realme 12 Pro Plus 256GB

The Realme 12 Pro+ boasts a curved 6.7-inch AMOLED display with a centred punch-hole, FHD+ resolution, 120Hz refresh rate, and a peak brightness of 950 nits. These are the same display specifications found on its predecessor, and except for the peak brightness, everything else is on par with its competitors within the segment. Despite its relatively low peak brightness, the content looks pleasing to the eye both indoors and outdoors. This could be attributed to the rich colours and impressive viewing angles the smartphone offers. The display has been optimised with Pro-XDR to improve its visibility and bring out finer details in HDR photographs in various lighting conditions. The Realme 12 Pro+ also employs 2,160Hz PWM dimming to eliminate flickering to an extent and eliminate eye strain.Apart from this, the smartphone supports HDR10; however, it can only stream content in FHD resolution from streaming platforms such as Netflix and YouTube. Be that as it may, the phone is equipped with Hi-Res dual speakers fine-tuned by Dolby Atmos, to deliver an immersive listening and viewing experience.

Let's talk about the cameras, which are the major USP of this smartphone. The Realme 12 Pro+ is equipped with a triple rear camera setup consisting of a 50MP Sony IMX890 primary sensor, an 8MP ultra-wide sensor, and a 64MP OV64B periscope telephoto lens that delivers 3x optical zoom. While the handset is touted to offer up to 120x zoom, it appears somewhat gimmicky, as images beyond 6x zoom tend to suffer in both quality and details.The 3x zoom is where you will find the best results. It is equivalent to a 71mm focal length that captures images with a good dynamic range and consistent colours akin to the results captured by the primary camera, at least in daylight conditions. The details around the shadowy area remain a big negligible, but that's passable. The lens uses an in-sensor zoom to provide 6x shots, which appear usable albeit with some distortion. As for the 8MP ultrawide lens, its performance is reliable in a well-lit environment. The images captured are sharp, particularly around the centre of the frame, and the colours are vibrant too. However, in low light, you might find the sensor struggling, much like any mid-ranger with an 8MP ultra-wide sensor.The 50MP primary sensor, in contrast, performs admirably better than its counterparts in both daylight and lowlight environments. While the colours look slightly oversaturated, the details and sharpness are quite impressive. The sensor also exposes the image well to capture details even around the shadowy areas. The sensor is also consistent when it comes to capturing human skin tones in both Photo and Portrait modes. However, it's worth noting that the phone's portrait mode struggles with consistency, occasionally resulting in the unintended blurring of parts of the subject's face.

Coming to the performance, it has been taken care of by the Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 chipset. This is a slightly toned-down version of the Snapdragon 7 Gen 2, which was seen last year on POCO F5. The Realme 12 Pro+ performs admirably, with no app crashes or awkward freezes detected in everyday use. The handset can also handle demanding tasks like multitasking and gaming, albeit with not as much finesse as some of its other counterparts. The Realme 12 Pro+ is tailored towards casual users who don't heavily engage in gaming activities.The handset is available in three RAM and storage configurations: 8GB + 128GB, 8GB + 256GB, and 12GB + 256GB. While the RAM in all three variants can be expanded virtually up to 12GB, the storage remains fixed. There is no option to expand it using a microSD card slot.Talking about the software, the Realme 12 Pro+ boots Realme UI 5.0 on top of Android 14 out of the box. The new UI comes with a relatively cleaner and easy-to-use user interface. There are fewer pre-installed apps compared to the year's Realme 11 Pro+ (review). Additionally, most of these apps are removable if they are not useful to you. The company has also restricted hot apps and recommended apps by default. However, if needed, they can be enabled from the settings menu.Apart from this and the goodness of Android 14, the UI also offers several new features such as File Dock for easy extraction of text, images, and links from a file and Smart Image matting to copy the subject (up to 3) from the image to clipboard and move them between apps, share it on social media, and more. Then there's Phonelink for easy integration with Windows laptop/ PC and Flash Capsule, among other things. The Realme 12 Pro+ will receive two years of major software and three years of security updates.

The Realme 12 Pro+ is driven by a 5,000mAh battery, which is the same as last year. The handset averaged around 7-8 hours of screen-on time during my usage, which mostly involved streaming, browsing, some gaming, and social media activities. Even with slightly heavier usage than this, the phone should last at least a day. On the PCMark battery test, the 12 Pro+ returned with an impressive score of 19 hours and 17 minutes.As for its charging speeds, the smartphone can be juiced up from 0-100 percent comfortably within an hour with the provided 67W fast charger. This has been the average charging speed for smartphones within the segment.