Xiaomi 12T Pro long-term review

Introduction

What do letters even mean? Is "S" supposed to stand for speed? And then, if so, does that mean "T" is for turbo? With the advent of electric cars, will that "turbo" reference even make sense to anyone in a decade or two? The Xiaomi 12T Pro answers none of these questions. But that's okay, because it's a phone, not a human dabbling in some late night pub philosophy.

It might still, however, be confusing, because a lot of people seem to think the 12T Pro is the successor to the 12 Pro. The launch timeline is definitely in line with something like that, but it's not true. The 12T Pro is, rather, a different take on the flagship smartphone - one much closer to the 'flagship killer' concept, whereas the 12 Pro sans T is the all-out spec monster. Outside of China, at least, since the 12S Ultra also exists over there and takes the crown away from the Pro. Are you still following any of this? Will Xiaomi ever clean up its naming?

Again, questions without answers. Worry not, though, for that's not the theme of this review. In fact, it's the opposite. We want to answer some questions for you, but other questions. Things like - is this a good phone to buy nowadays? How good? How does it fare in day to day life, away from testing labs and PR buzzwords? Those are all things we endeavor to clarify for you, as the 12T Pro is one of Xiaomi's two most flagship-y devices launched internationally in 2022. And it's the newer one of those two, and it has a few unique tricks up its sleeve(s).

So if you're interested, or at least intrigued, join us over the next few pages as we explain what it was like living with it for an extended period of time, during which we've used it as our one and only smartphone. We have thus encountered both its upsides and its downsides, and we can't wait to share all of them with you. Let's begin.

Design, handling, build quality

There are only so many ways you can design a 'full screen' looking front of a phone. This is the result of one of those ways. And it pretty much looks like all the others. Don't get us wrong - we're still fans of this almost bezelless theme. Very much so, in fact. But there's just not much left to say about it. So, in short - from the front, the Xiaomi 12T Pro looks like a smartphone, and one that's been launched recently. Because it is. And it has.

Now, if you go looking closely, you'll notice some interesting minute details. Like the fact that the bottom bezel is only imperceptibly thicker than the top one. And all four of them are incredibly slim. That tells you this is no run of the mill mid-ranger. In fact, it tells you it's a flagship device (well, as a general rule - there are exceptions, as there inevitably always are with any such rules of thumb).

The back is a similarly boring affair, at least on our very stealthy black review unit. There's glass on it, and it curves into the frame. It's also the sort of glass that's the best of both worlds. It's more matte than glossy, showing zero fingerprints in the process, but it's not so matte that the phone will practically slide out of your hand all the time. It's still slippery, but not that slippery.

The main event on the back has to be the enormous camera bump. And we don't mean enormous in length and width, although it's certainly no slouch when it comes to those measurements, but we're talking thickness here. The main sensor protrudes a lot from the rear, although the way the whole island has a two-step design is meant to slightly hide that.

This, by the way, is another indicator that we're looking at a flagship smartphone. A thick main camera means moar resolution, moar optics, moar light accumulation, moar better everything. Right? Well, hopefully, but we'll see about that in the appropriate section of this review. For now, note that the camera island is actually huge enough that the phone won't rattle on a table if you're trying to use the keyboard. If, on the other hand, you tap the top left part of the screen, it will feel like the entire device is about to roll over to the side.

The frame is plastic, and it's mostly glossy at the top and bottom, and mostly matte elsewhere. It's very thin on the sides, as the display assembly seems to sit 'on top' of the frame - the frame doesn't extend into the screen, for lack of a better way to describe this. The way it's done on the 12T Pro is reminiscent of how mid-rangers are constructed, so that's the first point that seems to contradict all the previous "this is a flagship" hints. On the other hand, this goes with the whole 'not premium' theme of using plastic for the frame.

Handling is great if you don't have small hands - as great as that of any recent device of mainstream size. The weight makes the handset feel beefy and substantial, but it's not overbearing. In fact, we always thought around 200g for this size is the perfect balance - if you have that "premium means more weight" bias you'll like it, but it's not so heavy that you need to take frequent breaks from usage in order to rest your hands. Again, unless they're small, in which case - we have a recently published long-term review of the Asus Zenfone 9 that might interest you.

Build quality is great, then again we don't remember the last time we handled a phone that didn't have great build quality, especially at such price points. So maybe this one should go without saying from now on?

Case

There's a case in the box, and it's neither the cheapest and flimsiest feeling we've ever seen in a phone's box, nor the sturdiest. It's somewhere in the middle, perhaps a little bit towards the flimsy end of the scale, but perfectly serviceable in day to day use if you don't mind paying hundreds of currency for a glass-backed phone only to then never touch it.

Don't worry, most people are in a similarly hilarious and ironic boat, this reviewer included. Oh, and let's not forget that a lot of other companies don't even go to the trouble of bundling such a basic case with their (oftentimes much more expensive) devices, so there's that.

Speakers

The Xiaomi 12T Pro's stereo speakers are not the best, nor the loudest we've ever heard, but - they are great for both sound quality (as much as you can expect from such tiny apertures) and volume for most people, most of the time. If you don't approach with unrealistic expectations, these will serve you very well. Again, they're phone speakers, so sound quality won't impress you, but it's perfectly passable.

Similarly, the top volume isn't the loudest we've heard, but it's sufficient to make you avoid bringing the phone closer to your ears, even in environments that are a little bit loud. More than that, the limitations of them being inside a phone become apparent, but you knew that already, didn't you? The point here is that these won't disappoint you at all, even if they won't blow you away either. They just perform very well, and that's it.

As usual, Xiaomi opted for a dual-slit strategy for the top speaker - sound goes out both through the earpiece and also through holes on the top of the frame. This makes media playback sound fuller (if you cover the bottom speaker with a finger you'll know what we mean), but comes at the expense of some lost privacy when on a phone call while using the earpiece, since there will be some sound bleeding out through those upward facing holes.

We've never had an actual problem in the real world with this, but maybe it's something you need to keep in mind, depending on where you go and who you talk to. Then again, you probably have a pair of TWS earbuds by now, and if you use those for calling then all of this is alleviated.

Vibration motor

This is a similar story to the speakers. It's not the best we've ever encountered, and it's very far from the worst. Let's call it an upper-midrange vibration motor or a low-end flagship one (if that even makes sense). Hopefully, this helps identify what we mean when we say that it's been very good, but - again, like the speakers - hasn't wowed us. It's just a solid part that does its job very well, and that's it.

Haptic feedback settings

Like most vibration motors these days, you can feel it more than you can hear it. That said, if it's on, say, a wooden surface, you will still hear it when the phone rings, for example - just not from another room. Xiaomi has been among the companies consistently using at least good, if not great, vibration motors for its flagships and 'flagship killers' for years now, and that's one of those things that improves the user experience in a very small way - but consistently so, every day. Note that we've maxed out the Haptic feedback level slider in Settings, but if you feel like that makes the vibrations too harsh, you can, of course, tone them down.

Display quality, brightness

The Xiaomi 12T Pro splits the difference between 1080p+ and QHD+ opting for a not very often seen resolution of 1220x2712. Will you be able to tell a difference in day to day use between this and the equivalent for the same aspect ratio 1080p+? No. Will you be able to tell a difference in day to day use between this and QHD+? No. Will you be able to tell a difference between this and QHD+ when you intentionally go looking for one? Sure. Why would you do that, though? This is all a very convoluted way of saying - the resolution is fine. This is not a 'low-res' panel by any stretch of the imagination, and for most people, it's more than they'd ever actually need.

The panel used is high quality, and brightness maxes out right above the advertised 900-nit level when auto brightness is on. That's not record-breaking or even close to that, but it's still perfectly respectable. It's more than what most mid-rangers can put out, and, for a point of comparison, Samsung's Galaxy S22 only goes a tiny bit further. In practical terms - this display remains viewable in all ambient lighting conditions, including on a bright sunny day. If the sun directly hits the screen, you will need to squint, but you will make out what's on it, just about.

So in terms of brightness, the story is by now a familiar one: the Xiaomi 12T Pro offers decent, solid performance that isn't wowing or earth-shattering. That seems to be the theme of the entire device, by the way - spoiler alert. At the other end of the scale, the screen gets dim enough for most people, probably, but we'd still have liked for it to go even dimmer - either on its own, or if not, then at least by using the Extra dim feature that Google's packed into Android 12, which Xiaomi simply refuses to use.

We won't stop calling this out until it changes; there's absolutely no reason for such a potentially useful feature not to be included, niche as it may be. It's only an added Quick Settings toggle, and there are already a ton of those with much more debatable utility. As things stand, on the lowest brightness setting, we don't recommend viewing things with white backgrounds in pitch dark environments for a long time, as there's a lot of light hitting your eyes from all that white, and it might get straining after a while. The dark theme mitigates that somewhat, and you could also use a browser that automatically applies a dark theme to websites.

On the plus side, the 12T Pro uses very high-frequency PWM dimming - 1920Hz instead of the usual 500-800Hz, and this apparently should be way less disturbing for people who are sensitive to PWM (you know who you are). DC dimming would have made the problem go away entirely, but we assume that simply wasn't an option for this panel, so this is arguably the next best thing.

Display settings

Auto brightness... is pretty bad out of the box. We had to wrestle with the algorithm for weeks on end, constantly manually adjusting the brightness until we finally got something that made more sense. It always tends to react too dramatically to even the tiniest of changes in ambient light, so all our work with it was done towards trying to tame these inexplicable tendencies.

Of course, once you have tweaked it, it will remember your personal setting for the next time it encounters that specific level of ambient light, so even if you're unlucky like we were, it will get better in time the more you manually change it. We want to note that perhaps the one redeeming feature is how nicely the phone reacts when there's a lot of light suddenly hitting its back. It's clear that it has two ambient light sensors, and the rear one is used very well.

Color settings

MIUI's color settings have gotten progressively more confusing over the years, and things are no different on the Xiaomi 12T Pro. So we'll try to summarize all the different options you get: Vivid mode targets (and pretty much hits) the DCI-P3 space, although with a white point that's too cold - you can mitigate this with Warm under the color wheel. Original mode targets (and hits) sRGB, which is still the color space where most things on the internet are rendered.

Color scheme settings

So we'd recommend going with this, choosing a white point that you like the look of best (this reviewer is partial towards Warm), and calling it a day. If you're the type of person who cares about DCI-P3, then go with Vivid. And if you like the punchiest, most saturated colors, Saturated is what you want, but fair warning - the world outside of your phone's screen might start to look bland in comparison.

Refresh rate

The Xiaomi 12T Pro's display is capable of refreshing at 120 Hz, and the touch sampling rate is a good 480 Hz. The default refresh rate setting supposedly optimizes things dynamically, but we don't have time for that. Custom 120 Hz is where it's at, since the refresh rate influences perceived smoothness a lot, and smooth is what you want your software to be. Even this doesn't ensure 120 Hz all the time, yet it's the best you can get, and should pick it. By the way, games generally run at 120 Hz too, which is not always a given on Chinese phones.

Refresh rate settings

Now, if you want to eek out more battery life, going with the default refresh rate mode does make more sense. But if not, just set Custom to 120 Hz and never think about it again.

Always-on display, Reading mode

The 12T Pro's Always-on display is incredibly customizable, and we dig that a lot (does anyone use "dig" in this way anymore?). You can choose whether it's truly always on, or schedule it, or have it only appear for 10 seconds after tapping on the screen. And then, you can pick from a multitude of analog and digital clock styles, kaleidoscope images, and other backgrounds. Custom text? Sure, that too.

You can basically change the design every day, and you wouldn't see the same thing for almost a month; that's how many options there are, and while we obviously haven't used every single element on offer, we're happy to see such choice being offered. There's a lot of it without feeling overbearing.

Always-on display settings

It's a very similar story for Reading mode, MIUI's blue light filter, which still goes further than all others. Sure, you can adjust the intensity with a slider and schedule it to either come on automatically at sunset and turn off at sunrise or use a custom period.

Reading mode settings

But then there's Paper mode, MIUI's unique trick that introduces a paper-like texture into the mix, which can also be controlled with an intensity slider of its own. Finally, you can pick "light colors" (desaturated in plain English), or black-and-white too.

Biometrics

The Xiaomi 12T Pro has an in-display fingerprint reader, which is mounted a little bit too low for top comfort but not low enough that using it will always pose a risk of dropping the phone due to the extreme finger gymnastics involved. We still would have liked to see it slightly higher up the screen, but it is what it is.

It's definitely not the fastest we've ever tested, while also not being among the slowest. It's a little bit above average in unlocking speed and very good for accuracy - but again, not the best. It gets our fingerprint recognized on the first try in about 90-95% of cases, which is good for an in-display sensor, but we've seen better. Still, it's unlikely to annoy you very much in day-to-day use - maybe a couple of times each day, it might be more stubborn than you'd expect, but otherwise, it's fine.

Biometrics settings

There's face unlocking too, of course, and unsurprisingly it uses the front camera only, which means it's much less secure than the fingerprint sensor. If you choose to use it, you'll find that it's insanely fast - so much so that you might forget you've turned it on. It feels as if you have no password, no PIN, no authentication enabled whatsoever. So that speed might be enough of a benefit for you to alleviate the decrease in security compared to fingerprint scanning. For what it's worth, we also checked and face unlocking doesn't work when your eyes are closed.

Performance, smoothness

The Xiaomi 12T Pro is incredibly fast, and it's also incredibly smooth. While in terms of speed it doesn't feel any different in day to day use (that doesn't involve gaming) than any other flagship device we've tested over the past year or so, smoothness is a slightly different story. It's ever so slightly better than the Xiaomi 12 Pro, which isn't surprising considering the improved chipset it uses, but interestingly, in our subjective evaluation, it fails to dethrone the OnePlus 10 Pro as the king of smoothness.

It's a very close second, however - and the Xiaomi 12 Pro is a very close third, tied with the Poco F4 GT. Now, if you don't review phones for a living, any one of these should feel incredibly smooth to you - as will the Asus Zenfone 9 that's right under them in our subjective classification.

What the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 inside the 12T Pro enables compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 in the 12 Pro is much less overheating and, thus much less throttling. The 12T Pro is consistently cooler to the touch than the 12 Pro was, no matter what you do - not that the 12 Pro was unbearably hot, but it's still a noticeable difference. The lack of (so much) throttling should also aid in intensive gaming sessions, so from the performance point of view, the 12T Pro definitely rises above the 12 Pro and is pretty much on par with any other handset sporting the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 SoC.

Battery life, charging

Battery life has been very good on the 12T Pro, and noticeably better than it was on the 12 Pro when we had that one for a long-term review last year. It makes sense though - the newer model has some extra battery capacity to work with. Unfortunately, we can't show you any screenshots of screen-on times, as we usually do, since the particular version of MIUI that we have on our review unit refuses to give us those numbers. This feels like a bug since every other part of the Battery section is identical to what we've seen on other Xiaomi and Poco devices recently.

Alas, you will have to take our word for it this time. We never ever had a day with less than six hours of screen on time, and in fact most days (around 90% or more), we saw more than seven hours of screen on time on a charge. That's very good performance in our book, bordering on excellent, but not quite there.

If you're wondering how we calculated these numbers - we looked at the Digital wellbeing section, which shows you "Screen time" but per calendar day only, not since the last full charge. Being very attentive to only take into account days when the phone wasn't topped up during the day, and averaging out the numbers, we came to our conclusions outlined above. This is an even less scientific quantification of screen on time than the one we usually employ, but it's what we were forced into by the aforementioned bug in MIUI's Battery section.

As usual, our use case involves around 12-16 hours off the charger in a day, with primarily Wi-Fi 6 connectivity, around an hour on 5G, around an hour or two of listening to music or podcasts via TWS earbuds, half an hour to an hour of phone calls via TWS earbuds, location always on (including Bluetooth and Wi-Fi scanning), and about half an hour of navigation through Waze. Note that our Wi-Fi signal is excellent, as is our 5G signal, so if you happen to roam around areas with less than stellar Wi-Fi or mobile network connectivity, your results will be worse than ours.

Charging is exceptionally fast as Xiaomi's gotten us used to recently for its top of the line devices. Both the 12 Pro and the 11T Pro had outstanding results in our testing, going from zero to full in 21 minutes, and the 12T Pro isn't far behind - if you employ the Boost feature, its time is 23 minutes, which is still insane compared to most competitors out there, and especially compared to what you can get on an iPhone or a Samsung or a Pixel. Speaking of Boost mode, in Battery settings you can make this active by default, so you don't always have to tap the "Boost" button in the notification that shows up when you pop the charging cable in.

Boost charging speed by default

Even now, in early 2023, there's no overstating how much peace of mind you get by knowing your phone can charge up so fast. Battery life itself becomes less important when a top-up takes so little time - not that battery life isn't great to begin with. So basically, the only downside is that to reach these insane charging times, you have to carry around the original charger and charging cable with you. A small price to pay, perhaps. And at least you get both of those in the box when you buy the phone, no additional purchase necessary.

Updates

It's 2023, and the Xiaomi 12T Pro launched in October 2022 is still running MIUI 13 based on Android 12, at least our review unit intended for the European market is. Not just that, but there's been no concise communication from the company telling us, and more generally its customers in the EU, what to expect when it comes to updates. Both MIUI 14 and Android 13 have been out for a while now, the former for less time than the latter, but still - we're in the dark as to when the 12T Pro will get a big update.

For all we know, it could happen tomorrow, or within a few hours of this review going live. And that's fine, but the fact remains - Xiaomi is really, really slow with updates. And this isn't even confined to big ones. Our review unit is currently on the November 2022 security patch level, and that's just unacceptable.

Current software

At half the 12T Pro's asking price, less so, but from this price point upwards - Xiaomi just needs to do better. We've ranted about this before so we'll try to keep it simple this time around: software updates are few and (very) far between, and you need to factor that into your purchase decision with any Xiaomi / Redmi / Poco device. This applies to the 12T Pro too, of course. Only you know how important timely updates truly are to you, so we can't make a qualitative judgment on your behalf about how bad this is. But good, it definitely isn't.

MIUI 13, bugs

Another thing we've been ranting about a lot in our recent long-term reviews is the fact that Xiaomi's MIUI has gotten pretty stale in the past few years, with updates only bringing with them minute changes in looks. It's still a joyful, playful UI, and if you've never used it before, you'll definitely enjoy its whimsicality, but if you have a Xiaomi / Redmi / Poco handset from the last 2-3 years and are switching to the 12T Pro, we have to inform you that you need to expect almost zero changes in the UI.

So maybe it's time for a new coat of paint? Some might rightfully point out that Apple's iOS has similarly looked the same for a very long time, and we'd respond that it, too is most likely in dire need of a refresh. So here's the gist of this argument: if you like the way it looks, that's fine. But the fact that no big changes have been launched in the past few years, combined with the obvious lack of focus on timely updates, makes us wonder how much emphasis software still gets nowadays over at Xiaomi HQ and what that might say for the future.

Settings

The current implementation of MIUI 13 on the Xiaomi 12T Pro also has an egregious bug that we've noticed recently on some Poco phones too - namely, the Do Not Disturb mode simply doesn't work as it should. You can turn it on, either manually or through the scheduling function, and the notifications that should be silenced aren't. There's not much more we can say about this, since it's not a random occurrence, or a hard to track bug. It literally never worked for us.

And this circles back into software emphasis, or de-emphasis - it's definitely not hard to catch such an obvious bug, is it? So then why is it still here? Maybe the next update, whenever that arrives, fixes it. Or maybe it doesn't. And then it's many more months of waiting for the next update, hoping it will finally make a base feature work again. Not a great experience, is it?

System apps updater

The System apps updater section in Settings still exists, in case you were wondering, but it now seems to handle a much lower number of apps than it used to. For years, we've been baffled by the fact that some system apps used this for updates, while others went the Play Store route. Now, it seems like most are being updated through the Play Store, which makes us hopeful that the System apps updater might finally be on the way out. Then again, it's been there for so long that we're wary of setting our expectations too high.

Launcher, Recents, Control Center

Going back to the topic of bugs for a bit, this one has been in the launcher for years - you can't have a home screen shortcut pointing towards something inside an app, although this works on every other Android skin, as it should. The easiest example to think of is the My Apps section in the Play Store. On any other skin, you long press the Play Store icon and the My Apps section is presented as an option. You then drag that to wherever you want it, and voila, it's on your home screen directly. The dragging bit doesn't work in MIUI, and hasn't for ages. Why? Who knows.

Another, perhaps smaller, issue with the launcher is that dragging apps across one or more home screens feels weird, and way too easily results in other apps that are already on said screens 'moving out of your way', even though you never intended for that to happen. This wastes time since you then need to manually move those back to where they were initially.

Launcher and its settings

These problems aside, the launcher is potent enough for 99% of people's needs, we'd say. You have a bunch of useful features, but not so many that it gets out of hand, and newbies would feel overwhelmed. It has an app drawer by default (with categorization and two different scroll bar modes), and the Google Discover feed to the left of your leftmost home screen.

In the Recent apps screen, the default is a vertically-scrolling two-column setup, but you can thankfully switch from that to a horizontally scrolling layout, which is what Xiaomi's competitors all use.

Recent apps

If you've used MIUI in the past year or so, you're well aware of the 'new style' Control Center, basically Xiaomi's wholesale reproduction of Apple's similarly named feature. Not only is this baked into the software now, but it's the default option. Thankfully though, you can switch back to the 'old style' of doing things, aka the Android way, with Quick Settings icons right above notifications.

Control center

While initially we tried out the 'new' Control Center, we eventually went back to the Android way of doing things since it just makes more sense to us, but obviously you may disagree. We don't find it a particularly amazing user experience for righties like us to have to swipe down from the left side of the screen to see notifications, since we look at those much more in a day than we do at the Control Center toggles. And there's also the fact that in the 'old style' the Quick Settings at the top push the first notification down a bit, making it more easily reachable with the thumb without the need for any gymnastics.

Gesture navigation, Dark mode

Gesture navigation exists and works very well, and thankfully allows you to get rid of the pill-shaped eyesore monstrosity at the bottom of the screen too if you so wish. And why wouldn't you? The functionality associated with it doesn't go away - you're still able to quickly jump from one app to another by swiping across the bottom of the screen where the white bar would be.

Gesture navigation and Dark mode settings

Dark mode is also in, unsurprisingly, and can be scheduled to come on and off on its own (sunset to sunrise), or using a specific set of hours. For less eye searing at night, we suggest you leave on "Adjust wallpaper to Dark mode" and "Adjust text and backgrounds" too. We were happy to see that forcing Dark mode onto third party apps works on this phone, and so we used that for the few that still don't have a darker theme of their own for whatever reason.

Camera image quality

The 12T Pro doesn't have the world's first 200 MP camera in a phone, but it does have Xiaomi's first 200 MP camera, and that's significant in its own right. Back in the day, Xiaomi was the first to the market with a 108 MP main sensor, and now it's among the first to come out with an even more pixel-dense snapper.

The main question on your mind after reading that is probably: does the higher resolution translate into better or worse picture quality? And that is, indeed, a very good question. We've seen countless times before that more pixels need not necessarily equal more quality. Both Apple and Google made do with 12 MP sensors for a very long time, and with very good results.

On the other hand, 200 is a good round number for marketing to brag about, and we are naturally drawn to the 'bigger is better' sometimes-fallacy ('sometimes' because it is true in some ways, and way less so in others). So, understandably, Xiaomi wants to make a big deal out of the fact that the 12T Pro's main camera is so high-res.

We'd like to focus (pun naturally intended) on actual image quality in this review, and as usual, we went with default settings since those are what 99% of people will end up using 99% of the time. This means shooting exclusively in the 16-to-1 bin mode, which outputs 12.5 MP images. If you want to take a look at what full 200 MP shots look like, or the intermediate 50 MP step, make sure you jump to our normal review of this phone.

With that introduction out of the way, we will say that the daytime shots captured by the 12T Pro's main camera turn out to be detailed, with high contrast, wide dynamic range, and almost non-existent noise. Colors do pop a lot, and for some people, even too much, but we think they're on the verge of being too saturated, but not quite there. Sharpness is also there, but again, not so much that we'd call these severely oversharpened. So, overall, these are very good, if you don't mind the colors. If you're at the other end of the fence and would like even more saturation and even more contrast, flip the AI toggle.

Daytime samples from the main camera

The ultrawide camera is the umpteenth 8 MP one we've seen in the past couple of years, especially from Xiaomi, Redmi, and Poco, and we're getting severe Snapdragon 625 vibes here (if you got that reference, congrats - you're old). The images it shoots during daytime are okay, with good dynamic range, though detail levels could be higher, and softness does always tend to creep into the edges. Colors are also very obviously not matched to the main camera, which is something we're used to seeing on mid-rangers, but 'flagship killers' like this one need to try and do better in the future.

Daytime samples from the ultrawide

While there's no proper standalone zoom cam on this model, you do get a 2x toggle in the viewfinder, and the images thus captured are pretty good. They may even be as good as a cheap dedicated 2x shooter would have been able to produce, so perhaps there's no point in mourning the lack of one. If the ultrawide is anything to go by, it's pretty clear that the priority was the main camera in the development of this phone.

The 2x shots come out with good detail levels, and similar looks to the 1x images, perhaps unsurprisingly since they're coming from the same physical sensor. Sharpening does sometimes go overboard, especially in very contrasty lighting conditions, which is a shame, but that's what you get when sharpening in non problematic conditions is almost too much to begin with.

Daytime 2x zoom samples

For nighttime photography, there's Auto Night mode, which is on by default. When it engages, you're getting incredibly similar shots to those in the dedicated Night mode. And for this reason, we decided to turn Auto Night mode off, so that you can get an idea of what it's like shooting in 'pure' Auto mode, with no Night mode magic applied, and then compare that to manual Night mode shots, which are almost always practically indistinguishable from those captured with Auto Night mode.

Because Xiaomi's Night mode is very quick - among the fastest we've used, in fact - we would, however, strongly recommend you keep Auto Night mode on, and then just shoot in Auto mode all the time. You will be very pleased with the results, we reckon.

Okay, let's see some samples. With no Night mode applied, you can see that the images captured in Auto mode are fine, considering the amount of ambient light there was in our scenes. When there's enough light around, you're even getting some good shots that sometimes exhibit finer detail levels than what Night mode produces. Then again, the tonal extremes are muffled as you might expect.

Nighttime samples from the main camera

Switching to Night mode unsurprisingly improves shadow detail, without going overboard with brightening the shots so much that you might think they were captured during the day. That used to be a trend in the mobile world for a short while, but seems to be dying out now. So what we get are more natural looking exposures like this, that are more atmospheric while not blowing out highlights. White balance is good, dynamic range is great, but sharpening is applied pretty heavily.

Night Mode samples from the main camera

The ultrawide struggles at night - we've probably written this phrase more than any others in our long-term reviews, and it's a staple when we're dealing with such 8 MP sensors. Without Night mode, you'll barely make out what's in the frame.

Nighttime ultrawide samples

Switch to Night mode, and you're getting dramatically improved results, if you have the steady hands for it - it takes the most time to process such shots on the ultrawide, and it's a good couple of seconds more than on the main cam. If you are able to be still for that long, then you'll get way better dynamic range. Highlights are toned down, shadows are lifted up, you know - standard Night mode stuff, but this camera needs that magic a lot more than the main one.

Night Mode ultrawide samples

2x zoom shots at night are pretty good in Auto mode, and obviously are better the more light there is around you when you capture them.

Nighttime 2x zoom samples

Switching to Night mode does the usual, improving dynamic range at the expense of some added sharpness.

Night Mode 2x zoom samples

Selfies come out good, if not amazing. Skin tones are accurate, but a tad muted perhaps, while the dynamic range is very good. Sharpness is good too. Portrait mode shots are very good, with great edge detection and subject separation. The blur effect isn't very realistic, but we'd wager that might not be an issue for people who grew up used to synthetic phone-made blur.

At night, things go downhill, but if you have some lighting around you, there's still a good chance you'll capture a usable image. And employing the screen flash will aid in your face being very much front and center, at the expense of your surroundings, but that tradeoff is very much understandable. There's even a brightness intensity slider for the "Fill light", as MIUI calls the screen flash, which is great to see.

Selfie samples, day and night, Portrait mode off/on

Overall, the Xiaomi 12T Pro has a very good main camera in all lighting conditions, a decent (but not more than that) ultrawide, and a good selfie camera too. So it's definitely not competing with the best of the best when it comes to image quality, but it's also not likely to let you down either - unless you had unrealistic expectations regarding the 8 MP ultrawide. It's a solid camera package for the price, which a better ultrawide would have made even more commendable.

Conclusion

The Xiaomi 12T Pro is a very solid smartphone that does a lot of things well. It's not outstandingly great at anything (aside from how fast it charges), but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Earth-shattering 'this changes everything' features come with risks, while the 12T Pro's formula is more about packing a lot of things that are proven to work into a product that's cheaper than all-out flagships while still coming with a lot of things people expect from a high-end offering.

The 200 MP camera was meant to be the standout feature, and in sheer resolution it does stand out, and stands proud next to the Galaxy S23 Ultra's these days. But if you're reading this review, you're probably versed enough in the mobile world to know that those cameras are not the same, even if the identical resolution implies that they could be. The Xiaomi 12T Pro outputs perfectly competent images, but it's not at the same level as devices like the S23 Ultra that cost twice as much. And that's fine (although we wish it had a better ultrawide).

This doesn't have to give you exactly the same stuff for half the price in order to be good, and it doesn't even have to give you exactly the same stuff for half the price in order to be good value. Which, by the way, it is. It's just not so insanely well priced that you'd want to go and sit in a line for it for a weekend.

The main problem this device has is that it's not exciting in a lot of ways, but that's a good problem to have - it's the mark of a mature product, which is part of a mature product line. It ticks the important boxes, and then it doesn't necessarily tick all of those which were deemed less important. And for most people, those who aren't obsessed with having something that is the best at everything, this formula should work very well.

Speaking of exciting - Xiaomi's marketing touts the 200 MP main camera as the best thing about this phone, but we'd clearly pick the charging speed over that, since it makes much more of an impact in day-to-day use. And that, you could say, is why we're not in marketing. Anyway, it's still incredible to experience this speed to this day, because it pretty much makes any battery longevity worries moot. Not that the 12T Pro has bad battery life - on the contrary, in fact. But, provided you can take the bundled charger and cable with you everywhere you go, battery life becomes irrelevant since you can just go from zero to full in 23 minutes.

Performance is great, and smoothness is outstanding too, even if not chart-topping in our subjective book. But it's so close to the top that you'd need to handle a few devices at the same time to notice any differences. And even then, you may only notice if you're unnaturally sensitive to smoothness, which we found most people are not. We are, which is why we make it a point to mention this, but don't misunderstand - all of the smoothest phones are buttery; you don't have to get the best of the best in order to feel that.

Software-wise, things can definitely be improved - there are some bugs here and there, updates are few and far between, and MIUI's looks are getting more and more stale. It's still a very competent and feature-rich Android skin, though, despite all of that, and as for the looks, that point is only valid if you've come across the same ones for years as we have. If this is your first MIUI device, everything will look incredibly fresh to you. And yet you may still crave more updates than Xiaomi is currently providing, and better quality control for those that do make it through.

All of those are fair and reasonable points, we think, and things to take into account if you're looking into buying this device. The Xiaomi formula at the low-end, mid-range, and even in the so-called 'flagship killer' realm where this phone lives has, for the past few years, been something like this: outspec the competition for the same price, but offer sub-par software support (at least compared to Google and Samsung). And that's not something we can ignore.

All that aside, the Xiaomi 12T Pro is, in the end, a good product that we assume struggles to really stand out in a sea of decent competitors. We hope this long-term review has made you aware of all its quirks, its high points and low points, and can thus help aid a purchasing decision if you have one to make. This one is definitely easy to recommend, but only if you love its understatedness and can live with its downsides - there aren't very many, but they're still there.

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