Xiaomi 12T Pro Review: Best Value Flagship of 2022?

The Xiaomi 12T Pro review is on the cards for the megapixel count race is still on for rear camera sensors. It has the Samsung HP1 200MP sensor with an f/1.69 aperture lens, an 8MP ultrawide, 2MP macro camera, and a front 20MP camera. It is a cut-out hole punch style, and it’s a flat AMOLED screen with a peak brightness of 900nits. It also supports HDR 10 plus and 120Hz refresh rate, and 480Hz touch sampling rate. So really good screen on this phone. An in-display fingerprint reader, sound from Harman Kardon for the dual speakers, and 120W fast charging. Credibly quick. It just takes under 20 minutes to fully charge this phone.

Xiaomi 12T Pro Review

It’s all powered by the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1, Qualcomm’s latest and greatest, with improved CPU and GPU performance. It’s more efficient, and the battery life should be slightly better. However, the Xiaomi 12T Pro review can help us understand if the latest affordable flagship with a 200MP main sensor is worth buying. It does have a large 5000mAh battery powering it. All plastic frames around the outside are frosted anti-smudge and anti-fingerprint glass on the rear. The Gorilla Glass 5 covers the front.

Xiaomi 12T Pro Unboxing

The Xiaomi 12T Pro unboxing shows a quick start guide, warranty card safety information, and a 120W charger in the box. It’s a little larger than normal, but it charges the phone in record time. It’s under 20 minutes. I’ll give you the exact times later in this Xiaomi 12T Pro review. A USB Type A to Type C cable, a SIM tray tool, and a transparent TPU case is inside the box.

The Design

The 12T Pro has this anti-glare glass backing on it. It does tend to pick up fingerprints a little bit because of the matte coating. Also, it does feel good in the hand. However, the Xiaomi 12T Pro review for design shows a plastic frame around the outside of this phone, so when you’re holding it, it doesn’t feel as good as the 12 Pro or the 12 Series. There is volume up/down and a power button in a good position.

You can easily get to it there, which we do like. 12T Pro smartphone has a 5,000mAh battery, so it’s a little heavy, 205 grams. The thickness is almost 9mm and about 13mm with the camera module. Thus, the cam module sticks out a little bit.

On the rear, the new 200MP sensor has an F 1.69 aperture, and yet again, we see this 8MP ultra-wide and a 2MP macro camera. The Xiaomi 12T Pro specs truly disappoint for the main camera’s secondary ultra-wide and macro lenses. I think they need to ditch this and give us a decent ultra-wide instead of those two, say a 13MP of autofocus or 16MP with a good lens. There is a dual-tone LED flash. So, this main camera does have Optical Image Stabilization. It can be the case that Xiaomi 12T Pro price is lowered using less quality megapixel ultra-wide and depth sensors. Still, we would prefer higher megapixel sensors.

On the top an infrared transmitter, a secondary mic, and a loudspeaker. The speakers are tuned by Harman Kardon, which is good to see. There is a USB Type C port, but it does not support video out. And it’s USB 2 speeds. It needs improvement. I hope that one day Xiaomi will correct this. The Sim tray takes two Nano Sims. A mic and the downwards-firing loudspeaker with a sim tray are at the bottom. The Xiaomi 12T Pro doesn’t bring full waterproofing but it is IP53 rated against dust and light splashes.

The Display

The screen is a 6.67-inch 120Hz CrystalRes AMOLED with HDR 10+, Dolby Vision, 5,000,000:1 contrast ratio, 100% DCI-P3 color gamut, 1200nits peak brightness, and 2712x1220p resolution. It’s flat, and the fingerprint reader is slightly lower than other smartphones. I think it should be a little higher.

The Xiaomi 12T Pro review for the unlocking shows it’s quick and highly responsive. However, the animation makes it look a little slower than it is. It seems to work every single time. Up the top, you can see a cutout for the front-facing camera 20MP, which does not support 4K video, unfortunately. It can be another Xiaomi 12T Pro price cut to make it under US$700.

The touch sampling rate of the screen is 480 Hertz, which is higher than normal than what you normally see. A lot of the time, it’ll be 240 or 360. Thus, the touch response is very good and accurate with the touch, and I haven’t had any issues. Checking the display quality compared with Xiaomi 12T Pro specs on paper, the blacks are deep and clear because it’s an AMOLED screen. I love that it is flat, and it’s got HDR support and Dolby Vision.

Refresh Rate

But there is no, unfortunately, a sweet spot for a 90Hz refresh rate. Therefore, you cannot set it to 90Hz. With the firmware update, Xiaomi could offer us 90Hz. It’s that perfect combination of fluidity and a little bit of battery saving. If you want that, you can adjust the colors under the color scheme.

On the default setting, which is vivid, the colors look fine. But the original color does look a lot more correct. You’ve got adaptive color options. There is blue light, of course, and many other things that display customizations can tweak, including the scaling and font size.

The UI Experience, Bloatware, and Camera 2 API

Briefly checking the UI doing the Xiaomi 12T Pro review, the MIUI 13 running the Android 12 version has 8GB of RAM, and it’s the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 SoC. It is the latest Snapdragon processor and the greatest performance chipset. Thus, everything runs smoothly. As I mentioned before, its fast touch response is working really well, multitasking is good, and I haven’t noticed the task manager being too aggressive with things.

The phone does come with an Android security patch level of July. I hope they can update this model. 12T Pro has the latest firmware at the time of this review, and it is the 256GB storage model we are testing. So, you get a lot of this bloatware Spotify, TickTok, and all sorts of other rubbish you probably don’t want, but it’s there. Why is it there? Well, that’s because Xiaomi’s made deals with these companies. They pay a little bit to have the application on the phone as soon as they turn it on.

Video Streaming

There is Amazon Prime video support. Therefore, it renders in full HD with Netflix and other online video streaming having Full HD support. This time around, camera 2 API supports level 3. So, if you want to use available camera GCAM ports with the 200MP rear camera, you can do so because we’ve got the full level of support. The UFS 3.1 storage of 256GB is very quick to respond. The Xiaomi 12T Pro review for reading/writing speeds shows that these are excellent. The sequential reading speed and the writing, wow, really fast. Random installation of applications is quick and seamless.

Geekbench 5 and AnTuTu Score

The Geekbench 5 score is 1307 for Single-Core and 4226 for Multi-Core. You can run this on your phone to compare. Also, the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset gets over a million points on AnTuTu version 9.4. It does say that it’s not a validated score online. I don’t know why that’s happening. It’s a bit of a glitch. You can see it did get a little hot and lost five percent of battery just from that single test.

The 3D mark stress test runs for 20 minutes and would not complete. It failed at about 10. I think it was 12 minutes when it got overheated. Not good to see this. So, 12T Pro does need to throttle this hot Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 chip a little bit more.

If you play a very demanding game, chances are after about 30 minutes or so, and you might get this message not good to see. We have audio that is showing 96Kbits/s. Still, what is going on with Xiaomi? There was a point where we were getting 320Kbits/s with their Flagship devices. But they’re falling behind again.

Charging and Audio Test

Charging time is blazing fast now. It uses the boost mode with 120W. You can select a little option to speed it up even more, and it only took 17 minutes to go from 9 to 100. Wow, that’s crazy quick. And yes, the power supply was hot. The phone got relatively hot but not as hot as when you game. Letting it run at 120Hz, 12T Pro lasts 11 hours.

Thus, in real-world uses, you’re looking at about seven and a half hours out of the 5,000mAh battery. But mind you that it is where there is good signal strength. That’s using 200 nits of brightness only, and it was running normal light tasks. Hence, if you do any gaming, you’re probably going to half that battery run time, especially when gaming on a brighter screen. Let’s pick an audio test for Xiaomi 12T Pro review. We’ve got the Harman Kardon tuned speakers downwards firing and then up the top. They do sound very good and loud enough. They’re clear, and when I went into YouTube, it automatically turned on Dolby Atmos to help improve the quality.

Gaming Performance

If you’re playing Pub G or a lighter game like Call of Duty, there are no heating issues, and the game runs smooth as silk. Therefore, it is recommended to run heavy games like Genshin on the high settings, not the highest ones. When you drop the settings down a little, it is going to be even smoother, and then you don’t run that risk of overheating. Still, it is unacceptable that any flagship Xiaomi phone has a game overheating problem.

The Camera

Let us do the Xiaomi 12T Pro review for the camera. So, the video quality of the front-facing Vlog footage is just 1080p. We’ve got a 96Kbits/s audio bitrate, sad to see. They need to fix this. However, the rear footage does look promising. You can shoot 4K/30fps, 4K/60fps, and 8K/24fps. It does have decent quality and then the 200MP camera. This new Xiaomi smartphone can take some excellent shots. Comparing the 12T Pro versus the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra and the iPhone 14 Pro Max, the 12T Pro certainly ticks many boxes. There are a lot of areas that this phone performs better.

 

Performance Overview

A great screen, it’s very bright good AMOLED, fingerprint reader built-in, we have decent performance. It is beyond decent, in fact, very fast and snappy fluid. It’s great. However, if you play some demanding games like Genshin Impact at top settings with 60fps and play for longer standard periods, you may be in for a bit of a surprise. Here the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 will overheat. It has been overheating in the Xiaomi 12T Pro review going through demanding tests, and it cannot complete the 3D map stress test. Xiaomi needs to issue a firmware update to just throttle that chip down a lot more, similar to what other manufacturers are doing, like Samsung.

They end up throttling these chips a lot, but at least you can still game. You’re losing some of the performance, but it won’t boot you out of a game. The phone charges in a blazing fast time, around 16-17 minutes to fully charge. It is nothing short of amazing. Yes, it gets hot, but many different sensors control it. They’re checking the thermals of the battery life. Thus, it is safe. The 200MP main camera surely excels in photography and vlog video recordings. Surely, it is better than the 108MP or other main sensors. You can get a lot of details in the photos.

Xiaomi 12T Pro Specs

Pros:

• A high-performance 200MP Triple AI rear camera setup.
• 120W fast charging for the 5,000mAh battery.
• 6.67-inch AMOLED with 120Hz AdaptiveSync refresh rate, HDR 10+, and Dolby Vision.
• Dolby Atmos and Hi-Res audio with Harman Kardon tuned dual speakers.
• Affordable price.
• IR Blaster. 
• Solid build and good quality finish.

Cons:

• The phone can get hot at the rear when performing heavy tasks or games for 30 minutes or so.
• The main camera module has mid-level 8MP ultra-wide and 2MP macro sensors.
• Poor audio bitrate in video recordings.
• USB 2.0 Type C port with no video out support.

Price and Availability

The Xiaomi 12T Pro price for the early bird sale starts at US$619 for the 8GB/128GB if you use all the store coupons at AliExpress. Normally, it will cost around US$700. You can buy the 8GB/256GB for US$750, and the 12GB/256GB model costs around US$800.

The Verdict

DealsNowToday.com Rating: 4.7/5

Price: $650

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