Xiaomi 12T Pro long-term review

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.