Realme 12 Pro Introduction:
Realme new smartphones and January 2024 was Jan-packed with smartphone launches, one of the series is the all-new Realme 12 Pro. Now, the new series number of Realme is Realme 12 Pro and this comes in two variants as - Realme 12 Pro+ and a regular model -Realme to pro. Although both phones have almost similar looks from the front but some changes are there under the hood and on back panel. I've had the Realme 12 Pro 5G for a week and change now, though emerge testing other parts of it out.
Realme 12 Pro was launched in India on Thursday at a starting price of Rs. 20,999 for the base model with 8GB RAM +128GB storage configuration. Another variant comes with 8GB of RAM as well, only the storage has now been doubled up to a massive RVs. 24,999 The new phone by Realme is available in a choice of two colour options or finishes. You can choose between the Navigator Beige and Submarine Blue. The review unit we tested was the 256GB variant in Submarine Blue.
Realme 12 Pro Specifications:
Powering the Realme 12 Pro is a Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 processor paired with Adreno 710 GPU, up to of RAM, and an on-board storage. It offers Dynamic RAM feature of adding up to 8GB of extra VRAM from the internal storage. With storage, there's no expandability.
At the bottom of device, you can see that it is equipped with a USB Type-C port, along with a speaker and microphone in / The SIM card slot (dual 5G connection). Also, at the top edge of this honeycomb back are another speaker grille along with a microphone. The power and volume buttons are located on the right side. Dual speaker setup on Realme 12 Pro 5G.
Bluetooth 5.2, dual-band Wi-Fi 6 and support for all the major GPS satellites are also on board for good measure Realme should've gone for Wi-Fi 6E and a new Bluetooth standard here, especially considering many phones in the same price range are shipping with newer connectivity standards.
Realme has also equipped an in-display fingerprint scanner on the phone. It sits just above the bottom of the display, and though it'd be nicer to have higher up as possible but despite that, scanner is good. No issues unlocking the phone in my time with it.
Powering the Realme 12 Pro is a large 5,000mAh battery with support for its company's own Super Dart Charge charging system, capped at up to 67W (same as last time).
Realme 12 Pro Unboxing:
The packaging of the Realme 12 Pro is quite standard, and like with other phones in this price segment. This gets you all of the stuff that you'd anticipate. You also get a 67W charging brick, USB Type-A to Type-C cable, case in the box, along with the SIM ejector tool and some paperwork.
Realme 12 Pro Design:
And there are only a handful of smartphones that prompt people to ask, "What phone is that?”. Expect the same about the Realme 12 Pro 5G too. Yes, a slab design is in existence for almost all the other smartphones (except foldable devices) around these days but Realme has broken that stereotype and managed to make their thin slab look distinct and sporty.
I got the Submarine Blue version and its appearance is phenomenal. When you flip the Realme 8 Pro, it comes with a vegan leather texture back and luxury watch face dial-like module what not. The company has partnered with French luxury watchmaker Olivier Savio, who is known to work with brands including Rolex and Breitling.
The camera module with nice gold touches from the outside and sunburst dial on the inside is clearly centre stage here. The device fits well in hand, weighs 196g The display and rear panel are of course both curved, a design accent that helps to make the phone look even slimmer than it is (at 8.75mm). Its premium to the touch with a supple vegan leather finish on its back that doesn't attract smudges or fingerprints.
Although the complete bezels are thin So on another side, this phone same set of slim uniform bezel can be seen just beneath it. The front is quite literally indistinguishable from the Realme X11 Pro, which also has a curved 6.67-inch display The Realme 12 Pro 5G also has an IP65 rating.
Realme 12 Pro Display:
As for the display, it bears a 6.7-inch curved AMOLED screen with full-HD+ resolution, and 120Hz refresh rate up to 240 Hz touch sampling rate; leading in at a peak luminosity of around800 nits. It gets fairly bright for indoors. The screen color are good Display is perfectly readable when using phone outside directly under sunlight. When it comes to display color options, there are Vivid, Natural, Cinematic and Brilliant. You can also manually override the screen colour temperature. The O1 Video Colour Boost engine converts SDR to HDR, but such processing isn't unique. Realme adds it value with tweaks by its own software in some of the display presents collectively known as Vivid mode and which can be enabled on individual apps or system-wide applications. Unfortunately, this only works with certain apps. The viewing angles on the phone are equally impressive and I did not see any washout.
Actually that is not the only surprise the Realme 12 Pro comes with a dual speaker configuration which peaks at very loud volumes. Low end is there with the bass, and separation does well for speakers that are placed at top and bottom. Audio through calls is also nice and loud, with an earpiece that gets pretty good volume. There are no serious complaints, only that it is not brilliant.
What does this mean for games on the Realme 12 Pro? Yes, you definitely can. You won't be hitting the best graphics or frame rates possible, but you can game on this phone for sure. The phone ran COD and BGMI smoothly. The phone neither got too hot, not was there as many touch misses which I did notice at times. Not that I noticed any significant drop in the frame rate with games running on multiplayer, my playtimes were just maxed out to about 30 minutes each.
The rear panel will heat up, but it's nothing to which you'll have to wait for the phone to cool down. I also did not experience any draft major heating while using the camera or everyday tasks. The vegan leather finish also conceals the heat nicely.
Realme 12 Pro Cameras:
The biggest upgrade of the Realme 12 Pro comes with its new cameras. There is a triple rear camera setup on the handset, and you may think there are four. Back Shooter Noob, however this one is entirely fake. On the actual cameras, you will find a 50-megapixel primary Sony IMX 882 camera with OIS and PDAF support, f/1.8 aperture located at focal length of 26mm. It packs a similarly situated 8-megapixel sensor, and brand-new to One Plus is a 32-megapixel Sony IMX 709 telephoto focus with "two-fold" optical zoom beside up-to-4x lossless in-sensor zoom. And finally, an 8-megapixel ultrawide sensor. That's a big upgrade from the two-camera system of last year that comprised just 100-megapixel main sensor and a 2-megapixel depth unit.
The default camera UI is about par for what you should expect from an Android handset of this calibre. Pro mode, Panorama, Hi-Res mode Time-lapse Long Exposure dual-view Starry Mode more are tucked under the More option on top of the shutter button ENCODING. The normal modes are Photo Mode, Video mode, Portrait Mode, Night and Street
For example, in Photo mode you get the option of a 0.6x (standard), 1x,2 x and 4 x filter. The main rear camera produces good image quality in daylight. It also does a nice job of the 2x optical zoom. The pro Standard colour is great at times, but can also be a bit oversaturated in some situations... and it did happen once or twice that I noticed flickering artifacts on an image. For example, the 4x image has a slight washed out look and loses some details. The ultra-wide camera is also fairly detailed under daylight conditions,
However, the colors and HDR are noticeably different between the primary lens vs ultrawide sensor.
As always, when the sun goes down its bye-bye details and forget about using other lenses in low light (at night) but shots taken with the main sensor are usable. On the back, its main camera can snap decent photos with relatively good amount of details provided there is sufficient light. Making shots of the night sky or world - in this case you get photos with a few details. Colors are also way off in lowlight and the high dynamic range too. The 2x zoom is poor in low light, and photos lack detail and color. Same is the case with ultrawide camera as well which seems to take high noise photos and washed out details. Low Light Portrait shots (Bad Edge Detection a liar, but some of the light seems to have seeped in.)
Realme 12 Pro Selfie Camera:
The selfies from the Realme 12 Pro 5G are decent. The phone receives a 16MP front camera, capable of capturing Full HD at 30fps. You get decent usable selfies, with a good amount of details in daylight but that starts getting washed off during low light.
Realme 12 Pro Video:
In terms of videos, the phone is capable to take 4k resolution video in 30fps but you can also benefit from OIS stabilization when recording at Full HD resolution which tops up at60FPS. Realme dubs its stabilization mode Ultra Steady and the results are acceptable. There is some highlights peaking though, but hey it’s good enough for sharing on social media. 4K video is detailed in daylight and has low noise but artefects are visible Low light videos have considerably sub-standard details.
Realme 12 Pro Performance:
Now the performance, as we know the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 chip is good enough for daily life tasks and even gaming; it is still not heavily performance. With the Realme 12 Pro 5G, Realme has focused more on the camera and design. The phone’s benchmarks results are not too great compared to some other options available in the same price range. Testing on AnTuTu, with the performance mode ON, the phone scored 5, 90,047 points, and with it off, it scored 5,61,099. With the Geek bench 6 app, with the performance mode off, the phone scored 882 in Single-core. In multi-core, it scored 2693.
I saw very little difference in the scores with mode turned on. Not a Huge Performance Figure. As I have mentioned, the Acer C7 is not exactly lighting fast and for day-to-day tasks it did its job without annoying me. Opening/Closing apps, Opening the background app, launching games. basically these things were pretty easy to do. In cases where performance of the phone was throttled by 8GB RAM and needed to use more than that, device would utilise Dynamic RAM function.
Realme 12 Pro Battery:
The device draws power from a 5,000 mAh battery similar to its sibling the Realme12 Pro+. The Realme 12 Pro didn't make it to our HQ in time for us to conduct the usual battery tests, but anecdotally speaking we easily got a full day of use with moderate consumption (screen on about 5 hours per day) using a mix of mobile data and Wi-Fi hotspot tethering while connected over both Wi-fi and/or cellular covering all major network standards as possible. Usage included web browsing, running social media apps and streaming YouTube videos. In our testing, we were getting some battery life of around 4 hours for the screen-on time after playing latest title game online gaming (for about an hour).
Realme will also bundle a 67W Fast Charger in the box, which it claims can charge from zero to 50% battery on your Realme GT Neo2 with just over half an hour of plugging and you would not need more than about one hour for full top-up.
In our testing, the Realme 12 Pro charged from 1% to 18% in five mins, and up to30 per cent in ten minutes. With a charger of approximately forty-five watts it got: charging speeds at one hundred percent charge in just under fifty-four minuted. The 5,000 mAh cell in the Realme 12 Pro+ also supports up to 67W charging and charges from zero to full in just about stops the clock at exactly a flat 43 minutes.
That said, as the charging tests on the Realme 12 Pro were done in India and with Always-On Display switched on, results can vary based on your usage pattern of this smartphone along with temperature.
Realme 12 Pro Software:
The Realme 12 Pro will run on Realme UI 5.0 on top of Android 14. During the time I had the phone it received two minor updates that did improve its camera performance. Realme UI 5.0 is snappy, however it also comes with a lot of bloat ware. The traditional Hot Apps and Hot Games folder, as well as the Glance lock screen and many pre-installed apps make an appearance.
I was able to disable some of the apps, but not all of them; you’re stuck with them forever. The phone gets a few neat features with Realme UI 5.0, including but not limited to File Dock, Smart image matting, and Phone link. Realme added that it will provide 2 years of software updates and 3 years of security updates for the phone.
Smart image matting - allows you to remove a subject from the background in order to place them on photos of your choice. You can drag-and-drop to share files thanks to File Dock or link up your phone with a Windows desktop and have calls, messages and notifications piped direct through it using Phone link.
Realme 12 Pro Conclusion:
Submarine Blue variant we received looked quite premium. The design of the Realme 12 Pro is definitely a stand-out over other smartphones in its price category. With a decent design and the ability to read outdoors (so you can get on with your work) this is all wrapped around an energy-filled 5,000 mAh battery that should last most users throughout the day with moderate use. The cell charged in 50-minutes for a full charge -- not exactly lightning quick, but it should do the job for most folks.
On the performance fronts, Realme 12 Pro was also a good performer and phone still made it to be mostly smooth. Then again, when you jump from app to camera it stuttered.
The Realme 12 Pro's rear cameras come with slow processing time and the output was not consistent in colors, especially for shadows but it clicked good daylight pictures. The telephoto camera delivered tolerably decent shots at up to 4x zoom. Up to 6x was pleasing, and even those at 10-times zoom were decent, which we rarely pushed beyond.
The phone costs INR24,999 in India that puts it below the premium amount and if you are someone looking for a device having good looks with decent cameras performing well in daylight then Realme 12 Pro is worth considering. Otherwise, look at some of the other choices in this price tier.
This content was last updated on 23 November 2024.
