Apple iPhone 12 Pro – The Best Overall Smartphone

Apple has created an elegant and expensive design of its flagship smartphone with a range of refinements, making the iPhone 12 Pro a complete package. Packed with an extensive screen, versatile camera, and strong battery life, the 12 Pro is all about offering a great smartphone experience to the users.

iPhone 12 Pro design and display

Besides the new colour, the iPhone 12 Pro has quite a peneplain stainless steel frame against the curved edges of every model since the iPhone X. It’s a huge change, however, not anything like we haven’t seen before. Apple first utilized a plain frame for the iPhone 4 and glued to it all the way to the iPhone 5s, before changing its strategy to curved sides. It doesn’t matter if you love it or hate it, you’ll need to get familiar with this design for utilizing the next multiple iPhone generations.

The majority of the ports, as well as buttons, are put in the same way as on the iPhone 11 Pro. The buttons provide decent feedback and are quite flat. The SIM card tray was moved to the left side of the phone. There is just a single physical Nano-SIM that the iPhone 12 Pro supports but an eSIM option is also present.

Display

iPhone 11 Pro’s display was smaller than that of iPhone 12 Pro’s. It measures around 6.1 inches (vs 5.8 inches) and comprises a completely new cover glass material that Apple has named Ceramic Shield.

This is considered to provide around four times better shatter resistance than what we had in the iPhone 11 Pro display. However, this doesn’t always mean it’s more resistant to scratches. We didn’t notice much of any hairline scratches on the brand new 12 Pro display in the two weeks that we used it.

Besides its size as well as the new glass, the features of the display haven’t been amended much. Just like the iPhone 11 Pro, the iPhone 12 Pro also utilizes a Super Retina XDR OLED panel with an immense myriad of brightness of 1,200nits (800nits typical) and also contains a 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio. It also contains many multiple HDR formats like HDR10, Dolby Vision, and HLG.

Excellent Battery Life

Apple doesn’t market the battery potential of its iPhones, however going by some of the latest teardown findings, the iPhone 12 Pro has a jarring 2,815mAh capacity, which is lesser than that of the iPhone 11 Pro. This would be quite derided on an Android smartphone in 2020, however, when it comes to an iPhone, it’s enough for everyday use. People are able to complete an entire day and get some more hours of use the next day before the battery level declines below 10 percent. With greater use, they were still getting closer and closer to a complete day.

It can be quite a drag to charge the iPhone 12 Pro if you don’t own a Type-C power adapter. It can be charged from a computer, however, it will be quite slow and you’ll require one with a Type-C port. Apple will gladly sell you its brand new 20W Type-C adapter for $32, which charges the 12 Pro’s battery to 50 percent under half an hour.

The 18W adapter that we had from the iPhone 11 Pro managed to charge a surprising 58 percent under half an hour. The charging speed starts decreasing after this, and in 30 minutes, the battery charges up to 87 percent. Overall, it takes around an hour and 40 minutes to be fully charged when it comes to iPhone 12 Pro’s battery.

iPhone 12 Pro specs and performance

The iPhone 12 Pro comprises 6GB of RAM. According to Geekbench 5’s diagnostics and other gleaming sources, iPhone 12 Pro has 2GB more space than the iPhone 12 and the iPhone 11 Pro. Other unique features contain Wi-Fi 6, Ultra-Wideband (UWB), Bluetooth 5 configuration for different satellite navigation systems and NFC. The iPhone 12 Pro also provides Face ID for biometric verification utilizing Apple’s TrueDepth 3D camera system. It is also known to operate at depths of around 6m for 30 minutes, up to 4m for the iPhone 11 Pro even if it has a similar IP68 rating. Lastly, the Pro models in 2020 also had a LiDAR scanner, that was first confronted with the iPad Pro (2020) earlier that year.

Before we talk about its performance, let’s look at its software. The iPhone 12 Pro functions on iOS 14.1, which is also free for many latest and even older iPhone models. Talking from the iPhone 11 Pro perspective, the experience with the iPhone 12 Pro is quite similar to that, other than the fact that there are some new static as well as live wallpapers. iOS 14 brought to the limelight new customization options with some amazingly cool hidden features that are also worth checking out.

Due to the LiDAR scanner, many augmented reality apps work a lot better than they did on the iPhone 11 Pro. The more concise spatial information embedded in the phone due to the LiDAR scanner allows apps like Apple’s own Measure app to conveniently estimate the height of a person if you just point the camera at them. Applying actual measurements is also much more precise, even though not entirely exact when relative to a true measuring tape. Apple has also included a ‘People Detection’ feature inside its Magnifier app that utilizes the LiDAR scanner to aid visually impaired people to detect other people around them through audible alerts. This element is now available in iOS 14.2 as well.

iPhone 12 Pro cameras

Superficially, it would look like Apple hasn’t changed the camera setup in its entirety relative to the iPhone 11 Pro. Although, the iPhone 12 Pro does brag about some of the new features, and one especially could just be a robust reason to purchase the 12 Pro. We are obviously talking about the iPhone 12 Pro’s element to record Dolby Vision HDR video, which in our opinion, is quite a game-changer.

There’s also a toggle in the camera app’s settings that allows you to enable or disable this feature. Whenever it is enabled, the iPhone 12 Pro allows you to record up to 4K 60fps video in the Dolby Vision HDR feature. This HDR format is quite increasingly becoming saturated even for budget TVs as well as many of the different streaming services that now utilize it. The majority of the Apple original shows available on Apple TV+ are avid Dolby Vision supporters already. iPhones have large supported HDR playback, with the latest iOS 14.1 updates that also enabled 10-bit HDR playback support on the original iPhone 8 and even some older models.

Apple iPhone 11 – Next to iPhone 11 Pro

If the price tag of the iPhone 11 Pro is too high, then you may consider the iPhone 11 as a very good alternative that comes in $300 cheaper. You’ll enjoy the same excellent performance, all-day battery life, and a great dual-lens camera. It lacks the telephoto lens of the 11 Pro, and the design and screen are nowhere near as good, but you’ll only notice that if you put them side by side. For most people, the iPhone 11 is probably the right pick from Apple’s lineup.

Conclusion

It entirely depends on you whether you want to buy the newest iPhone. However, we do recommend testing it at first and see for yourself if it is of your liking.