Realme 12 Pro Review
The Realme 12 Pro lives up to its promises, offering the best design and impressive cameras for under ₹25,000. While its low-light camera performance could be better, the design is nearly flawless, with the potential for improvement with a metal frame in the future. This phone is striking and bound to attract attention from onlookers. However, it’s not a jack-of-all-trades. Performance-wise, it’s on par with its 2023 predecessor, making it less appealing to power users.
In the fast-paced world of budget smartphones, Realme has consistently been one of the frontrunners, and with the release of the Realme 12 Pro and Realme 12 Pro+, the company is set to maintain its momentum in 2024. Following the success of the Realme 11 Pro (review) series, these new iterations promise significant upgrades, particularly in the design, display, and camera departments.
Among the plethora of budget offerings flooding the Indian market, the Realme 12 Pro stands out, thanks to its camera array. While many smartphones in this price range tend to feature token secondary or tertiary cameras, typically limited to 2-megapixel depth or macro lenses, Realme has opted for a different approach. The Realme 12 Pro and 12 Pro+ are among the select few to offer telephoto lenses, a rarity in the sub-₹30,000 segment.
In this review, we’ll explore whether this move pays off for Realme and whether the Realme 12 Pro proves to be a worthy investment for consumers seeking an affordable yet feature-packed smartphone. Let’s get right into the Realme 12 Pro review.
The Realme 11 Pro revolutionised the budget smartphone design game in 2023, so naturally, the Realme 12 Pro builds on its predecessors’ success with a similar design language. The Realme 12 Pro features a softer vegan leather back, this time around, with an overhauled camera module design. The phone is available in two colourways – Navigator Beige and Submarine Blue, and we got the latter for review.
The Submarine Blue colour is a treat for the eyes. Clubbed with the premium gold accents that run down the back panel and around the camera module, the phone looks as good as an art piece. The Realme 12 Pro and 12 Pro+ are the best-designed budget phones in 2024 so far, in my opinion. They’ve both got similar looks, so you won’t miss out on one of the primary appeals of this series even if you go for the cheaper 12 Pro, which is fantastic.
The rear camera module especially looks wonderful. Realme has roped in French luxury watchmaker Ollivier Savéo to help design this phone, and the results of this collaboration are impressive. The camera module is meant to imitate luxury watch dials, and Realme has pulled off the effect rather well.
Regarding the phone’s handling, it boasts a lightweight design, tipping the scales at a mere 196 g, delivering a delightful feel in hand. The vegan leather material on the back ensures a pristine appearance devoid of any fingerprint marks or smudges, while the phone’s ergonomic curves enhance the comfort of the grip. On the front, you’ll appreciate the uniformly thin bezels and a curved display.
The phone is rated IP65 which means it should be completely protected against dust and splashes of water (do not submerge it). The optical in-display fingerprint sensor is one of the fastest I’ve tested in the mid-range segment. In fact, it even beats out the speed of the OnePlus 12R’s fingerprint sensor which is a much more expensive phone.
Realme has opted to grace the new Realme 12 Pro with the identical display found on its predecessor, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Let me elaborate. The Realme 12 Pro packs a 6.7-inch AMOLED display with 120 Hz refresh rate and Full HD+ resolution. The display supports 1 billion+ colours, HDR10+, and up to 950 nits of rated peak brightness. Sound familiar?
There is just one difference between the Realme 12 Pro and 11 Pro’s displays – the touch sampling rate has decreased to 240 Hz from 360 Hz. However, the effects of this downgrade weren’t too noticeable in my usage.
The Full HD+ display looks nice and crisp, the colours are vivid but not too artificial-looking, and the viewing angles are great for the price. HDR content looks great on YouTube, but just like with the Realme 11 Pro, HDR is not yet available on Netflix, which is very disappointing. If I’m paying for an HDR panel, I expect full support. Another gripe I have is the display’s brightness.
In my testing, the panel reached 898 nits of peak brightness under direct sunlight in Auto Mode, and while this is not a bad number by any means, there’s no real upgrade here while other manufacturers are bumping up the peak brightness of their phones considerably.
Overall though, this is a solid AMOLED panel that is complimented by a loud dual stereo speaker setup, that proves to be more than adequate for an immersive content consumption experience.
The Realme 12 Pro is designed with two pillars considered – design and camera. The design, as discussed, is fantastic – almost unbeatable at this price. The cameras, in my experience, are one of the best under ₹25,000 as well.
The company has included a new camera array which consists of a 50-megapixel OIS-enabled Sony IMX882 primary camera, a new 32=megapixel Sony IMX709 telephoto camera with 2x optical zoom, and an 8-megapixel ultrawide shooter. This is a huge upgrade over last year’s dual-camera setup. The cameras do have some hiccups though, let’s discuss them.
The primary 50-megapixel shooter is capable of capturing some impressive photos in daylight. There’s a good amount of detail, pretty decent dynamic range, and slightly contrasty colours. The shadows do get crushed slightly in some instances, but it’s nothing major.
Portrait photos from the primary camera have some issues though. The edge detection is pretty decent but the details on your subject’s face are almost always smoothed over, creating an artificially beautified look – even with Beauty Mode turned off. Indian skin tones also seem slightly more red when captured through this camera.
In contrast, the 2x telephoto lens fares much better with portraits. You get a more flattering focal length for portraits, the colours are more natural, and there’s no artificial smoothening happening here. You can see a clear difference in the samples provided below.
Now, this 2x optical telephoto camera is great with portraits and for daylight pictures, however, its quality does take a dip in low light because of the lack of OIS. The primary camera does take pretty decent low-light pictures but its White Balance seems to be thrown off in some scenes. In the example below, there was no source of red or pink light in the room, but the whole picture has taken a pinkish hue.
So, both the primary and telephoto cameras fare pretty well in daylight – you get solid pictures with good colours, detail and dynamic range, and portraits are excellent on the 2x lens.
However, the ultrawide camera could use some work – the dynamic range is poor with the shadows in particular taking a serious hit to quality. As for the 16-megapixel selfie camera, I have no major complaints. It fares about as well as the competition with good pictures in ideal lighting. There’s still no 4K video recording ability here though.
The Realme 12 Pro houses the Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 processor which is built on the 4nm process. It comes with marginally improved performance over the Dimensity 7050 processor that was used on the Realme 11 Pro. You get 8 GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 128 or 256 GB of UFS 3.1 storage.
For those concerned with power above all, this isn’t the phone for you. While the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 can handle day-to-day tasks with ease and even some medium graphics gaming, it is severely outclassed by competitors such as the POCO X6 Pro with the Dimensity 8300 Ultra and the iQOO Z7 Pro with the Dimensity 7200.
Let’s talk about synthetic benchmark numbers. The phone score nearly 600,000 in AnTuTu (v10) but phones such as the POCO X6 Pro and iQOO Z7 Pro comfortably beat this score. The same can be said for GeekBench, but the Realme 12 Pro does manage to score marginally higher than the iQOO Z7 Pro in the Multi-Core test.
The phone got a pretty decent PCMark Work score though, meaning it is up to the task to perform general tasks such as working on Excel sheets, scrolling through web pages, etc. However, one good news is that the phone barely throttles its performance. In the CPU Throttling Test, the phone did not throttle at all in 15 minutes, which is impressive.
In GPU benchmarks, the Realme 12 Pro got some of the lowest scores in its price range and was even beaten out by the Motorola Edge 40 Neo most of the time. So, naturally, this phone is not the most powerful and should not be your go-to pick if your main concern is performance and gaming. There are better options such as the iQOO Z7 Pro that you can get under ₹25,000. And if you’re willing to spend ₹2,000 more, the POCO X6 Pro 5G is blazing fast.
As for the software, you get Android 14 with Realme UI 5.0 on top. There’s considerable bloatware present, but Realme has taken some steps to reduce it. For instance, the phone no longer forces app installation, and the folder of ‘suggested’ apps I despised on the Realme 11 Pro has disappeared.
There are still some repeat offenders like Hot Apps and Hot Games that cannot be removed, but it is moving in the right direction. The company has promised two major OS updates and three years of security updates, but that does feel inadequate by 2024 standards.
Battery capacity and charging speeds remain the same on the Realme 12 Pro. It has a 5,000 mAh battery with 67 W fast charging support, the same as the Realme 11 Pro. It is a good enough one-day usage device that usually ends the day with around 10-15 per cent battery with moderate usage.
In our 4K video loop test, the phone lasted almost 12 hours, which is decent enough. It lost 9 per cent charge by running Google Maps for one hour, and 5 per cent charge when playing Call of Duty: Mobile for 15 minutes. All decent numbers. The phone takes around 52 minutes to charge from zero to full with the included 67 W charger. This is pretty fast for the price.
The Realme 12 Pro lives up to its promises, offering the best design and impressive cameras for under ₹25,000. While its low-light camera performance could be better, the design is nearly flawless, with the potential for improvement with a metal frame in the future.
This phone is striking and bound to attract attention from onlookers. However, it’s not a jack-of-all-trades. Performance-wise, it’s on par with its 2023 predecessor, making it less appealing to power users. The iQOO Z7 Pro and POCO X6 Pro would be better choices for such users. Additionally, the battery life, while decent, isn’t remarkable. Nevertheless, it shines where it claims it will.
However, for those seeking an elegant device with a good display and impressive camera capabilities, the Realme 12 Pro is an excellent choice.
