Xiaomi 12 Pro long-term review

Performance, smoothness

The Xiaomi 12 Pro has the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 at its core, which isn't the latest and greatest Android SoC anymore, having been superseded by the 8+ Gen 1. The differences in performance between them are minute, however, and you are not going to feel them in real life usage scenarios, outside of heavy games.

And yet, the 8 Gen 1 runs notoriously hot, and thus is notoriously quickly throttled by smartphones left and right, which means that sustained performance takes a hit. This is pretty much a known factor about this SoC across all devices it powers, so we can't really fault the Xiaomi 12 Pro specifically here. Basically at this point if you're looking at a handset powered by this chip, you pretty much know what you're getting into.

And it bears stressing that for any general tasks, you won't notice any throttling going on, nor a lot of heating. Yes, the phone does get warm sometimes, but nothing overwhelming if you don't push its limits with benchmarks or heavy games or other intensive tasks. While this is an incredibly fast phone, it's probably not necessarily the one for you if gaming's all you do - in that case, Xiaomi offshoot Poco has an F4 GT to sell you, with better cooling and pop-up gaming triggers.

For everyone else, the 12 Pro is incredibly fast and consistently so. In terms of smoothness, it comes in second best out of all devices we've reviewed long-term so far. The crown stays with the OnePlus 10 Pro for now, but the Xiaomi 12 Pro isn't very far behind, it's just ever so slightly less smooth. It's highly unlikely you'll notice unless you can use both side by side, but coming from a Samsung - even a high-end 2022 model - there is a noticeable lack of jitteriness and stutters.

Battery life, charging

Battery life has generally been very good on the Xiaomi 12 Pro, but not outstanding. Aside from a few weird outlier days, we've gotten pretty consistent results with our use case, which involves around 12-16 hours off the charger with primarily Wi-Fi connectivity, about an hour or two of mobile data on 5G, Bluetooth always on and connected to headphones for about an hour or two of calls or music listening, location always on (likewise Wi-Fi and Bluetooth scanning) with about half an hour to an hour of GPS navigation via Waze or Google Maps.

With this use, we almost always got more than six hours of screen on time in a day, so much so that we'd call six hours of screen on time easily attainable with this phone with similar usage to ours. That said, reaching seven hours, while not impossible, only happened for us a handful of times, so it's probably not something to hope for - just enjoy on the rare occasions it does happen.

Battery life snapshots

Given its battery capacity, which isn't that big in this day and age, the results are great - but we can only imagine that if Xiaomi had used a 5,000 mAh cell instead of this 4,600 mAh one, we would have entered 'seven hours of screen on time all the time' territory, and that would have changed our assessment of the battery longevity from 'very good' to 'great'. This is still not bad, however, and unless you have a much more demanding use case than we do (say, 100% or close to that on mobile data where the signal isn't great), the Xiaomi 12 Pro will probably last you one full day without worry.

And even if it doesn't, and you have to top it up throughout the day, that's absolutely a breeze thanks to the insane 120W fast charging. Although we've reviewed a bunch of very fast charging phones long term already, we're still in awe of how extremely fast charging can change the way we think about battery life - it's quite rare, after all, that you'd actually be away from a charger for more than a few hours nowadays.

And if you have a charger around, you only need 18 minutes to go from zero to full, provided you engage the "Boost" charging mode by hitting the big Boost word in the notification that pops up once you've plugged in, and keep the screen off. But even if you don't want to do this Boost dance, you're still only looking at around 24 minutes for a full charge, and that's mindblowing, even today.

50W fast wireless charging support is provided too, but we didn't have a Xiaomi fast wireless charger around to test that, and you probably won't either. In that case, you can use any other wireless charger out there - charging will be slower of course but for nighttime top-ups perfectly adequate.