Xiaomi 12T Review

The “T” series has always been special in the Xiaomi smartphone line. The devices of this series have advanced features and excellent performance, and can also compete with flagship smartphones in many ways, while being noticeably cheaper. In the price segment, the T-series smartphones are between state employees and flagships, a sort of middle peasant for those who need a good smartphone and, moreover, not too expensive. We will look at one of the representatives of this series today, namely Xiaomi 12T.

Appearance -absolutely nothing new

The device received the classic strict design of its predecessor with minimal changes. The smartphone comes in three different colors: blue, black, gray. Design:

• Sensors. The first thing that catches your eye is in the upper-left corner of a rectangular, the insert noticeably protruding from the body contains a triple camera unit with a dividing line between the sensors.
• Materials. The back panel is made of frosted glass, for this reason, the smartphone does not slip in your hand. The gadget itself does not give the impression of being cheap, build quality and overall feel of using it at a high level.
• AMOLED. The front panel is covered with glass - surprisingly, without the classic “chin”. The smartphone is equipped with a 6.67-inch AMOLED display with Always on Display mode and a resolution of 2712×1220 with support for royal 120 Hz.
• Fingerprint scanner. Series 12, unlike its predecessor, finally got an under-screen fingerprint scanner, it is located at the bottom of the display. It works fast enough, even in the cold season.
• Work. Chinese smartphones often sin by that their under-screen scanner stops working in standby mode until the smartphone detects movement - here the scanner always works, even if its visual performance is not displayed on the screen. Along with finger unlock, there is also the option of face recognition using the front camera.
• Front camera. The front camera is located in a hole in the center of the top of the display. The system provides a mode for repainting the status bar in true black, due to which you can visually hide the cutout with the camera.
• IP53. Xiaomi 12T is equipped with two stereo speakers: one on the top and one on the bottom, both placed behind the dotted grilles. You can also find an infrared port on the top panel. There is no TRS 3.5 mm headphone jack.

Autonomy

Autonomy is one of the main advantages that Xiaomi 12T can boast of and even wipe the nose of many flagships. The smartphone has not only a capacious 5000 mAh battery, but also one of the fastest chargers on the market - 120W.

Battery:

• 120W. Fortunately, the company does not reduce the bundle under environmental pretexts and put a 120 W power supply in the kit. Unprecedented generosity because such an adapter is not cheap.
• 20 minutes. In the maximum charging mode, the smartphone can be charged from 0 to 100% in just about 20 minutes. And it's incredibly fast, just a couple of minutes of distraction is enough, as the smartphone is already fully charged and ready to go.
• Harm. How much does such a fast charge harm the battery? It's hard to say, but the company promises that such charging will not hurt. At the same time, it is worth noting that the smartphone has a fairly powerful liquid cooling system, which makes itself felt - the smartphone does not overheat even with such a fast charge.
• AMOLED. As for autonomy, the smartphone has an economical AMOLED display that can dynamically change the screen refresh rate to save energy.
• Full HD. Xiaomi 12T is capable of playing videos in Full-HD resolution for 16 hours, and with moderate load, it can easily withstand a day and a half of work. With active use, even with games, you can count on a day.
• Wireless charging. The smartphone does not have wireless charging, but with such a speed of wired charging, it is not really needed, to be honest - the smartphone does not stay long on the wire anyway.

Display

As noted earlier, Xiaomi 12T has an AMOLED display of the same diagonal as its predecessor, namely 6.67 inches, but the resolution here is higher and amounts to 2712 × 1220 pixels (with a pixel density of 446 ppi). 

Screen:

• 120 Hz. The display supports 120 Hz, which works not only in system applications, but also in games. The color scheme of the display can be customized. The sampling rate of the touch layer reaches 480 Hz. There is support for HDR10+.
• 900 nits. The peak brightness of the display is 900 nits, which is very worthy - the smartphone is comfortable to use even on a bright day.
• Always On Display. Always On Display is naturally present here. The menu system includes numerous amazing dials, which are just not there: abstract, digital, with space, nature, etc. MIUI has enough of this.

Camera

The smartphone is equipped with a set of three cameras - the main, wide-angle and macro cameras, the characteristics are as follows: Characteristics:

• Wide-angle and macro camera. The wide-angle and macro cameras here cannot boast of quality, unlike the main camera. It contains a 108-megapixel Samsung HM6 sensor with optical stabilization. The optics produce a picture of sufficiently high quality with good contrast in winter lighting conditions.
• Proximity sensor. Unfortunately, there is no telephoto module, so the zoom is only digital. The quality of pictures at 2x zoom is still acceptable, but at a higher zoom level, detail is reduced significantly.
• Night. At night, the smartphone can automatically switch to night shooting. She, like daytime, shows excellent results: no noticeable noise was detected, color correction is at a decent level, as is the processing of light sources. Night mode takes extra time to take a picture, but it usually doesn't take more than a second.
• Zoom in. As in the daytime, the previously mentioned zoom does not look entertaining, far away at night, the detail drops even more.
• Video shooting. Video shooting here is also decent. The main camera module can shoot video in resolution up to 4K, but only at 30 frames. In daylight, the picture looks nice, while walking, the stabilizer works perfectly: there are no noticeable twitches, but due to the lack of support for 60 frames, sometimes the picture may still seem blurry.

Processor

Xiaomi 12T is powered by Dimensity 8100 Ultra, an improved version of the Dimensity 8100 chip. The processor combines eight cores with a maximum clock speed of 2.85 GHz. By the way, it is positioned as a competitor to Snapdragon 888 from Qualcomm. The video core Mali-G610 MC6 is responsible for the graphics here. Power:

• Antutu. And this is an extremely entertaining processor. In the Antutu benchmark, Xiaomi 12T scored 778,764 points in economy mode and 837,351 points in maximum performance mode. Quite a big result.
• 3DMark. In addition to excellent performance, Xiaomi 12T offers an equally important thing - excellent stability. In the 3DMark stress test, which lasted 20 minutes, the smartphone showed a stability of 97% - a wonderful result. After a long time in the maximum performance mode, the gadget warmed up slightly, but did not give even a hint of throttling.
• Genshin Impact. As far as practical tests are concerned, in Genshin Impact, the device holds an almost stable 60 frames at maximum graphics settings. Even after a long time, the smartphone does not heat up and does not give hints of throttling.

Operating system

As an operating system, the smartphone uses the latest proprietary Xiaomi MIUI 14 shell based on Android 13. One of the main differences between MIUI 14 and its predecessor is the achievement of better performance optimization so that the system works stably and without failures. OS:

• Transitions. In the new version, the transitions in the system have become much smoother, and the feedback on touch has also improved. Xiaomi promises a performance increase of up to 26% both in the system and in third-party applications compared to the previous version.
• Customization. Otherwise, there are no significant changes, everything remains in place: a fresh corporate identity, a huge number of settings and customization, separated notification area and settings menu in the style of Apple. In addition, MIUI 14 has implemented a new system widget design. Some of them have a design more similar to iOS. This gives the system a more elegant, modern and simple look.
• AOD. The shell is rich in customization, you can change literally everything - fonts, AOD, notification style. At the same time, the system does not impose a new design, if you like the old style, you can change it at any time in the settings.

Xiaomi 12T VS Realme GT Neo 3T

Conclusion