Realme 12+ review
Display
The Realme 12+ has a pretty large 6.67-inch display. It is almost perfectly flat with a standard 20:9 aspect ratio and a FullHD+ resolution of 1080 x 2400 pixels. This works out to a very sharp pixel density of right around 395 ppi. The display is AMOLED and has a 120Hz refresh rate.
Realme claims that it should be capable of around 600 nits of regular brightness output with a peak of 2000 nits. In our standardized testing, we measured around 586 nits in brilliant display mode and a peak brightness of 1,148 nits. That's not exactly the 2,000 nits promised by Realme, but then again, our standardized testing procedure uses a fairly large portion of the display. Plus, the Realme 12+ does have a special mode to specifically boost brightness for HDR content. Also, we found that the Realme 12+ has plenty of brightness to be comfortably usable outdoors.
The minimum brightness we measured was just 2 nits.
Max display brightness test
White test pattern, 75% fill (nits)
- Manual mode
- Auto mode
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Realme 12+
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The Realme 12+ uses a standard 8-bit panel. It has plenty of color modes available to play around with and offers coverage of both DCI-P3 and sRGB.
As already mentioned, the Realme 12+ has HDR support - HDR10+ on the display, to be exact. It has decoder support for HDR10, HDR10+ and HLG. No Dolby Vision. It also has the highest possible Widevine L1 DRM certification, allowing apps like Netflix to offer up FullHD streams to saturate the display resolution.
The Realme 12+ reports support for 60Hz and 120Hz operation. There is no 90Hz middle ground like you see on many other devices. You can choose between a trio of refresh rate modes in display settings. Standard mode just locks the refresh rate to 60Hz. Then you get high mode and Auto select mode. Both of these tend to favor 120Hz, High more so than Auto mode.
However, the Realme 12+ doesn't seem to have any smart auto-switching logic even in Auto mode and instead operates on a per-app logic. That means that even when there is no motion on screen, the phone won't drop to 60Hz to save battery.
Worse still, we had very little success with high refresh rate gaming. Just one out of all the games we tried managed to run in 120Hz mode and push higher than 60fps. So, high refresh rate gaming is practically a no-go.
Overall, we really wish the Realme 12+ had better refresh rate behavior.
Battery life
The Realme 12+ packs a decent size 5,000 mAh battery. In our testing, it managed 13:03 hours of Active Use Score, which is above average for this battery capacity but is about what we would expect from the MediaTek Dimensity 7050 chipset, which we have already tested in the Realme 11 Pro. The 6nm chip is efficient overall.
Our new Active Use Score is an estimate of how long the battery will last if you use the device with a mix of all four test activities. You can adjust the calculation based on your usage pattern using the sliders below. You can read about our current battery life testing procedure here. For a comprehensive list of all tested devices so far, head this way.
Charging speed
The Realme 12+ has support for 67W SuperVOOC charging. The charger and a proprietary USB Type-A to Type-C cable are included in the box. Keep track of both if you want to charge at full speed. The Realme 12+ has the same battery capacity and charging support and the same chipset as the Realme 11 Pro, so it comes as no surprise that the two phones charge at exactly the same rate.
We clocked our Realme 12+ review unit at 41% after 15 minutes on the charger and then 73% at the 30-minute mark. A full charge took us right around 47 minutes. While not quite as fast as the competing charging solutions from the likes of Xiaomi and its 67W-rated charging, Realme's 67W solution certainly holds its own in the price bracket. You can certainly do a lot worse in this department.
Charging speed
- in 15 min
- in 30 min
- Time to full charge (from 0%)
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Realme 12+
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Speakers - loudness and quality
The Realme 12+ has a hybrid stereo setup with a dedicated bottom-firing speaker and an amplified front-facing earpiece as the second channel. The Realme 12+ also has a small opening on the top bezel for sound to escape, which helps in balancing the two channels and in stereo separation.
The speakers sound balanced and of similar audio quality, even if the bottom one is louder. Quality is quite good overall, and we can say that there is a noticeable improvement compared to the older Realme 11 Pro. Mids tend to sound a bit cleaner to our ears. Highs come out very clear, too, with little distortion. The Realme 12+ is also louder than the Realme 11 Pro, earning a VERY GOOD score in our standardized testing.
The Realme 12+ doesn't have a full-featured equalizer, but it does include something called OReality Audio. It is an audio enhancement technology with a smart mode by default and optional presets for movies, gaming, and music.
The Realme 12+ also has Hi-Res audio support.
Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.
Connectivity
The Realme 12+ is a dual-SIM 5G device with simultaneous 5G connectivity on both of its Nano-SIM slots. It supports SA and NSA Sub-6 connectivity. The phone has GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO, BDS and QZSS support for location services. Local connectivity is covered by dual-band Wi-Fi ax/6 as well as Bluetooth 5.2 with LE and Hi-Res audio support. Our unit has NFC on board, but the feature is market-dependent, so check with your local retailer. There is FM radio receiver is on board.
The Type-C port on the Realme 12+ is backed up by a USB 2.0 data connection, which means a theoretical data transfer speed cap of 480 Mbps. It has Host/OTG support but nothing else fancy, like video output via USB Alt mode.
The Realme 12+ has a pretty full set of sensors onboard. There is a TDK icm4x6xx accelerometer and gyroscope combo. A memsic mmc5603 magnetometer and compass combo. Also, an OPUS Fusion light sensor that reports data a bit slowly but gets the job done. A proper hardware proximity sensor is also on board - a SensorTek stk33c01. The only obvious omission is a barometer.
Reader comments
- Rims
- 13 Oct 2024
- QBk
This phone is pretty good overall. It is totally value for money. Every phone has pros and cons. Everyone knows about the pros like camera quality is top class , smooth ui but I will tell you it's cons. 1)When you play heavy games, it gets ...
- Mr okpe
- 28 Sep 2024
- G2L
Realme 12 have so much features the most phone do not have including it's creamer features
- PhoneGEEK765
- 27 Jun 2024
- ITL
WHY TF did they release a realme 12 plus? Now we have 4 phones of the realme 12 series