For years, Xiaomi’s Redmi line has been known for providing customers with feature-packed smartphones at an affordable price. One of their latest releases is the Redmi 12. Were they able to keep that trend? Looks like they did.
For starters, the Redmi 12 is equipped with a large 6.79-inch screen with a hole punch for the 8MP front camera. Knowing that this is a budget device, I was expecting an HD screen, but I was surprised to find out that it has a Full HD+ resolution and a 90Hz AdaptiveSync refresh rate as well. This means that the display is sharp with fluid animations and transitions.
It’s not a perfect screen, though, as I notice some dimming when you view the phone from a small angle, but when viewed directly it’s bright and good for playing games and watching movies. Note that it only has a single down-firing speaker, so make use of your headphones or external speaker if you want better audio.
The quality is also good. Again, it’s a budget device so the frame is made of plastic, but Xiaomi gave it a premium treatment with a glass back design, making it look more expensive than it actually is, and an IP53 dust and splash resistance, so you don’t have to worry about taking it to the beach or spilling liquids over it.
Budget smartphones from the past skimp on cameras but that’s not the case for the Redmi 12 as it has three, consisting of a 50MP main, 8MP ultra-wide, and 2MP macro. I appreciate the configuration as these are the lenses I mostly prefer having on a smartphone. Performance-wise, these are not exactly the kind you’d perform really well in low light but as long as it is bright, it can certainly deliver nice photos.
Powering the Redmi 12 is a MediaTek Helio G88 processor, 8GB of RAM, 128GB or 256GB of storage, and a large 5,000mAh battery with 18W fast charging, which should last you two days of heavy use. This is a decent configuration and I’m glad that smartphone makers have started offering 8GB LPDDR4X RAM as a minimum for budget devices. The only bottleneck here would be the storage type as it uses eMMC 5.1 instead of UFS, which means slower read and write speeds. Still, you’d be able to play games in its mid or lowest settings.
As for other features, the Redmi 12 has WiFi, Bluetooth 5.3, dual SIM with the second slot in hybrid, a 3.5mm audio jack, an Infrared remote, and a side-mounted fingerprint scanner. No 5G here, though, just 4G, but that’s fine.
The Xiaomi Redmi 12 8GB+128GB is priced at PHP 7,999, while the 8GB+256GB is at PHP 8,999. We recommend getting the latter if you can stretch the budget a bit as 256GB is ideal if you’re planning to install plenty of apps and take plenty of photos and videos.
Overall, the Redmi 12 did deliver in providing consumers value for their money. It’s a budget device that offers a lot for something priced well under PHP 10K.
Get it from Lazada, Shopee, and TikTok shop.
