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I’m staring at the seemingly endless blue that is the Laccadive Sea. If I were to plunge in and swim with superhuman ability, the next shore I’d land on would be in Somalia. However, at the moment, I’m sitting firmly in Colombo, with lung capacity that lets me stay underwater for no more than an embarrassing right seconds. There’s yet another blue I’m admiring, apart from the ocean ahead of me. It happens to be the new realme 12 Pro+, in a stunning Submarine Blue finish.
Inspired by luxury watch design, thanks to a collab with French luxury watchmaker Ollivier Savéo, the gold dial-like camera bezel shines under the Sri Lankan sun, where I am to test out the device.
Design
The realme 12 Pro+ really does stand out, what with the blue and gold tones on vegan leather. It’s one of the more unique designs in the smartphone market since this design language was adopted last year. The smartphone sports a 6.7-inch OLED display and weighs just under 200 grams, which makes it not-so-light but sturdy. The grip is perfectly snug given the anti-slip quality finish on the rear panel.
The display boasts a resolution of 2412 x 1080 pixels and is nice and bright, even in outdoors. There is a whole lot of bloatware when I boot the smartphone. But once I’m done away with the excess baggage, I try on some multimedia. I watched the last two episodes of Behind Your Touch, a supernatural comedy-drama series on Netflix that is centred around a veterinarian and a hot-blooded detective. The rather gripping finish to the series had some low-lit visuals which showed up well on the display, with the sound being well-rounded and the voices coming through clearly.
Camera
The camera is said to be one of the USPs of the smartphone, according to the company. Thankfully, there was no dearth of pretty sights in Sri Lanka to test this claim. But let’s look at the specs first. To start with, there is the primary Sony IMX 890 50 MP camera, with a 1/1.56-inch sensor and optical image stabilisation. There’s a 64 MP OV 64B periscope telephoto sensor for clearer photos while zoomed in and an 8 MP ultra-wide camera to round off the setup.
Let me talk about the telephoto lens first. Most of the zoomed-in photos I took on the realme 12 Pro+ — especially during the day — are quite sharp and grain-free. You can check out the image of the top of a skyscraper taken at 1x and 10x zoom. Colours of the actual scenes are rendered quite faithfully when zoomed in as well. The times it doesn’t deliver great results while zoomed-in are when the subject isn’t perfectly stationary.
For example, most shots that I took of a cormorant chilling in the middle of the Maduganga River turned out a little blurry around the bird’s edges and they weren’t grain-free either.
Trying to capture the pink-hued sky around sunset at a nameless beach, I realise the viewfinder switches between cool and warm tones before settling on warm — the correct tone. While the end result is a very accurate reproduction of the colour tones, warm hues and the saturation, this initial and unexpected adjustment on-screen is a glitch that hopefully can be fixed with a quick software update. The rear camera also supports 4K video recording @ 30fps, apart from both 720p and 1080p video recording at both 30 and 60 fps each. The videos taken are bright and impressively stable. However, while zooming in, I notice some details are not as sharp as expected. The front-facing camera is a 32 MP Sony sensor, which delivers fairly accurate skin tones and skin texture as well! Definitely something I wouldn’t mind using for web briefings and work meetings on the go!
Performance
The realme 12 Pro+ runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 chipset, and the unit I reviewed has 12 GB RAM and 256 GB of storage. The operating system is realme UI 5.0 based on Android 14. Real-world usage was seamless and snag-free, with no heating issues even while gaming or using the camera for the most of a hot, sweaty afternoon outdoors. The Flash Capsule, a fancy name for pop-up notifications is a convenient feature as part of the updated user interface. While it also supports Smart Image Matting, the feature hasn’t arrived on the handset at the time of the review.
Battery has never been a cause of worry in any of the realme flagships I’ve reviewed. And the realme 12 Pro+ is no exception. It has a 5,000 mAh battery that keeps me company for most of the day spent outdoors, using the camera on and off for almost 2-3 hours, while connected to the internet constantly, reading books for a couple of hours and a couple of hours of streaming music.
With all this, at the end of the day, I’d still have about 40 per cent charge left, which is really impressive. With the bundled 67W SUPERVOOC charger I can easily charge the device, while I go grab a quick breakfast.
Verdict
The realme 12 Pro+ has no blurred lines between its strengths and weaknesses. The design, the finish, the battery life, the absence of heating issues and the camera’s capability of delivering some stunning photos in the right conditions weigh in heavily on the flagship’s favour. What I would have liked to not see on this flagship is bloatware and small niggles around the camera experience.
Having said that I have to admit the device is priced well and is definitely another step in the right direction for realme and its target audience who might be looking for affordable flagships that deliver on most fronts.
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