The smartphone experience on the realme 12 Pro

The design and build quality of the realme 12 Pro are good, and I liked using it. Its vegan leather exterior is soft to the touch, offering a nice feel and giving you the impression that it will stay secure in your hand. However, to enjoy the smartphone fully, you have to take the risk of not mounting its protective cover. That’s not ideal if you’re not usually careful about scratching or dropping your phone.

The vegan leather is nice and soft

The screen is quite large, more than enough to make this phone great for internet browsing, reading, or watching videos. It also offers excellent brightness levels and impressive clarity. However, because of its dimensions, this phone might require two-handed navigation for some, like children or persons with smaller hands.

The screen is large and bright

The realme 12 Pro 5G performs admirably when it comes to the fundamental aspect of smartphones, which is making calls. It’s been ages since I’ve had to critique a phone’s call quality or mobile network connectivity, and the realme 12 Pro continues the trend. My conversations over the phone were great, with clear and crisp audio quality.

Phone call quality is good

The realme 12 Pro 5G delivers solid performance in everyday tasks, too. Media playback is flawless, and it can even handle gaming pretty well. However, in the case of more demanding games, medium to low settings are required for smooth gameplay. The graphics unit is not powerful enough for high framerates and/or high-quality visuals.

Gaming is OK but not amazing

The stereo speakers offer a solid audio performance for a phone, with no distortion at high volumes but limited bass. For a better experience, you should always use headphones.

The fingerprint reader is accurate and fast, outperforming many of the ones I’ve tested on other similar smartphones. During my time with it, the realme 12 Pro rarely failed to read my fingerprint correctly. However, I did find its placement a bit awkward, being near the bottom edge.

The fingerprint sensor is accurate

The realme 12 Pro 5G’s battery life is impressive, easily lasting a full day with moderate use and potentially stretching to one and a half or even two days for lighter users. Its 67W fast charging is excellent, filling up over half the battery in just 20 minutes and reaching full capacity in 48 minutes. It’s right on point with realme’s marketing claims.

Charging time for the realme 12 Pro

In real life, the realme 12 Pro 5G stands out with its beautiful design, vibrant display, and excellent battery life. It charges faster than many, and experience-wise, it’s a strong contender in the mid-range Android market.

The camera experience on the realme 12 Pro

The realme 12 Pro features an advanced triple-camera array on the back, comprising a 50 MP primary camera, a 32 MP telephoto lens, and an 8 MP ultrawide sensor. The primary camera promises superior image quality in both daylight and low-light conditions. The telephoto lens offers 2x optical zoom and 4x lossless digital zoom for detailed photographs of distant objects as well as crystal-clear portraits. Lastly, the ultrawide sensor provides a large angle for capturing landscapes and group photos.

The realme 12 Pro includes a telephoto camera

The Camera app on the realme 12 Pro 5G is fairly simple and easy to use, and it supports all the common shooting modes. The ones shown by default are Photo, Video, Portrait, Street, and Night. Tapping on More gives you access to the more specialized modes: Pro, Pano(rama), Hi-Res, Movie, Slo-Mo, Time-Lapse, Long Exposure, Dual-View Video, Text Scanner, Starry Mode, Group Portrait, and Tilt-Shift.

The Camera app is easy to use

The photos I took in daylight were of good quality, with plenty of detail, good contrast, and dynamic range. There’s no obvious noise in good lighting conditions, but the colors tend to be somewhat oversaturated.

Photo quality in daylight is excellent

The same is true about the photos I took using 2x zoom, which is done optically through the telephoto lens.

2x zooming is optical

When zooming in 4x, the photographs remain lossless because the magnification occurs within the sensor, maintaining quality. However, these photos do exhibit some noise, and the colors aren’t as vibrant as those shot at 1x or 2x zoom levels. Still, the overall quality of the images is quite good.

4x zooming is lossless

The ultrawide camera also manages to deliver satisfactory results, but there is a noticeable color discrepancy compared to photos captured with the primary or telephoto lenses.

Colors on the ultrawide camera don't match the other lens

The realme 12 Pro does pretty well in close-up photography, too. The colors are vibrant, and it manages a decent background blur. However, for sharp focus, you’ll need to maintain a minimum distance of about 8 cm from the subject.

Close-ups are of good quality

Activating Portrait mode allows for capturing detailed portraits with a realistic and convincing background blur. It performs unexpectedly well, even when photographing non-living subjects. 🙂

The smartphone excels at shooting portraits

The realme 12 Pro 5G’s cameras are, for lack of another word, reasonable at night, delivering usable photographs with decent clarity. Still, with all lenses - main, telephoto, and ultrawide - expect noticeable graininess and a slight blurriness in shadowy regions. Additionally, there’s room for enhancement in dynamic range and color fidelity.

Low-light photo quality is decent

If you’d like to see more samples, browse the gallery below. It includes photos I’ve shot with the realme 12 Pro both during daylight and at night, with and without zooming.

Moving on to video recording, you should know that the smartphone can record videos in up to 4K resolution at 30 fps. It also offers 1080p recording at both 30 and 60 fps. While optical image stabilization enhances video quality by decreasing shakes, it’s not supported at 4K.

Watch the next clip, shot at 4K resolution and 30 frames per second, to get a clearer picture of how good video recordings are. As you can see, the smartphone can capture fine details, produces adequate colors, and maintains good contrast levels.

In the next video sample, recorded in 1080p and 60 frames per second, with more movement, you can notice a similar level of quality and how the image stabilization does its job:

The realme 12 Pro 5G is a smartphone that offers excellent photo and video recording experience in well-lit environments, even when zooming in or shooting portraits. It has its fair share of struggling during the night, but the results you get are decent. Overall, I’m quite satisfied with this smartphone’s cameras, considering that it’s a mid-range device, not a flagship.

Android 14, realme UI 5.0, and bundled apps

The realme 12 Pro comes with realme UI 5.0, a user interface based on Android 14. While I had it in testing, the phone received a software update that improved security and optimized the Camera app’s performance, network experience, and system stability. As far as I know, realme’s policy remains the same as in previous years, meaning that this smartphone should receive two operating system upgrades and three years of security patches.

The realme 12 Pro 5G comes with Android 14 and realme UI 5.0

realme UI 5.0 builds upon Android’s standard interface by adding a series of enhancements designed to offer a more user-friendly experience. This clean, feature-packed UI (user interface) allows detailed customization, from always-on display settings to personalized wallpapers, fonts, icons, and colors. Navigation is straightforward, and you can choose either gesture or traditional button controls. Multitasking includes Split View and Flexible Window options alongside a Smart Sidebar (that’s similar to Samsung’s Edge Panels). I find the latter very useful for quick app access and for its new File Dock feature that lets you simply drag files in open apps to edit or share them.

The user interface is clean and customizable

During the initial setup of the realme 12 Pro, the phone gave me the option to accept or reject the installation of two recommended apps: Temu and weather24. As I prefer a cleaner system, I declined to install them. However, the realme 12 Pro 5G still installed a lot of apps that I didn’t want or need, apps that weren’t shown in this initial list. Besides the essential apps (like Camera) and the ones from Google that are standard in Android (like Chrome), this is what I got:

• Amazon Shopping: The known online store’s application for shopping.
• App Market: An alternative to Google’s Play Store for downloading apps.
• Booking: Handy for trip planning and hotel reservations.
• Calculator: Useful tool for math problems.
• Clock: Simply tells the time, as the name suggests.
• Clone Phone: Offers easy data migration from your old device.
• Compass: A straightforward app indicating cardinal points.
• Facebook: The app version of the popular social network.
• Games: A central hub for managing installed games on your smartphone.
• Internet: A web browser with a simple interface. Most people will prefer using Google Chrome instead.
• LinkedIn: The official app for the widely-used business and employment-focused social network.
• Music: Manages and plays your music collection.
• My Files: Useful for organizing files and folders on your device.
• Netflix: The Android app of this popular streaming service.
• Notes: A minimalistic note-taking app with to-do list functionality.
• Phone Manager: Helps monitor smartphone health and perform optimizations.
• Photos: The default gallery app for viewing images.
• Recorder: Records audio using the phone’s microphone.
• Spotify: The application of the popular music streaming platform.
• TikTok: The entry into the popular social network using the same name.
• Videos: Allows playback of locally stored videos.
• Weather: Displays upcoming weather forecasts.
• WPS Office: A mobile office suite application.
• Zen Space: Helps eliminate distractions with features like Deep Zen and Light Zen, which silence notifications for focused work.

realme bundles a lot of apps by default

Thanks to its many customization options and overall simplicity, I can say that I like the realme UI. However, I don’t appreciate the excessive number of bundled apps you can’t opt out of during the initial installation.

Performance in benchmarks

Having seen what the realme 12 Pro has to offer in design, specs, camera, software, and user experience, let’s now move on to check its performance in benchmarks:

I began by testing the realme 12 Pro with Geekbench. The smartphone got a Single-Core score of 934 and a Multi-Core score of 2640 points. Additionally, the GPU Compute benchmarks ended with scores of 1320 for OpenCL and 1706 for Vulkan. These figures show that the realme 12 Pro 5G is a competent mid-range device for daily use and can also provide a decent gaming experience. Nevertheless, compared to other mid-range Android phones with similar features, such as the Motorola Edge 40 or the Xiaomi Poco X6 Pro, which are similarly priced, the chipset inside the realme 12 Pro falls short in speed for both CPU and graphics.

Benchmark results in Geekbench 6

Next, I tested realme 12 Pro 5G’s performance with 3DMark. It achieved a score of 2383 in the Wild Life benchmark and 5421 points in Sling Shot. These results aren’t top-tier, but they’re good enough to indicate that this smartphone can handle casual gaming easily. For more demanding games, it delivers decent frame rates, though you may need to adjust the graphics settings for smooth play.

Benchmark results in 3DMark

Continuing, I turned to PCMark for Android to benchmark the smartphone in everyday performance and to see how it estimates its battery life under typical usage conditions. The realme 12 Pro 5G achieved a decent Work 3.0 performance score of 11500 points, alongside a remarkable battery endurance of 16 hours and a half!

Benchmark results in PCMark

Last but not least, I also took a look at the wireless performance offered by the realme 12 Pro. The 5G speed provided by my mobile operator is underwhelming, to say the least, and it’s not worth sharing. On the other hand, my home 1 Gbps internet plan offers a maximum download speed of 940 Mbps and an average speed of 850 Mbps. Using my Wi-Fi 6 mesh routers, the results I got for the realme 12 Pro 5G with Ookla’s Speedtest app were impressive: 734 Mbps in the download test and 628 Mbps for upload.

Benchmark results in Speedtest

The realme 12 Pro delivers solid performance for productivity and casual gaming. Its battery life is good, lasting up to two days. However, its chipset is less powerful than what you can get on similarly-priced Android smartphones.

What do you think of the realme 12 Pro?

The realme 12 Pro 5G has impressed me with its elegant design and cameras. However, its benchmark results disappointed me a bit and I would’ve wanted more from a smartphone with a mid-range price. But this is my opinion, and I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this smartphone. Are you considering buying the realme 12 Pro? What other mid-range Android smartphones are you weighing it against? Use the commenting options below to share your perspective. 🙂