So Xiaomi's new 12 series is out we have the 12 pro the 12 x which I don't currently have and then this model just the 12. now the 12 is a 6.2 8 inch model compact flagship smaller very comfortable size in screen fingerprint reader 120 hertz screen it is an amoled screen over 1000 nits of brightness we've got a 50 megapixel camera on the rear 13 megapixel ultrawide 5 megapixel macro spec wise looks really good powered by the new snapdragon 8 gen 1 from qualcomm latest and greatest 4 nanometers but as i discovered in using this and you'll see later on in the review that it has a bit of a serious problem and it's just like the snapdragon 810 days unfortunately now just to point out before we get started here that this is an import model okay it's meant for the chinese domestic market and we are still waiting for the global release at the time of this video as a result there is no lte band 20 on this so yes i did buy and import this one i used a company called trading shenzhen they are very good i've used them for a long time much better than those dodgy aliexpress sellers that can be very hit and miss so inside the box you'll find a clear tpu case we get a type a to type c cable our charge is watts it will take about 38 minutes and then you do get the typical kind of paperwork here all in chinese of course being an import model and a sim tray tool now really nice build quality and finish to this phone so obviously i've got the blue color here now it is about 8.2 millimeters the thickness that's not measuring the cameras here which then bring it up to about nine millimeters or 9.5 or so and then the weight well officially they say it's 179 grams according to my scales it's about 183 which is still very very good so matte finish here with this gorilla glass victus on the back and i think it looks stunning so curved edge right here volume up and down and then power buttons made out of metal metal frame around the outside it is a super solid build and it's typical xiaomi quality now that we've come to expect that it has an excellent finish this is just as good as any of the big name brands like an apple or samsung you get the idea there so looking at the front here fingerprint reader in a very low location now i wish it was up a little bit higher like the pro model that i have here full review that one's coming too by the way so if you tap on the screen you can then simply wake it up unlocking speed is pretty good although the animation makes it look a little slower than what it really is bezels here around the outside i don't think they're too bad but it's not quite symmetrical the way they have done this edge here now i don't know if they do that to stop damage to the screen with drops or maybe a little bit more added prediction i don't think it's too bad cut out here so no under display camera a lot of people were disappointed in that me i'm not because i did find the under display cameras to be very poor quality normally even though the mix 4 is probably about the best that there is so xiaomi has really good under display camera tech so other things to point out curvature to the glass and yes it is an oled screen or amoled 1 billion colors 120 hertz very good i'll get more onto that very shortly but when you do look at it at angles you can see it shifts out just a little bit on the corner right up the top here we have some harman kardon branding that's because they do have the stereo speakers from them they sound pretty good and later on in the review i'll give you a sample of them of course and compare it to this one right here the 12 pro so ir transmitter antenna lines you can see again the camera module sticking out a little bit but it's nothing like the 11 ultra down the bottom here we've got our type c port sim tray so it does take two nano sims no micro sd card support microphone antenna lines another one of those speakers now this is a bit of a let down here the type c port it's only usb 2.0 spec still i mean come on xiaomi why we not usb 3.1 why no video out display support that would be really good to have and it is definitely well
overdue there now the back of it with the cameras there so dual tone led flash main 50 megapixel camera there and then we got a 13 megapixel ultra wide and 5 megapixel for macro now i do like this i like the fact we don't have any silly 2 megapixel cameras here i hope this trend continues and then that camera here and the cutout this one's 32 megapixels the same as the pro model so the xiaomi 12 a little bit smaller than the pro model here that's because it is 6.28 inches this one being the xiaomi 12 pro a 6.73 inches you can see the camera module slightly larger there and i really do like this matte black finish here looks stunning and the screen so the 6.28 inches it only needs full hd plus that's all it's got if you want the quad hd then you go for of course the pro model and you do see a slight sharpness to it but really at normal viewing distances i can tell you now that most people will not be able to distinguish the difference between quad hd and full hd plus you're just not going to be able to see it there so if we had a look at the settings there are a few options that we get in here typical from xiaomi so anti-flicker mode is there an obvious which with the 12 pro isn't it's in the developer options for some reason and i do find that this one suffers from banding a lot more mostly on camera compared to what we see here with xiaomi's and you'll see that's the sunlight mode too there as well that you can set up and the reading mode color modes all that kind of standard stuff that we get with them which is really great now refresh rate here you can set it to either 60 or 120 hertz the good thing about the pro model is you get the in between perfect kind of balance which is 90 hertz which i actually do prefer for of course fluidity yet you do get that battery saving sadly missing on this model here but it is a very good screen flickers less than the 12 pro model and absolutely nothing wrong with it so can you distinguish the differences with the screen compared to say the xiaomi 11 not really they look both of them stunning you can't see the difference between the 10 bit to the 12 bit you get the idea it's got dolby vision too as well with it now in direct sunlight it fares fine okay you can see right now you can still make it out but not quite as good as the 1500 nits peak that you get on the 12 pro this one is 1100 nits but still definitely sufficient and great screen now of course powering this beast here is the new snapdragon 4 nanometer it's the snapdragon 8gen one it's quite a hot chip if you didn't see my previous video it can heat up and i'll get more into that later on especially when you're gaming it will and if 8k video can record only six minutes because of heat constraints i think not the storage constraints so ufs 3.1 very quick
but what about ui performance miui 13 now now normally when you swipe down toggles very quick i have the apps draw enabled normally pretty quick but why am i saying normally well that is occasionally waking it up i have a just seen now and then uh lag for a second i mean that was very quick but just one time or two or three times now i've seen just a little loading icon before the icons came up this miui 13 to me seems a little bit of a beta now certain applications like play store when you get into it it doesn't seem smooth it seems to stutter twitter is exactly the same the scrolling performance is absolutely terrible on this phone so far other issues i've seen is that sometimes in some of the om system apps of xiaomi's that when you go to type in you can't see where you're typing with the on-screen keyboard i don't know it's because i'm running g board and not the xiaomi keyboard but still it shouldn't be happening jump into twitter here and you'll probably see what i mean that when you scroll here it's not loading lag it's just the way it scrolls even in 120 hertz it could be better it could be smoother it's just a bit janky at times and really not too happy with that now triggering gestures works most of the time really well and overall don't get me wrong it's a very fast quick snappy phone as you'll see now from the benchmarks so at the time of this review i am of course on the latest update now this is a big update that came through that was meant to improve stability security and optimize system performance but as mentioned i'm still seeing issues it still feels like a bit of a beta rom at the moment like we're kind of guinea pigs hopefully they'll sort it all out when the global version is released and with the chinese rom i'm sure that they're going to fix it eventually of course with updates so charge time 15 minutes to go from 11 to 100 very quick not quite as fast as the 20 minutes you get with the 12 pro so i don't have lte band 20. big problem here for a lot of people in europe that's of course what happens when you import a chinese model if you get the global version when it eventually comes out you won't have this issue but it did get on 5g and got well typical kind of speeds for my carrier now really good antutu scores here almost reaching the million point mark here where's the big jump so it's actually the gpu but it's at short bursts only what happens is later on gaming it drops right down too as well if i keep running this test it eventually drops and it will probably end up overheating and i'll show you more about that soon so a wildlife score here just to show that that gpu yes is very potent getting almost 60 frames per second average is excellent it's not the extreme test but wildlife it's still quite a demanding test there now internal storage ufs 3.1 i have 128 gigabytes of it and we're getting really good speeds here look at this that's probably faster than most people's ssds and their laptops i'm pretty sure it would be for a lot of people they're still running sata3 of course they're really good okay that's not going to slow down the system at all geekbench 5 score very good okay for what it is for the snapdragon 8 gen 1 and gps works well very good here you can't get any better accuracy than 3 meters that's the qualcomm cap there but it does see just so many satellites you can see 77 and view and used 41 so that's excellent there now on to screen kind of use screen on time so with this average kind of my own use here i can achieve almost seven hours now that's a lot of twitter a lot of using the camera which is fine i guess at 120 hertz but really should be bit bit i'm a little disappointed about that now if you run a fixed test at 60 hertz it would actually go for a really long time then the battery life you can see it went for 14 hours which is kind of crazy real world use you're looking probably then 10 hours if you lock it down to 60 hertz so if you need that battery life highly recommended just to cut that refresh rate in half you gain so much more you gain an additional about three hours of real world juice audio now so if you want to use a 3.5 millimeter setup okay your headphones earphones whatever you need to use an adapter for that and it does sound really good typical xiaomi good quality there now the speakers both of them harman kardon now what i've discovered is that the xiaomi 12 even though it doesn't really make sense it's smaller shouldn't sound better but it does sound slightly louder than the xiaomi 12 pro which i'll give you a sample of shortly but just wanted to point out that we're running at 30 hertz refresh rate in this normally then it jumps up to 60. but sometimes the scrolling in here doesn't quite feel like 60 at least it's not too obvious on the xiaomi 12 but probably more on the xiaomi 12 pro at the moment it just sometimes feels a little stuttery like not as smooth as it should which is just one of my complaints here with the firmware anyway enough of that what i'm going to do is play a track here my typical track at 100 volume on both and you'll probably hear hopefully that the xiaomi 12 is actually a little bit louder so that is really interesting that the xiaomi 12 speakers sound better than the 12 pro now onto the biggest area criticism from me is gaming not the performance it's very good i mean really fast you can use max settings here extreme frame rate with pubg not a problem the problem is after playing demanding games or games with the highest settings that you think you better run with the new snapdragon 8 gen 1 right four nanometer chip you know it's the latest and the greatest well it uh it's like the snapdragon 810 if you remember that one very hot chip so qualcomm's back to its well it's dark side of overheating chips and what happens is i did a stress test here with 3d mark and that's the wildlife extreme test it ran for only about 11 12 minutes before crashing and completely closing me out of the application or the game for example if you play gen chin impact the same thing would happen booted me out overheating message popped up and that's it it simply gets too hot this chip very hot on the back of the phone so if you intend to play games for long periods demanding settings and you're using a case as well just expect this phone to just overheat super quick and that is just simply unacceptable to me really disappointing from qualcomm and xiaomi moving over to our camera style so we've got a 32 megapixel sense at the front here same as the xiaomi 12 pro the larger more expensive model and you can shoot 1080p that's it so 1080p 30 and 60 maximum there is electronic image stabilization i'm really sad to see we still don't have 4k with front-facing vlog footage i think they are falling behind here xiaomi they need to get up with the times other manufacturers for years now i've had 4k with the front-facing cameras so just like the xiaomi 12 i noticed that especially with the vlog footage that you do get a lot of this it just looks simply too bright it's being over exposed and they're not really balancing this out too well other brands uh manufacturers tend to handle these kind of bright conditions a little bit better it's simply software xiaomi just need to optimize these cameras a little i do find that throughout the cameras on the larger version so the 12 pro and this model here so this is the main 50 megapixel camera has optical and electronic image stabilization during the day it's pretty much exactly the same the video quality out of this that you will get from the xiaomi 12 pro and i've done a comparison so check my channel for the xiaomi 12 pro versus the 12. there's a camera comparison included in that
it goes over this so the quality looks pretty good to me the electronic and the optical image stabilization is excellent and i'll just jog ahead see daniel castle there in the background well it is 13 megapixels i do find that the daylight footage the 4k 30 that we can get it won't shoot 4k 60 looks very similar to the 12 pro and even the photos quite similar but we don't have the as wide feel of view that we do with the Xiaomi 12 pro again check out that comparison if you want to see the differences between the 12 pro and this smaller 12 model okay so final verdict on this one there's a lot of good in this phone here i love the frame around it the gorilla glass vectors the finish of it the style of it i think looks good it is a high quality product high quality screen but then the failings that come through with the software and its current state feels very much like a beta to me with some of that lag i'm seeing in certain apps like youtube or twitter and even the play store seems just a little bit choppy not smooth it should be running a lot better than that i'm not too sure what's to blame it's not running at 120 frames per second it runs at 60 at 60 hertz with certain apps and then of course it does dynamically scale that refresh rate with it so the front-facing camera and still no 4k video i mean come on xiaomi get up with the times for years now other brands have had 4k vlog front footage okay it's not too difficult to do that but there we go optimization of the cameras i find to be disappointing especially a front-facing camera always seems to be overexposed face is too bright video quality to two as well oh and don't get me started on that audio bit rate 96 kilobits per second yet again they've gone backwards we've gone backwards in some areas we really have speaking of the performance too so at short workloads short bursts the snapdragon 8 gen 1. it's very quick it's fast it's snappy but long term gaming demanding games like gen shin impact or even pub g when you put it onto the highest possible settings and you play the game for 30 minutes this phone overheats it runs into overheating problems okay it boots you out of the game you lose the game it puts up that message that i showed you it's overheating this to me is simply unacceptable it's inexcusable really now who's to blame here is it qualcomm i think they're partly to blame and xiaomi two as well surely xiaomi had their prototypes tested games on them did they only game for 10 minutes game for 20 minutes 30 minutes overheat how was that pass to be an acceptable design or was it qualcomm did they simply not just lay out the plans for a thermal solutions did they not set that in stone then concrete right you need to have so much copper thermal transfer pipes you must have this you know to dissipate that heat i can see the snapdragon 8 gen 1 being a great chip in something large like a tablet where it can dissipate that heat but in a smaller size compact flagship like this simply too much and it reminds me of the snapdragon 810 days if you remember those and those chips just getting far too hot not having sufficient cooling in them it's just a repeat of that all over again very disappointed to see so to me this has potential but xiaomi's got time on their hands before the global release fix this hopefully fix the thermals fix that firmware those bugs give us hopefully 4k front facing camera improve the bit rate improve the software in general and then we might have a good phone but to me it feels like xiaomi's lost their direction their way a little bit too many releases this is going to be if you think about it the xiaomi 12 model number three if we count the 12 pro and the x number three of about 10 because we're going to have the t series the t light the 12 light we're gonna have the 12 x the 12 ultra it just goes on and on and on the pro plus ultra it's just so many releases i think they're really just flooding out too many models people are getting confused they're losing focus losing direction and it's showing it's starting to show in the xiaomi 12 sadly so thank you for watching my yes long-winded review here but now you know the full story of the xiaomi 12.
2022-01-24