iPhone 12 Pro Review (4 Months Later) By Tomas Villegas

So, it has been four months since I brought the iPhone 12 Pro into my life and I think I'm ready to share my full review on this device with you to break this down quickly and give you my full thoughts right out of the gate. It has a great build. I love the new squared off edges. It feels great in the hand the rear camera is okay. The front-facing camera is perfect.5G is decent when I can grab some of it of ft-mobile's network here in northern Utah. I wish the speakers were better battery life isn't as good as the iPhone 11 Pro and if you don't need 128 gigabytes of storage, a telephoto lens, a LIDAR scanner or a stainless steel framed phone, then save yourself 200 and get the iPhone 12.

Personally, I think that's a much better phone for the money, and I mean who doesn't want an extra 200 in their pocket. That's it and that's my summary of this review. If you haven't clicked away and are hanging around for me to elaborate on these points, let's hop into this review, the 12 pro has an improved camera system and when AI decides it's time to kick the LIDAR scanner into action, it will deliver improved autofocus in low light situations, and it helps with snapping quick pictures and shots in darker environments, which most of us are always in when we're with family and friends. We're never in perfect lighting conditions. The pros primary and ultrawide sensors are exactly the same as the 12.

With the pro you get an additional two times. Telephoto zoom sensor it's nice to have, but unless you know you're going to use the two time telephoto lens on the pro, you don't really need it. In my use, I find myself using the ultra-wide and standard lenses, the majority of the time I rarely kick the two times zoom in because when I'm taking photos and videos, it's usually in not so desirable lighting conditions like I was talking about earlier, throwing it into the two times telephoto lens in low light situations, makes the photos and videos you take. Look not so great, even with all the computational photo processing the a14 bionic chip, that's in the iPhone 12 and 12 pro that's throwing at it. That's because pretty much every smartphone manufacturer has a secondary telephoto camera in their devices.

That is using a smaller sensor with less light gathering capabilities than their primary sensors on their devices. The iPhone 12 Pro is no exception to that statement. Even the a14 bionic chip knows this, because when there is less light and day fades in tonight, it turns out the device decides to utilize the main sensor, because it is bigger and is more capable of producing better image because of its light gathering capabilities, and then the a14 goes to work by adding its computational photography processing. On the back end, giving you a clearer image, you can cover up the telephoto lens, while zooming in a low light, shooting situation and everything still works as expected. It's weird cool and really confusing to me, if I do say so myself, and mainly because I'm not quite sure if the two-time zooming capability is worth the additional cost of the pro alone.

A quick side note with that and for you to note the 12 pro max has a bigger primary sensor, which is capable of gathering more light a longer telephoto lens, so you can zoom in more and has sensors shift image stabilization. Those additions are pretty significant from what I've seen in comparisons done on the two between the iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro max by other folks. Here on YouTube for the first time in a while, the iPhone lineup is once again fragmented into cameras departments. The 12 pro max has the better camera of all the iPhone 12 variants hands down, but it's too big for me, and it doesn't fit into my skinny jeans. Let's take some time and speak to the LIDAR scanner.

There is this new little circle cut out where the camera sensors live, and it is essentially a depth sensor that is primarily used to gather physical data, so the phone itself has a better sense of where it is in the world. It's not guessing. It's not basing it off contrast or anything like that. Furthermore, it's actually reaching out you know and returning data to it. I know that explanation is a gross oversimplification of what awesome things the scanner actually does.

The LIDAR scanner has some pretty niche uses for photography and remains pretty much inactive throughout the day in poor lighting it fires up and can do up to six times faster autofocus on people and selected objects. I noticed this right away after migrating all of my data from my 11 pro. This thing will focus superfast in low light situations and does a pretty impressive job at it. Using the LIDAR scanner now lets you do portrait mode at night as well, and that's a cool addition. The LIDAR does the whole augmented reality thing too, and that depends on if you care about that type of thing, or not, the only AR type of thing that I've done is using the measurement app from time to time, because it has seen a pretty significant speed, increase and apple says.

It is also more accurate, but personally it's still not at the level to where I would trust it over a good old-fashioned tape measure you know measurements uh taking for construction purposes or something are way too important to trust it to a device like this still, maybe at some point in the future. It'll get better, but not right. Now, now on to the build quality of the iPhone 12 Pro, it's great and Apple doesn't disappoint. But one item to know that is probably a singular case on my part- is my sim tray doesn't sit flush with the frame of the device. You can feel how crooked the tray is on frame, and it doesn't fit quite straight into the phone.

This is only on my device, as my wife's 12 pro is in immaculate condition and the tray fits in the device as intended. I don't know if I should reach out to apple for this, but it's not a huge deal, because I keep my phone in a case anyways. I love that apple decided to return to the squared off design. It now stands on its own without assistance making it nearly the perfect phone for shooting b-roll of the stainless steel frame is a beautiful addition, as they have continued to refine it until you pick it up, because the frame will pick up every single fingerprint there is out there in the world my phone lives primarily in a case anyways. The last thing I'll say about build quality is that there is a decent sized glass cut out on the frame to give the device 5g capabilities.

I am not a fan of how this breaks up the design and what it does to the aesthetics of the 12 pro. Now, that's just a small complaint for me. I know it's necessary to achieve 5g connectivity. It's just something I prefer not to have. Maybe they could have had it come out the back or something and blend it into the glass on the back of the device.

That's a nice segue for my next point. This is the first series of iPhone to offer 5g connectivity and, depending on your carrier and location, I'm in an area that has spotty 5g availability at best through T-Mobile, and I get the impression that 5g just isn't ready for prime time for the good majority of iPhone users in the United States, especially in rural areas of the country. Don't get me wrong. I like that apple is pushing the envelope, but I can't help but think that if they excluded the 5g radio from the iPhone 12 could they have saved consumers some more money on the cost of the device. Also, it would probably help separate the 12 pro from the lineup even more because I mean they're already doing it with the camera.

Fragmentation anyways iOS allows you to disable 5g entirely. If you need to which I did because I noticed a significant knock to my battery, as my cellular network was continuously trying to deliver 5g connectivity to my device, and it's just not there yet. So if you go into settings cellular data options and voice and data, you can go full fledged 5g on or keep the device in its default at 5g auto. I went ahead and put my device into LTE, and I've noticed quite a bit better battery life throughout my day, and my internet connectivity is noticeably more reliable. I understand, 5g is the future, but I'm just not convinced it's ready for consumer use for those folks in non 5g areas.

Battery life on the 12 pro is good, but it's definitely not as good as it was on my 11 pro. I consistently get around 4 to 6 hours of screen on time daily, and I have no problem getting through a full day with at least 10 to 20 left on my battery on my 11 pro. However, I had trouble getting the battery below 20. At the end of my day with the same usage, I now have to enable my low power mode setting on the iPhone 12 Pro more often than I'm used to, and it's just something I've taken note of its kind of a bummer, and I feel like this. Could potentially take us backwards because you know apple's on this thing, where they're making everything better as consumers request it again.

This is the price you pay to be on the bleeding edge of iPhone upgrades. Another thing with the 5g. If you have 5g auto, enabled the battery takes a pretty big hit, and I'm barely lucky enough to get to my nightstand with even 10 left on my battery, even with the 12 pro being set to 5g auto, I'm pretty confident in saying that the 12 pro will get you through a day or an entire day without a problem. It probably even gets some of you out there through two full days with light to medium usage. The battery is good, it's just not as good as it used to be so onto the speakers on the 12 pro they aren't as good as I would expect from a thousand dollar smartphone.

They sound, really tinny and are abnormally harsh sounding for any iPhone that I've experienced. I'm absolutely aware that everyone here sound differently, and I just don't like the speakers on the 12 pro at 100 volume, they sound, really tinny and are abnormally harsh sounding for an iPhone so uh. I just don't remember the last time. Furthermore, I was disappointed by an iPhone's on board speakers they're, not bad they're. Just not that good and again you turn it up really loud.

It hits my ears weird, and I don't know what it is with the frequency ears or whatever it's just it's not as good as I would expect from a really expensive smartphone. Moving on one of the most welcome upgrades from the 11 pro 2, the 12 pro is its base storage option. You now get 128 gigabytes of storage included in the price of the 12. Pro apple didn't totally get rid of the 64 gigabyte storage option. You just have to go down to the 12 to get it, I'm glad they finally made this change, but I think it's just too late for me to even care much about it anymore.

Through these upgrades I'm accustomed to having a 64 gigabyte limitation on my onboard storage and have made adjustments to the usage in my device to fit within that limit, I usually only use about 32 gigabytes of storage at any given time. This is because I don't keep any of my media on my device and have become pretty dependent on my internal cloud services. It just makes me nervous keeping irreplaceable pictures and videos of my family and my kids on the device and then having that device fail or become lost or get stolen. You can't replace those memories. You can replace the device, but you can't replace those memories.

I run a geo-fence thing and auto upload all of my media to my Synology NAS in home on my home network and all of my media lives there. Every month I go and clear out pictures and videos off my device and make a backup of everything and have monthly sorted out things, and it works really. Well before we move to close this review out, I want to talk quickly about the included accessories' controversy that apple had with this deployment of this device. Apple made a change to what is included with the iPhone 12 and the 12 pro device lineups. They no longer include a wall charger in the box.

Ultimately, Apple is a business, and they need to make money. They do a great job at covering it up. Saying apple is making environmental improvements, but, let's be honest, they're a business, and they need to make money their responsibilities to their stakeholders now apple. Using this opportunity to lessen their environmental impact is just a perk of that decision. The decision is based on making money because they are business and their responsibility is their stakeholders all right.

So that brings me to my recommendation at this point. If you have an 11 or an 11 pro, you should pass on this iteration of iPhone entirely unless you're on the upgrade program and if you're on the iPhone upgrade program, I would recommend you go the iPhone 12 route, it's a perfect upgrade and will save you some money in the long run. If you're looking for a new device, I would absolutely go for the iPhone 12 and pass on the pro. If I were to do it all over again, I would have gone back and got the black iPhone 12, and I would have been just as happy as I am with the 12 pro, if not happier, because I'd be saving around 10 a month on my upgrade program, monthly installments and everybody loves to save some money. Well, that about does it for me in this one.

If you enjoyed this review, please feel free to give me a thumbs up. If you didn't, you know what to do. Thank you for taking the time to watch I'm Tomas, and I will catch you in the next one. You.

Source : Tomas Villegas