Apple iPhone 12 Pro full review By GSMArena Official

Hey, what's up guys will here for GSM arena, we've already reviewed the new iPhone 12, and now it's time to talk about the iPhone 12 Pro in some markets like the US, it's not that much more expensive than the vanilla one. If you compare the storage tiers, so is it worth going for the pro? Instead, let's find out in our full review. Apple has released two devices this year that are really quite similar. The iPhone 12 and the 12 pro both bring pretty much the same design language, including the glass body, with a flat metal frame. The main things that set the pro apart design wise are that the back glass is frosted here, and the shiny frame is a heavier stainless steel rather than aluminum lending a slightly more premium feel. But the easiest way to tell is that the pro has a more complex camera setup on the back.

This build is sturdy and quite durable. Thanks to a special ceramic shield, glass protecting the front panel and of course, you get full ip68 waterproofing. The new iPhones can be submerged up to six meters underwater. The screen itself is quite the same, as you'd find on the iPhone 12. It's a 6.1 inch super retina Dr let with a pixel density of 460 PPI. This year, Apple is still bringing that wide notch cut out at the top for the selfie cam and 3d scanner.

A bit of an eyesore, hopefully we'll see a bezel-less display from them. Before long and despite the current smartphone trends, the newest iPhones have a standard, 60hz refresh rate screen, so you miss out on that super smooth scrolling. But besides that, this screen is great. You get deep, OLED, blacks and color accuracy is excellent. The white balance will adjust based on the ambient lighting, and we measured an excellent 800 nits of maximum brightness here, and the screen is perfectly usable when you're outdoors in the sun stereo speakers are pretty standard for iPhones.

At this point, it's a hybrid setup with one speaker at the bottom and the earpiece acting as the second one, just like the regular iPhone 12. The 12 pro scored a very good mark on our loudness test, and the audio quality here is excellent, with great mid-tones and highs and even some bass. You would hope that, since this is the pro version of the phone, you get some extra goodies in the box. Well, just the opposite is true: you don't get a headphone, adapter or even a charger apple expects you to already have these or to buy them separately and storage isn't expandable either, but there's plenty of storage on board, 128, 256 or 512 gigs like last year. The new iPhones don't use a fingerprint scanner for biometrics, but instead use face ID recognition to wake up and unlock the phone.

It's superfast, reliable and secure thanks to the advanced 3d scanner, but, like we mentioned in our iPhone 12 review, if you're wearing a face mask face, ID won't work which is kind of a big deal. These days, all the new iPhones come with the latest iOS 14.1 pre-installed, with iOS 14. Now you get widget support on the home screen. There are three different widget sizes, and you can place ones of the same size into a stack. Then they can rotate through automatically, or you can manually swipe through them.

There's also a new option for organizing your apps called the app library. It's apple's version of an app drawer, and it sorts the apps into categories. For you and picture-in-picture mode is quite handy. You can minimize a supported app into a floating window which allows you to multitask while watching a video or facetiming. For example.

If you want to know more about iOS 14's new features which there are plenty of you can check out our iOS 14 review linked in the description. Otherwise, the interface is much the same swiping from the left, horn or the notch will summon the notification center and swiping down from the right calls up the control center. All in all, the UI is quite snappy and responsive thanks in part to this year's chipset. The brand new a14 bionic, which is built on a 5 nanometer process, apple claims. It offers 50 better CPU performance over last year and in benchmarks.

It seems like they speak. The truth. Just like the iPhone 12, the 12 pro aces, the charts with this peak performance. These are some of the best numbers we've seen. GPU scores aren't a giant improvement over last year, but still they come out on top and games run flawlessly.

Here you also get a Qualcomm 5g modem on board, so you get 5g network connectivity too. Compared to the iPhone 12. There is more ram on the 12 pro 6 gigs rather than four. You don't really see an effect on benchmark scores, but the extra memory should help in multitasking, and it also helps with certain features like Dolby Vision, video recording and LIDAR scanning, which we'll get to in a bit like the iPhone 12. The iPhone 12 Pro has a 2 800 William hour battery.

It's a smaller capacity than last year and battery life is a little less too. The 12 pro scored an endurance rating of 81 hours in our tests now on to charging, and we got ourselves apple's 20 watt charger for this test. Just like the iPhone 12, we were able to charge the iPhone 12 Pro from zero to 59 in half an hour. This year's iPhones bring support from MagSafe. You can attach certain magnetic accessories to the back of the phone.

Besides things like wallets, this includes the MagSafe wireless charger. We weren't impressed with the results we got from this charger, though it was able to charge the battery from zero to thirty percent in half an hour now on to the iPhone 12 pros camera setup with a 12 megapixel main camera with is, a 12 megapixel fixed focus, ultra-wide cam and a 12 megapixel two times telephoto cam, but the main cam has a wider aperture now and there's a new addition to the mix, a LIDAR scanner. The LIDAR scanner is like a TOF camera used on other phones, but much more advanced. It calculates distances to objects by repeatedly posting a laser and measuring the reflections, and with this info it creates a cloud-like map of points that can represent the object in 3d space. This has its application in augmented reality measurement and scanner apps.

The LIDAR scanner is also used to provide edge detection for portraits in dark conditions and also to improve focusing speed and accuracy at night. Besides that, though, the camera performance is largely the same as the iPhone 12. Daylight photos from the main camera. Looks good with low noise levels, balance sharpness, accurate, colors and good contrast. The dynamic range isn't jaw dropping, but the photos look natural and well-balanced.

We aren't fans of how the 12 pro handles fine detail, though things like grass, foliage or window blinds, often look smeared. If you peek from up close ultra-wide performance is the same as the iPhone 12. The field of view is super wide here and distortion correction is quite proficient. The images have good contrast. Low noise and realistic colors detail is just average here, though two times zoom photos from the 12 megapixel telephoto are excellent.

You get great contrast, accurate colors and balanced dynamic range. There's plenty of resolved detail too. If you're, shooting in low light with the main cam night mode will trigger automatically it's quite streamlined, since it is in a separate mode, it usually goes for one or two second exposures and the image is saved instantly. The results are sharp and detailed with true to life. Colors and low noise exposure is balanced too, with mostly preserved, highlights and detail and shadows do have to specifically opt out of the night mode if you want to take a shot without it.

This results in photos with lower sharpness and contrast, more visible noise and a bit washed out colors, but they still aren't bad. An upgrade over last year is that the ultra-wide camera supports night mode which triggers automatically like on the main cam. These photos are very usable with balanced exposure contained highlights, decent detail and true to life colors. They are still rather soft and noisy, though manually disabling night mode will get you ultra-wide images with low detail plenty of noise, desaturated, colors and softness throughout the frame. If you zoom at night, you'll, either get a shot from the telephoto camera or a digital crop from the main cam, depending on how dark the scene is.

If the telephoto does kick in, the photos have better than expected detail and HDR restores most of the highlights. They are a bit noisy and washed out. Looking, though, and there is no night mode support on this camera, the detailed depth mapping provided by the LIDAR scanner gives the iPhone 12 Pro an advantage. As far as subject separation goes for portraits. These are taken with a telephoto cam by default, and they are good.

The separation is outstanding and the refocus background looks quite nice. However, the detail could be better here and there is some visible noise. You can also take portraits with the main camera for a wider field of view. It has more detail, though. The separation isn't as good here as we expected.

We were impressed, though, by portrait effects, which seemed to really shine thanks to the LIDAR scanner. These artsy photos come out really nice, even on a first attempt with great looking edges around the subject. Thanks to the LIDAR depth mapping, the iPhone 12 Pro supports night mode, portraits with the main camera. These photos turn out great, with very good separation for these conditions. You get nice contrast and well-preserved.

Colors too, however, even though there is an improvement in the separation exposure and color saturation compared to the regular iPhone 12, the difference isn't night and day and with the use of the auto, enhance in the gallery app, you can achieve nearly the same result on the 12 that you'd get on the 12 pro. It just takes an extra step now onto selfies, taken with the 12 megapixel front facing cam, you have the choice between taking a full frame, 12, megapixel selfie or a cropped in 7 megapixels, one with tighter framing the quality here is awesome with plenty of detail, great contrast, superb colors and well handled noise. The HDR is well-balanced, too, resulting in quite a natural looking photo thanks to the 3d scanner on the front. Selfie portraits are outstanding, with impressive separation and refocus backgrounds. These come out in the cropped, 7 megapixel field of view.

Night mode is available on the selfie camera too, and it brightens the whole photo and exposes more detail. The images are still soft and noisy, though you can shoot selfie videos in 4k resolution, and these are excellent, with very good detail. Now onto video captured with the rear cameras, starting with the main one, 4k footage is excellent, with true-to-life colors, great contrast, low noise and impressive dynamic range. Fine detail is a little lacking, but it's not a big deal. Video captured with a telephoto camera is virtually identical in quality to that from the main cam.

The only difference is the zoom 4k footage from the ultra-wide is decent, but not great. While you do get excellent contrast, colors and dynamic range, the resolve detail is mediocre. On the iPhone 12 Pro you can capture HDR videos in the Dolby Vision, dynamic, HDR, video format in up to 4k at 60fps. If you do, the videos will still look normal on a nonuser screen. Since the Dolby Vision, information is saved separately in low light.4K videos from the main cam are very good. They are detailed enough with good colors and reasonably low noise.

You can't shoot low light video with a telephoto, but you can with the ultrawide. This is a rather poor quality. Finally, there's electronic stabilization available on all cameras and all resolutions, as you'd expect from an iPhone is fantastic. So that's the iPhone 12 Pro compared to last year's model. It's got a larger screen with better durability, a much faster chipset with 5g improved portrait photos, night mode with the ultra-wide, a LIDAR TOF camera for 3d scanning and the new MagSafe accessory support.

Of course, you don't get a charger in the box this time and with this huge notch and applying old 60hz refresh rate, the iPhones will be behind the pack as far as display goes for yet another year. Some people don't care about that, though, but they might wonder if they should go for the iPhone 12 or the 12 pro, honestly. The two phones are the same. The only major differences are the two times optical zoom and the TOF camera. In some markets like the US, the price difference isn't huge, and you might not mind spending an extra 120 bucks for a more versatile camera system.

But if you're in a region like the EU, where you'd have to pay 200 euros for that camera upgrade, the iPhone 12 seems like the better deal. Thanks for watching guys, stay safe and see you on the next one. You.

Source : GSMArena Official