So I have reviewed the Xiaomi 12. make sure you catch my video of that one it's in the channel the
full in-depth review but now it is time for the larger model xiaomi's 12 pro so this has a 6.73
inch screen which is an ltpo 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 megapixel 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 vectus 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 ufs 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 then 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 having like
five or four or useless cameras that you wouldn't really use so they do have the main camera 50
megapixel 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 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 out come 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 ir 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 xiaomi which was great and they're made out of metal they do feel really good those buttons
and then moving over to our display this is a ltpo 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 that'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 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 ltpo versus what we had before
you're not really going to see it in 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 look at that look at that 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 one that's pretty poor too
is even twitter that i've been running on this i do find that it's sometimes it has quite a bit
of stutter 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 miui 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 pro here's a sample at both of them at hundred percent volume
so this was the last patch that came through which they do claim is a miui 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 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 geekbench five score 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 ufs 3.1 here
and blazing fast speeds 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 here 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 ltu 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 in order 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 my
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 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 jutter 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
backwards 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 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 end of 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 this 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 my channel's been reviewing their phone since the 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
little update it really does feel like this is not that much better in its current state that is
than the meat 11. i personally right now in this moment i would stick with my me 11 or me 11 ultra
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
ultra 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 the me
11 was out when the xiaomi 11 came out it certainly was to me a much more impressive
device than what i'm feeling here with the 12 pro so thank you so much for watching my
detailed super opinionated review here of the xiaomi 12 pro as a big xiaomi fan that i am