Tencent Digital | Wang Yuan
For several consecutive years, "impacting the high-end" is a label that Xiaomi's flagship cannot do without, and everyone has different answers to this question.
In my opinion, Xiaomi's technical strength in high-end products is beyond doubt, and the experience of Xiaomi 11Pro/Ultra at the beginning of the year is still the first echelon.
But what I did not expect is that this year's Xiaomi "big cup" came a little early, only 9 months after the release of Xiaomi 11 Pro, Xiaomi 12 Pro officially debuted, which can be described as full of confidence. To know that the previous generation of products was once called "Android machine king", under such an aura, how will the Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro, which was handed over in advance, take over the baton?
Say goodbye to the appearance of "straight male aesthetic"
"Refreshing", is the xiaomi mi 12 pro in the appearance of the design to bring me the first impression, compared to the previous generation, it has reorganized a lot of redundant design elements on the back, giving people a regular, clean feeling, the value of the face is also pulled up a lot. A few days ago, Xiaomi officially announced that Lao Wei, the original CC series product manager, joined the digital series, with the blessing of female aesthetics, which may also be an important reason for Xiaomi 12 Pro to get rid of the "straight man" image.
The most emblematic of this is the lens module part, although the original square duplex has a strong recognition, but always let me feel that there are too many elements, so that the back shell looks like a top-heavy feeling. The Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro returns to the vertical rectangular design and uses a metal module with a frosted surface that is close to the back cover in color and touch. However, the bulge is still there, and it is necessary to strengthen protection on a daily basis.
The outer edge of the module is also cut with CNC to cut a bright edge, and in order to make the three lenses look less dull, the camera module is divided into four grids with lines in a way similar to the golden section, and the addition of these small details makes the entire camera part look much more refined, and also avoids the "collision shirt" with similar design products.
The sides of the rear shell are slightly curved to look flatter. In terms of material, it continues to use AG frosted glass, the feel is a lot more delicate, there is almost no fingerprint staining, the Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro on my hand is blue, in addition to black, purple and plain leather material of the wild green color.
The middle frame is also made of frosted metal, visually and the back shell has a good connection, Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro's fuselage thickness is 8.16mm, weighing 205g, compared with the previous generation are slightly lighter, but the difference is not large, holding in the hand is still quite weighty, a touch to know that it is a flagship.
The Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro has a speaker opening at both ends, which still has the blessing of Harman Kardon in terms of sound quality, but Xiaomi uses the split speaker scheme of the Xiaomi Tablet 5 Pro here, that is, the symmetrical four-unit speaker design. The upper and lower two sets of sound units use independent tweeter + woofer, which can separate the low-frequency sound from the high-frequency sound, so that the details in the sound are richer and more layered.
Top screen, there should be
A few days ago, Xiaomi officially announced the vast majority of the parameters of the Xiaomi 12 Pro screen, although it has been reduced a little in size, but it is particularly top in terms of materials and display quality, and Lei always said on Weibo that "the ceiling of the screen industry in the industry" is really reasonable.
First go through the parameters, Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro is equipped with a 6.73-inch 2K screen, resolution 3200 * 1440, ppi522, and a delicate look. Full-screen brightness 1000nit, peak brightness 1500, outdoor also has a good display effect. Support 10bit color depth and 1.07 billion color display, and the screen will be professional color correction before leaving the factory, JNCD ≈0.43, deltaE = 0.4, in the display accuracy and professionalism are guaranteed. In addition, it also supports True Color Display, Dolby Vision, and HDR10+.
Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro this screen uses Samsung's latest E5 material, the global brightness increased by 11%, but the power consumption was reduced by 16%, and there is a layer of prism structure above the screen pixel layer and the touch layer, so that the screen luminous light can be more concentrated in the range of human eye perception, in the same brightness, power consumption can be reduced by 9%.
Most importantly, Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro also supports intelligent dynamic refresh rate, that is, the second generation of LTPO technology, the screen refresh rate can be dynamically adjusted according to the content changes displayed on the screen, such as when looking at text, picture content, the screen refresh rate can be as low as 1Hz, when playing games to increase to 120Hz, and support sliding speed, screen refresh rate can follow the speed of finger sliding.
Take brushing Weibo as an example, when the finger quickly slides the information stream, the screen refresh rate can reach up to 60fps (it should not be adapted to 120fps), when the finger sliding speed becomes slower, the frame rate also decreases, when the slide stops or clicks on the picture, the screen frame rate drops to 1fps. This feature was previously only experienced in the iPhone 13 Pro/Pro Max, and the Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro is currently the only one in the Android camp. In addition, the Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro also supports a touch recognition rate of 10 fingers and 480Hz, which makes the game control response faster and more accurate.
In general, thanks to the second generation of LTPO technology, the screen power consumption of Xiaomi 12 Pro has been further controlled, and on the whole, the screen of Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro can well balance the display effect and power consumption.
In addition, the refresh rate of the screen, color style, etc. can be customized in the system settings, and the adjustable options are rich to meet the needs of many professional users.
Although it did not wait for the off-screen lens, the xiaomi mi 12 pro's screen digging hole was finally moved to the center, there is a symmetrical aesthetic, and also adopts a small aperture design and a narrower border, in addition to the previous generation, the screen rounded corners of the mi 12 Pro are almost the same as the fuselage fillets, minimizing the impact on the screen ratio. At the same time, the screen cover is made of Corning Gorilla Glass Victus, which has good durability.
Snapdragon 8 toothpaste squeeze burst, high power single cell
The screen display effect is naturally inseparable from the blessing of performance, and this part is believed to be the most concerned point of xiaomi 12 pro. Although the "first" new generation of Snapdragon 8 processors was preempted by friends, it is certain that the Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro is still relatively sufficient in stock.
The new generation of Snapdragon 8 chips uses Samsung's 4nm process, the latest ArmV9 architecture, and has 8 cores, including a 3.0GHz Cortex-X2-based main core, three 2.5GHz Cortex-A710-based performance cores, and four 1.8GHz energy efficiency cores based on the Cortex-A510 design. Its CPU performance is increased by 20%, the power consumption is reduced by 30% under the same performance, and the integration of the latest Adreno GPU has improved the graphics rendering performance by 30%, the power consumption has been reduced by 25% under the same performance, and it is also equipped with the seventh-generation AI engine, and the AI computing power has also been greatly improved.
The detailed data on this chip will not be repeated here, in short, Qualcomm's tube of toothpaste is still a bit fierce. From the point of view of running points, my Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro chip in GeekBench5 single core score of 1136, multi-core 3562, AnTutu running score reached 1011130 points, far beyond the Snapdragon 888/plus more than 800,000 results.
The most intuitive way to feel the performance improvement is to play the game, here we find the "Glory of the King" and "Original God" two games to test.
In "Glory of Kings", the Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro already supports a 120-frame mode with ultra-clear and extreme image quality. Throughout the game, the frame rate remained stable at around 120fps, and there was no significant fluctuation in frame rate under large-scale team battles. After a game of about 25 minutes, the temperature behind the phone was measured at 40.4 ° C with a temperature gun.
In "Original God", in the case of opening the extreme picture quality, the frame number when running the picture is about 57fps, and the frame number during the battle is floating at about 50fps, and the frame number remains above 50fps most of the time, and there is no obvious catatum drop frame. (The sharp drop in frame rate in the figure appears in the still screen of the map transmission) As a flagship, such a performance is not enough.
And after 30 minutes of continuous play, the highest temperature measured by the temperature gun on the back of the phone was 42.1 ° C, which surprised me a little, and it was much better than some Snapdragon 888/888 plus flagships around 45-50 ° C. In addition to the advantages of the process, it also benefits from the 2900mm large-area VC temperance board of the Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro.
In terms of battery life, the battery capacity of the Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro has dropped to 4600mAh, but thanks to the process advantages of 4nm and many optimizations on the screen for power consumption, the actual endurance performance is not much different from the previous Snapdragon 888 flagship. After two hours of game and one hour of long video, one hour of short video, one hour of short video, the remaining 53% of the power, converted to the daily moderate use of most people, insisting on 8-10 hours is basically not a problem.
Perhaps many people will mind the battery capacity of the Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro, but it should be noted that the Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro uses a single-cell solution and is equipped with Xiaomi's self-developed surging P1 chip, which supports 120W fast charging.
Because the relationship between charging speed and battery energy density is one or the other, if you want speed, you have to sacrifice energy density, and it is difficult to take into account between the two, so the previous 120W fast charging mobile phones in the industry generally use a dual-cell solution. The Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro solved this problem with its self-developed surging P1 chip, which is equipped with a single-cell battery of 4600mAh.
Here to share a knowledge point, compared with the dual battery, the single cell solution has two major advantages, the first is that the single cell solution reduces the waste of space, the space utilization efficiency is higher, in the same volume, the battery capacity of the Xiaomi 12 Pro is about 400mAh higher than the dual cell solution. The second is that due to the series connection of dual cells, it will cause 3%-4% power loss, and this problem does not exist in the single-cell solution.
In actual tests, it took only 18 minutes for the Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro to fully charge the phone in speed mode and 25 minutes to fully charge in thermostatic mode. And Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro also supports smart charging at night and time domain smart charging for the seasonal temperature of the use area to delay the aging of the battery, and with the blessing of the surging P1 chip, the safety of charging is also guaranteed.
Abandon the billion-level pixel and deepen the digital image
Taking pictures is one of the most core experiences of Xiaomi mobile phones, and the Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro has made great changes in the strategy of lens hardware selection and before. The first is to abandon Samsung's large pixel sensor, the first use of Sony IMX707 main camera, this sensor has a 1/1.28-inch outsole, pixel four-in-one single pixel size of 2.44μm, compared to the current mainstream IMX766 has a stronger sensitivity.
In addition, the Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro also uses a 50 million form of portrait lens and a 50 million pixel ultra-wide angle lens. The cut-out telephoto lens is probably due to the low frequency of use, while taking up too much internal space, and the digital zoom ability of the main camera is already good enough.
For the first time, the Xiaomi Mi 12 series is also equipped with a new Mi Imaging Brain, including an intent recognition unit that predicts the camera behavior according to the use intention of the user or app, and adjusts the use intensity of the algorithm. The acceleration engine and computing unit are used to further improve image quality, and the ecological engine supports more third-party applications to call the system camera capabilities to improve shooting quality to meet the needs of users.
From the sample point of view, the detail analysis of xiaomi mi 12 pro is quite in place, and the color tuning is also tending to be real and transparent, and the advantages of the main camera on the big bottom are very obvious.
When shooting at close range, details such as the texture of the surface of the object are displayed very clearly, and the background bokeh is also very powerful, and the relationship between the front and back of the whole picture is clear at a glance. However, when shooting food, the color tuned by smart HDR is slightly gorgeous, which is not necessarily to everyone's taste.
Even if the telephoto lens is abandoned, under the maximum 20 times digital zoom, the details of the shooting subject have been preserved to the greatest extent, and the picture performance under the 2x and 5x zoom is naturally needless to say, in short, if you like to frame the scene through zoom composition, Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro will not disappoint you.
Under the ultra-wide-angle picture, the field of view of the picture is obviously improved, there is distortion in the edges but not excessive distortion, due to the advantages of large pixels, the details of the picture are not significantly reduced compared to the main camera, and the color rendering is also consistent to the greatest extent.
The strongest way to improve the perception of taking pictures is still in the night scene, under the action of the large outsole and the amount of light, the brightness of the picture has been greatly improved, and the details of the shadows have also been preserved, and the entire picture is very clean, and there is almost no noise. And under the ultra-wide angle and 20x digital zoom, the picture quality has not shrunk.
And when taking night photos, the Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro did not have a long exposure time, and it could be imaged by pressing the shutter, which once made me suspect that I had not turned on night mode. This is mainly due to the improvement of the photo speed of the Xiaomi imaging brain, which can effectively avoid problems such as blurred pictures caused by long exposure of night scenes and hand shaking. And not only has the camera speed improved, but in terms of continuous shooting and camera start speed, the Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro has obviously made me feel faster.
In addition, the Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro also supports sports pursuit and human eye focus, when shooting children or small animals, even if they briefly run out of the frame, they can still quickly recover the focus after returning to the picture. When shooting portraits, the face is locked by the human eye, and it is easy to produce a film for daily capture. It is worth mentioning that the tracking recognition algorithm of Xiaomi 12 Pro comes from the Xiaomi robot dog CyberDog, even if the object has changed, it can still be identified, and this function also has the ability to continuously learn its own characteristics, the more used the better.
summary
For Xiaomi, the goal of "impacting the high-end" is actually not so important today, and the development of Xiaomi's digital flagship has become a "New Year" product with its own traffic today, which can spy the development direction of the Android camp in the next year.
This time the Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro did not disappoint unexpectedly, in the screen, performance, photography, video and audio stacking and experience have achieved the ultimate, although the digital series no longer take the low-cost route, but in the same price point Xiaomi 12 Pro can still make people feel the same cost-effective gene as always.
Of course, the new generation of Android flagship has just begun, and there may be many highlights in the new products to be sent by friends, but there is no doubt that in the next year, Xiaomi 12 Pro will be a strong opponent, in the domestic and even the entire Android camp is a non-negligible existence, whether it is worthy of "high-end", I believe there is already an answer.