iPhone 12 Pro Review

Last week 2 of Apple’s newest phones launched, the 12 and the 12 Pro. I have been lucky enough to get my hands on a new personal handset for myself as well as being able to test out the 12. After three years of heavy use it was finally time to say goodbye to my trusty companion my iPhone X and say hello to the new 12 Pro.

Initial thoughts

First impressions start at the first thing you see and that for me was the shock and just how small the packing is without the headphones and the plug. I have said previously that I think Apple is making the right change here and I do believe that several other companies will be following suit soon. To the right is a picture of the iPhone 12 Pro box next to the iPhone 11 box to compare.

Design

I couldn’t decide for ages what the best colour to go for ages, I wanted to keep my original graphite but I also wanted the special colour this year which was the pacific blue but in the end I went with the gold and oh boy it didn’t disappoint.

The main event for the design is obviously the new edges of the phone. Many people have said about how the new edges look similar to the iPhone 5 and I will agree they do but the shine from the gold edges is an amazing touch. The main improvement with the new edges of the phone however is how much easier to hold in your hand then previous generations.

The screen is made with a special ceramic shield which makes the screen 4x better off when being thrown around. This is perfect for me as I do have a bit of a bit of a history for dropping and cracking screens. Apple advertised in their original iPhone 12 advert that the iPhone was “Oops resistant” Keep an eye on my Twitter www.twitter.com/kylewilkinson46 and I’ll let you know how true that is.

Camera

The camera is one of the main features of the pro iPhones. For those of you that have the iPhone 11 Pro I don’t think there is much real difference between them but for me I was going from the X to the 12 Pro so I was eager to test the camera out. To test it out I spent the day down south in Bournemouth.

Below is some of the shots I took during the day using a vary of the different lens that the phone comes with.

Something else that was new to me was the night mode. The 12 Pro comes with a new sensor in the lens as well as the LiDAR sensor making a massive improvement to low light photos and dark mode. To test this, I stopped at Telegraph Hill in the New Forest at 18:00, very dark and a perfect time to test it. Dark mode does not use flash so to be able to get that picture from total pitch black is amazing and some of the things you could create with it would be so inspirational.

Battery Life and Other stuff (5G)

Battery life is something which is very controversial with this phone as its even advertised on the Apple site as having less battery life. For me I have found the battery life a huge improvement from the X. The 12 Pro does come with a slightly smaller sized battery and even with improvements to the way the A14 Bionic runs the system things like 5G have led to what Apple say is an hour less battery.

Here in the UK 5G isn’t out much unless you go to major cities. Luickly there are testing it now in Oxford which is nearby to me. So I was able to test out the speed of 5G. A question I often see online is, “Is it actually as fast as they claim?” Short answer is yes. Web pages load as soon as you push the link and music and videos download in seconds. Below you can see screenshots from SpeedTest by Ookla.

Summary

To summarise my review of the iPhone 12 Pro in a word, Impressive. However, do I think if you have the 11 or 11 Pro is it worth the upgrade, no. Obviously this year the price remains the same £999 and for the £999 you are getting a great phone that is packed full of tech. However apart from 5G there isn’t too much new between the 11 and 12.

Thanks for reading my review on the 12 Pro and if you have any questions please tweet me here www.twitter.com/kylewilkinson46 you can always contact me via email too here kylewilkinson53@gmail.com I’ll be doing a little review on MagSafe when I manage to get my hands on it.

Thanks for reading

Kyle Wilkinson

Links:

4G Network Speed Test: https://www.speedtest.net/result/i/4222878931

5G Network Speed Test: https://www.speedtest.net/result/i/4219514287

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