Earlier this year, Samsung treated us to the kind of image madness we could expect from its new 200-megapixel camera sensor by pasting a huge photo of a cat on the side of a building. The honors for the first smartphone to feature such a monster sensor went to Motorola last month, and now Xiaomi has joined the rather exclusive 200-MP party.
As with the Motorola handset, the star of this particular flagship smartphone show is a 200-MP main camera that's based on Samsung's 1/1.22-inch Isocell HP1 image sensor, with individual 0.64 µm pixels that are grouped together in fours and sixteens for increased light-capturing potential.
This module is fronted by a F1.69 lens made up of eight elements and offers an 85° field of view, but the optics don't come with Leica branding we saw on the 12S back in July. Other key camera specs include optical image stabilization for keeping things steady and 2x in-sensor zoom.
And all of that impressive camera tech is supported by Xiaomi's own AI algorithms for the promise of "superb imagery with high clarity, strong night photography, and quick focusing" – plus the ability to record 8K HDR10+ video. The main camera is joined by an 8-MP ultra-wide and a 2-MP macro shooter, plus there's a 20-MP selfiecam out front.
Staying in front, the Pro features a 6.67-inch Dolby Vision AMOLED display at 2,712 x 1,220 resolution (446 ppi) and rocking a 20:9 aspect. There's an adaptive 120-Hz refresh rate for snappy visuals, and up to 480 Hz of touch sampling for responsive input. Peak brightness of 900 nits should be good for outdoor use, the contrast ratio is reported to be 5-million:1, and there's support for HDR10+ content too. Meanwhile, an in-display fingerprint sensor caters for password-free logins.
The flagship phone is powered by Qualcomm's latest and greatest mobile platform, the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 SoC, for zippy processing at up to 3.2 GHz, integrated Adreno graphics and a 7th-gen AI engine. It can be had with up to 12 GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 256 GB of UFS 3.1 storage, and Xiaomi keeps things cool with a vapor chamber that's reported to be 65% larger than in the heat dissipation system of its predecessor, plus boasts 125% more thermal material coverage.
The 12T Pro runs Xiaomi's MIUI 13 operating system, which is based on Android 12, and in addition to 5G mobile internet, the dual-SIM smartphone can tap into Wi-Fi 6 too. Bluetooth 5.2 comes along for the ride as well.
There's a 5,000-mAh battery with support for 120-W wired charging (and the phone ships with a charger too) for up to 13.5 hours of screen time in just 19 minutes. And the dual Dolby Atmos speakers are tuned by Harman Kardon.
Xiaomi also announced a slightly less capable 12T model at today's launch, which tops out at (only) 108 megapixels in the camera department, is powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 8100 Ultra chipset and comes with 8 GB of RAM only.
The 12T Series handsets go on sale in mainland Europe from October 13. The Pro model starts at €749, while its 12T sibling starts at €599. Neither smartphone is likely to make it to the US.
Product page: 12T Pro