Realme 12 Pro Review: Best-Designed Smartphone In The Segment With Some Neat Tricks Up Its Sleeves

When it comes to design, the Realme 12 Pro stands out as a unique mid-range smartphone that surpasses the ordinary. Building upon the Realme 11 Pro’s groundwork, this device features a striking ‘Luxury Watch Design’ crafted in partnership with renowned International Luxury Watch Designer Ollivier Savéo. The Submarine Blue model we tested boasts a stunning appearance with a golden fluted bezel encircling the camera setup, adding a distinctive touch. Its vegan leather back provides a comfortable grip and resists fingerprint smudges, offering a significant advantage over phones with plastic or glass backs. Additionally, the slim curved frame enhances the phone’s ease of handling and portability.

Transitioning to the screen, the 6.7-inch FHD+ OLED display features a punch-hole cutout and a fluid 120Hz refresh rate. With a 240Hz touch sampling rate and instantaneous sampling rate of up to 2000Hz, the device delivers impressive responsiveness. Although the display is vibrant and provides an immersive viewing experience, the 800 nits peak brightness falls short for outdoor usage.

Using the phone indoors provide an enjoyable experience, particularly when playing games like Battlegrounds Mobile India and EA FC Mobile on the device’s high refresh rate screen. The phone’s display supports HDR10 and HLG for streaming a wide range of colors from OTT platforms. The Realme 12 Pro 5G utilizes high-frequency 2,160Hz PWM dimming in low-brightness conditions, enhancing dimming efficiency significantly compared to traditional methods. This feature ensures color accuracy in low light and reduces flickering, activating automatically when the screen brightness is below 90 nits. Ignoring the peak brightness problem, I was impressed with the display quality overall. Despite being curved, the phone’s panel offered good viewing angles.

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Cameras

The Realme 12 Pro is equipped with a 50MP primary camera featuring IMX882 and OIS. Sporting a 1/2-inch sensor with a focal length equivalent to 26mm and an f/1.8 aperture, this camera is designed to excel in capturing wide shots in various lighting conditions. The large aperture allows for enhanced light intake, resulting in clearer images. In my testing, the phone delivered impressive photos in both bright and dim settings, showcasing good detail and accurate color reproduction. Although edge detection could be improved, the overall image quality was satisfactory.

The phone’s 32MP IMX709 telephoto camera, equipped with a 1/2.74-inch sensor, facilitates 2x optical zoom, enabling me to capture detailed shots from a distance. Additionally, the phone offers a 4x Lossless zoom (In-sensor) feature, although it did not perform as effectively as claimed. Moreover, the phone includes an 8MP ultra-wide camera sensor with a 112-degree field of view, but I found the resulting shots somewhat underwhelming in my usage.

The phone includes three unique movie filters developed by Claudio Miranda, an Oscar-winning cinematographer. Inspired by his work in well-known films, these filters are named Journey Filter from ‘Life of Pi,’ Memory Filter from ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,’ and Maverick Filter from ‘Top Gun: Maverick.’ Despite their impressive names, the outcomes produced by these filters were similar to those found on other devices and popular apps such as Instagram.

Realme claims that the phone enhances videography output by offering stability through OIS support. However, in my experience, I did not observe a significant improvement in video stability, as there was noticeable shaking in the videos captured by hand. The phone is equipped with a 16MP front camera that can capture decent photos in good lighting conditions, but it doesn’t stand out from other phones in the same price range.

Performance And Software

Realme 12 Pro is equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 chipset built on a 4nm process. The octa-core processor consists of four high-performance A78 cores running at 2.2GHz and four efficient A55 cores running at 1.8GHz. During testing, the phone achieved an AnTuTu benchmark score of 5,64,897, which is display in the shared screenshot below. The Realme 12 Pro achieved a single-core score of 930 and a multi-core score of 2,724 in the Geekbench test. It’s worth mentioning that the POCO X6 5G, equipped with the superior Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 chipset, is available at a lower price than the Realme model, which features the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1. During the CPU throttling test with 50 threads running for 30 minutes, the Realme 12 Pro maintained 87 percent of its maximum performance, showcasing an impressive result.

Having covered numbers, let’s shift our focus to practical applications. I tested various demanding games on the phone and encountered no stuttering or app crashes throughout. The gameplay was quite seamless, and thanks to the high refresh rate support, using the device was extremely easy. Surprisingly, there were no significant heating problems even after playing intensive games for over an hour. Benchmarks provide an objective measure to compare the performance of different phones when completing the same tasks. In real-world use, the Realme 12 Pro delivers satisfactory performance without any notable issues.

When it comes to the software, the device operates on Realme UI 5.0 based on Android 14 right out of the box. While the phone comes with pre-installed apps, it also offers some impressive features. For instance, Smart image matting enables easy isolation and sharing of subjects from photos across various apps. Phonelink facilitates a seamless connection with Microsoft LTW (Link to Windows) for simplified device connectivity at the click of a button. Additionally, File Dock allows for the recognition and extraction of content such as text, images, and links with just one click. In general, the operating system includes beneficial features that can enhance productivity.

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Battery And Charging Speeds

The Realme 12 Pro features a 5,000mAh battery with 67W SUPERVOOC charging support. Charging the phone from 0 to 100 percent took less than 45 minutes, allowing me to plug it in before preparing for work and finding it fully charged when I was ready.

This convenient charging process, coupled with the 5,000mAh battery capacity, provide enough power for a typical day’s use, offering approximately 6–7 hours of screen-on time. Playing games on your phone will require you to charge it by the evening, considering that it impressively lasted 15 hours and 13 minutes in the PCMark battery test.

Verdict

The Realme 12 Pro is a smartphone that delivers solid performance, but it faces tough competition from the POCO X6 5G due to its lower price point and superior processor. One standout feature of the 12 Pro is its telephoto camera, which allows users to capture stunning photos. While the phone performs well in areas such as display quality and battery life, it may not offer any groundbreaking features. However, where the Realme 12 Pro truly shines is in its design – it stands out as one of the most aesthetically pleasing phones in its price range, making it a compelling choice for those who prioritize style and visual appeal in their devices. If you are in the market for a smartphone with an attractive design, the Realme 12 Pro is definitely worth considering for its unique blend of performance and aesthetics.

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