screen with a crazy high pixels per inch rate ltpo 2.0 display which can supposedly refresh from between one to 120 hertz but in my testings i’ve only really ever seen 60 90 120 doesn’t really get to as low as 10 never mind one fps but we do have brightness levels of course something standard that you see sunlight mode as well as reading mode which makes your phone kind of look like a kindle device we also have a bunch of different advanced settings in terms of colors adaptive colors as well as a vivid saturated or original color loads of things you can play around with including super resolution ar image enhancement ai hdr enhancement and memc which allows for frame skipping and video as well as the old school dark mode which you can schedule and yes you can have it set to always on as well as to a bunch of third-party applications and it
does affect your wallpaper with the google widgets too which is pretty nifty if you ask me of course we can use it in third party apps such as instagram over here and all first party apps as well including the settings app and switching back over to light mode which is my preferred one we are treated to miui 13 skinned of android 12 though it doesn’t really seem like android 12 and it doesn’t really seem like a brand new refreshed me why 13 software kind of like a miui 12.6 or miui 12.8.5.1 of course we have google services and we have a couple new features including widgets though it’s only really targeted to chinese users and if you want to go to your normal widgets it can take quite a bit of time to get to we can use split screen of course like we’ve seen on android phones for years now and we can also use mini windows but we can’t use it with many apps including first party apps such as calculator i can use it on the notes app though which works pretty well and you can fling it around your screen pop it in the top right corner and talking about the notes the haptics are absolutely phenomenal on this phone right up there with the best of the best as well as these speakers since we are paired with two speakers one at the top one at the bottom including homocotton and dolby atmos software so how does it sound against two other top dog smartphones hello we just happen to be passing by what are you cooking smells good now we do still have game turbo which is a game overlay
unfortunately no fps can’t say included though you can enable it within the developer options you can also bring up some shortcuts to apps and we’re going to be maxing out the settings over here for ganshin impact starting up as i mentioned fps cancer in the developer options only on xiaomi devices and running games and impact on the highest possible graphics setting remember the game is capped at 60fps so even though the phone can boost all the way up to 120 fps we’re kept at 60 but the strange thing is we’re only reaching between 26 and 54 frames per second whereas the motorola hx30 that has the same chipset inside it that being the snapdragon 8gen1 was sitting way above that in terms of min and max and the same goes for bullet force but bullet force has an unlimited fps cap and the xiaomi can reach up to 122 fps while the motorola could reach up to 128 but you’ve got to bear in mind that that has 144hz display when it comes to real racing while the motorola did make use of that unlimited fps cap the xiaomi 12 pro seems to be capping at 60 hopefully this does get fixed with future software updates because you really want a game on 120 fps when you actually have 120hz display talking about the chipset however of course we have that new snapdragon 8gen1 so what does that mean for benchmarks well we’re going to kickstart things off with checking out the battery but before we do that click on performance mode so that we can
get through all these benchmarks with it enabled check out the percentage at the start which is 75 as was the temperature and we’re gonna see how much temperature has gained as well as how much the battery has drained in terms of percent and milliamp hours per minute drainage we are running antutu over here into two version nine to test our gpu and cpu and now moving on to geekbench version five to test that only cpu and three mark wildlife we do in the standard wildlife since we’ve done wildlife extreme in my recent speed test make sure you check that out and going into battery drain over here it drained by crazy 11 giving us a 33.73 milliamp hour per minute drainage which is actually worse than the crazy high 31.25 on the motorola aj x30 and in terms of temperature it gained 26.7 degrees in celsius whereas the motorola gained 27.5 which was above the xiaomi but that kind of gives us an idea that this is not really about the phone but more about the chipset meaning that qualcomm have not really kept things cooler this time around but when it comes to scores the xiaomi 12 pro did incredible with just shy of a million points beating it though was the motorola ajx30 however the motorola aj30 was beat by the xiaomi 12 pro in my initial unboxing getting a score of 1 million 7 512 points which is the highest i have ever seen but for some strange reason i could not
replicate that this time around and when it comes to geekbench though we had a pretty decent single and multi-core score it was beat by its older cousin the xiaomi mix 4 running last year’s snapdragon 8 plus chipsets in the single core department and when it comes to 3dmark wildlife the xiaomi 12 pro while it got an incredible fps of 55.6 was beat by the iphone 13 pro max’s a15 bionic chip and of course the new king motorola aj30 though the xiaomi did still do incredibly well beating the pixel 6 pro its older generation xiaomi the mix 4 as well as the samsung galaxy s21 ultra but the s22 ultra is just around the corner just saying the xiaomi 12 pro is one of the most attractive smartphones i have ever set my eyes on thanks to its stunning green vegan leather backplate even if it’s more of a gray than a green from the elegant xiaomi logo to the revised camera module i can safely say that this is the classiest xiaomi device i have ever hulled inside that new camera bump sets three more than capable 50 megapixel sensors with the star of the show of course being that new sony imx 707 main sensor which takes incredible photos and videos in all different lighting conditions sitting under that huge main lens is two equally capable iso cell jn1 sensors which take fantastic ultra wide shots though not the widest around and superb optical zoom shots though the absence of a periscope lens is a bit disheartening not to mention the lack of 4k video from the selfie cam the selfie camera itself while taking great photos is not hidden underneath the display like its cousin the mix 4.
Once in the phone we are treated to new software that is said to focus more on optimizations rather than new features and while it does feel a tad more optimized i feel that a new generation of miui would have benefited with a fresh new look powering the device is the new 4 nanometer run snapdragon 8gen1 chipset which pushes loads of pixels through the new wqhd plus ltpo 2.0 display and while the new dynamic refresh rate is nice to see it’s not very adaptive and qualcomm’s new ai powered sampling doesn’t seem to have been used correctly leaving us with only average gaming performance despite not having an under display selfie camera this is one of the best displays i have ever seen it’s extremely colorful very bright and has even broken records on displaymates not to mention they have ditched the quad curves which i am more than pleased about the battery is unfortunately smaller than last year’s m11 pro and while wireless charging has dropped to 50 watts old-fashioned wired charging has now been increased to 120 watts which allows the phone to be topped up in under 18 minutes with all that said and done i still feel like something is missing maybe it’s the lack of water resistance rating or an under display selfie camera or maybe just maybe smartphones are starting to get a bit boring nevertheless the xiaomi 12 pro is still a fantastic smartphone that checks almost all the right boxes making it an incredible device to kickstart the year off with this is tech nick and i’ll catch you in the next one
Read More: Review Realme GT 2 Pro: So Close!
