This phone has been out for a while now it's the xiaomi 12x i've reviewed all of the other xiaomi
phones in the xiaomi 12 series that's the 12 pro which i have right here the chinese and global
model and also the xiaomi 12 but this model i'm quite interested in because it's powered by the
snapdragon 870 which i think is still an excellent chipset and it's a more smaller compact phone
so the screen on this one 120 hertz refresh rate it has a cutout in the front of it there for a
front-facing camera which is a 32 megapixel camera rear main camera is 50 megapixels 13 megapixel
ultra wide so we don't have the 50 megapixel ultrawide like get with the pro model uh but
it's still an okay camera it's not bad and then a 5 megapixel macro so the battery capacity
of this one is 4 500 milliamp hours it has 67 watt charging and over all my time using it i
actually like the xiaomi 12x here more than the 12 pro and definitely more than the xiaomi 12.
and just to point out that this review unit here i did get from a company called
heka they sent this out to me so thank you so much for doing that otherwise i would not be
reviewing the xiaomi 12x included with the box of the xiaomi 12x we do have our charger 67 watts it
takes 41 minutes with my testing we get this a type a to type c cable and then a tpu case
sim tray tool so that case is a clear style one very standard there from xiaomi and we do have
a little bit of paperwork so we've got the quick start guide safety information and our warranty
card this phone has an excellent build quality and because it's a smaller 6.28 inches it only
weighs 176 grams so we have curved glass here on the rear and it's gorilla glass victus that they
are using with this particular model thickness is 8.2 millimeters on the sides and we do have
metal volume up and down and power button curved front screen so in hand it makes it a little bit
more comfortable i can get easy access to those power buttons the volume button there and an
instagram screen fingerprint reader so just tapping it there it unlocks quite quick but
the animation can sometimes make it look a little slower than what it really is now the location of
that in-screen fingerprint reader i wish it was about here not down there which i find sometimes
a little bit awkward to get to so with the cameras on the back here we do have a 50 megapixel main
camera 13 megapixel ultra wide and 5 megapixel which has autofocus that is for macro shots dual
tone led flash and the color when you reflect it in certain light it goes from blue to almost
looking like a light purple at times our cutout front facing camera is 32 megapixels so that's
the same as the larger 12 pro model and the 12. the frame on this phone looks great feels great
it's got rounded edges to it we've got our speaker here now these speakers are tuned by harman kardon
microphone ir transmitter and then down the bottom type c port microphone sim tray takes two nano
sims and then the other speaker so i'll give you a sample later on of those speakers you can see
the antenna lines the frame has a nice curve to it it's a metal frame around it alloy and it's
really high quality it does feel great size wise this is what it looks like next to an s22 ultra
and a xiaomi 12 pro you can see it's quite a bit smaller that 6.28 inches is very comfortable and
i do like it so next to the larger 12 pro look at the difference there it's just much better to hold
more compact and it's quite refreshing to finally have a smaller phone of this size when everything
nowadays seems to be 6.7 inches and over now this phone has an excellent amoled screen 6.28 inches
as i mentioned before so nice compact small size but it doesn't compromise compared to the larger
6.67 or 6.7 oversized screens we still get pretty much a flagship quality screen in this it is okay
so brightness does peek out at well they claim over a thousand nits i'm able to measure up to
almost 800 so that is great there is dc dimming so anti-flicker mode it is there but it only works
at 60 hertz you can see when i want to enable it now it's giving me that little
pop-up to tell me that hey it's only going to drop the resolution sorry the refresh rate down to 60
hertz now so if i put that back on 120 which i prefer because it's very fluid and smooth then
you may see a little bit of banding come through but it doesn't actually seem to be too bad with
this particular panel so we do have here the color schemes you can adjust the color profiles
there the white balance can also be adjusted and touch is working great on this phone no problems
at all with it it's really really good i just cannot complain about how the responses will
touch and gestures work excellent great too no problems i'll just show you some real world images
that the screen because it is curved on the edges you do see a bit of color shifting but it's very
minimal overall this is a top quality panel that xiaomi went with in the 12x
the xiaomi 12x does run miui 13. it's had a few updates now and it is very fluid and
smooth so i am on the latest patch at the time of this review we've got a security patch there from
february still we're in may so that needs to be updated i hope that's going to come through soon
so it is quite good with the animations they've definitely improved upon things and maybe it's
to do with their experience with the snapdragon 870s a little bit better than the eight gen one
i don't know but it feels smoother and better actually than the larger xiaomi 12 pro with the
more potent chipset which doesn't really make sense the gestures as mentioned do work really
well multitasking is very smooth and quick swapping between our applications the only
complaint that i have is occasionally if it's been sitting there for a while i go to unlock the phone
it will sometimes show this little spinning icon in the middle before i get all of my icons showing
up so there's that moment of lag which is a little bit annoying they need to address that i do think
abstract i do have that enabled you don't have to use it you can just have
everything all in one here but i prefer the app store so good performance miui 13
running here a lot better than what i've been experiencing with other xiaomi phones however
i still do have this one big criticism of miui and that is the amount of bloatware that they put
on these phones it's getting ridiculous it is almost up to three gigabytes worth of bloat now
so a lot of games a lot of junk so they make these deals with these brands to have these applications
already pre-installed on their phones and they get money out of it and apparently that's because
they're supposed to be passing on savings to us but i think you pay now for this phone anyway it
shouldn't be full of bloat very easy to uninstall it all you can just go into the settings manage
applications and then uninstall and go along and tick them all so it only takes a few minutes
but we shouldn't have to do this it shouldn't have all this extra junk that's on i mean look
at it all and as mentioned like it's almost three gigabytes worth okay so charge time here it didn't
come out correct i didn't want to time it properly here the antutu app so i mentioned before it took
me 41 minutes i think officially they say it's 39 and this time around it was actually this was from
three percent to 100 took took 46 minutes now 46 minutes for a 67 watt charger that's actually not
bad if it's under an hour i am happy i think it's very good performance so the scores here uh okay
yes a little off now from what the snapdragon 8 gen 1 can do but don't be fooled by synthetic
benchmarks because the snapdragon 8gen1 throttles a lot this chip the 870 i think is a very good
chip it barely throttles it doesn't throttle down that much at all it's doesn't generate as much
heat it's a great chip and still in 2022 it's fantastic so that before was the balance mode
that's on the performance mode it did up the cpu score a little bit but again synthetic benchmarks
um i wouldn't worry too much about them i'll get onto gaming performance later on oh and you can
see it did go up almost 12 degrees though which is quite a bit battery life here so 12 hours and 47
minutes is the fixed battery life test that i do run on these phones at 200 nits brightness it's a
good result but realistically you're looking about eight hours seven and a half hours of screen on
time running at 120 hertz which is pretty good actually considering it's a four thousand five
hundred milliamp hour battery and a smaller phone here that's as good as other phones that have five
thousand milliamp hour batteries this phone does have a level three here of camera two api support
so that means gcam ports and open camera is going to work with full access to everything which is
great you do not need to have root access for that and white vine level one security level
one cert is there present good and that means netflix yes isn't full hd but amazon prime video
is not that is in standard definition according to the bit rate that it does show me with the app and
we have gps that works pretty well this is typical qualcomm it's going to have top out the accuracy
at three meters then what about our speakers well they sound worse than the xiaomi 12 pro and the 12
x before i get onto the comparison of these two speakers we know they're harman kardon tuned but
what about type c 2 3.5 audio quality what is that like it's actually very good i've had no problems
with it voice call quality is good as well haptics on this feel fine and i'll test out first the
12 pro then the 12 x and we'll listen to which one is best both of them will be at 100 volume
all right i did not expect that that the smaller phone is better those speakers sound
richer have a little bit more bass than the larger more powerful xiaomi 12 pro how does it game so
the snapdragon at 870 is still a very good chip even in 2029 it's a cooler running chip
than the snapdragon triple eight or the eight gen one and it will not throttle as much too when it
plays a game like this which is gen chain impact i get a steady around 40 42 43 frames per second
highest possible visuals here at 60 frames per second and it continues to deliver that
steady frame rate which is great it's it's not fluctuating as much as those hotter chipsets and
the more modern qualcomm chips do which is not really what you want so still an excellent chip
don't worry about it not being able to play games because it will still be able to play every single
game out there with really good frame rates so what i'm going to do now is game for about 40 to
an hour or so 40 minutes to an hour and we'll see just how hot
is the smaller xiaomi 12x going to get it has been now just over 40 minutes and i've seen a couple of
frame dips and it's getting warm i can feel it has definitely heated up a little bit the phone but it
doesn't seem to be getting any hotter so let's take a look at those temperatures here now so
we are looking at 40 almost 41 degrees that's on the front of the screen and the back of it that is
a little cooler here around 36 there was the maximum just near where the camera is okay 38
so it is heating up it is getting warm but these temperatures for modern phones and powerful phones
aren't actually too bad the snapdragon 870s as i mentioned is a lot cooler than the triple eight
or the eight gen one rear main camera video now so this is 4k 30 we get 4k 60 and 8k
now you can use the digital zoom to go right back into the ultra wide which i'm using now
and all electronic with the ultra wide but we do get optical with the main camera so you can see
it swap over that is now 1.1 times digital zoom and two times right there i wouldn't
really go over this because it doesn't look that great now the stabilization of that main camera
i'm just going to demonstrate it i'm going to walk here and there's the light jog sideways
you can see it's not actually too bad here now occasionally i do see a few jutters when i pan
around especially when using that 13 megapixel ultra wide and this is very typical of xiaomi with
their cameras and video just an android in general we tend to get those stutters that come through
the juddering which is a little annoying but overall i do like the video performance here
for 4k 30. and our front-facing camera here typical xiaomi fashion there is no 4k option
has electronic image stabilization this is my arm out at the maximum there i do notice a bit
of overexposing here when you are in the sun now the audio bit rate is good 320 kilobits per second
now this is i think one of the best more compact phones that you can get it's got the build quality
the fast ui performance 120 hertz battery life is not too bad around seven to seven and a half hours
of on-screen time 120 hertz that's me going easy on it too by the way so a lower brightness and no
gaming mostly just social media there with it it has a great main camera the ultra wide is not too
bad video performance 4k does have a 320 kilobits per second audio bit rate kilobit per second and
with this model the global it's just 96 for some reason so of course xiaomi is going to have to
fix that the main factors of why i like the xiaomi 12x more than the bigger 12 pro is just that that
it's smaller more compact yet it still has very good performance the snapdragon 870 i think is a
great chipset and when you game for long extended periods on the xiaomi 12 pro it throttles a lot
and the performance is almost about the same now it gets up to just over 40 degrees when
you gain quite a bit on it for extended periods 42 41 degrees whereas this at least the chinese
version of the 12 pro hit a really hot 52 degrees celsius so that just shows you how
hot that qualcomm snapdragon 8gen1 is compared to the older but still super good in my books 870 so
i think it's the phone to go for out of the 12 series so far if you don't want to spend the
money you're not fussed about 120 watt charging and you need that great small compact size
with an excellent build quality so thank you so much for watching my review here of xiaomi's 12x