From £999,
apple.comWE’RE IMPRESSED Amazing
HDR screen; superb camera; top
processor; 5G; great build quality.
WE’D IMPROVE Expensive;
average battery life; no 90Hz
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THE LAST WORD The iPhone
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Everything about it is high-end.
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zoom or high refresh rates, but
there are trade-offs for those.VERDICT
Find top deals for the iPhone 12
Pro at: bit.ly/t3ip12pro78 T3 DECEMBER 2020Te s te d
Apple iPhone 12 Prof you’ve read our review of the
iPhone 12 on page 74, you’ll be aware
that this year’s mid-range iPhone
has already set a high bar. But with a
few extras, the 12 Pro sails over this, offering one
of the best designed and most powerful phones
available – with an equally premium price.
This is a gorgeous-looking gadget. The gold
version, for example, has a solid gold band
around the outside, visible from the front,
surrounding a sleek black, shiny oblong on the
front. It makes this phone look more like a piece
of jewellery, an accessory, than other phones.
Yet despite these refined looks, it’s hardier than
ever: it includes Apple’s new ‘Ceramic Shield’
glass, which the company says is four times
more likely to survive a drop.
The iPhone 12 Pro has an OLED display, with
a resolution of 1170x2532, which is 460 pixels
per inch. That’s exactly the same as the iPhone- But with a typical brightness of 800 nits and
reported peak HDR brightness of 1,200 nits, the
screen is nothing less than stunning.
The big talk around the display in the iPhone
12 Pro is the lack of 90Hz or 120Hz support. We
were surprised not to see support here, but aside
from gaming, which benefits from faster
response times, a higher refresh rate just makes
things animate more smoothly, which is very
nice, but not essential.
The iPhone 12 Pro’s triple-lens camera appears
very similar to the 11 Pro’s, but there are
improvements inside and out. Its 12MP wide-
angle lens now has a wider f/1.6 aperture than
It has best-in-class cameras,
speed, screen quality and
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Apple iPhone
12 Pro
iPHONE WHOAH!
the 11 Pro and it packs a 12MP 2x telephoto lens
on top of the 12’s 12MP 0.5x ultra-wide. And
there’s a new piece of hardware to help with
low-light shooting in particular: LiDAR. A
depth-scanning sensor on the back makes
autofocus so much faster in low light compared
to other phones – even the iPhone 12.
The telephoto lens hasn’t changed. It’s a 2x
zoom compared to the wide-angle camera,
which is the same as the 11 Pro. With the likes of
the Samsung S20 Ultra offering a 5x telephoto
lens, it feels like Apple is behind here.
5G is one of the biggest new features on the
spec sheet, though it does share that with the
iPhone 12, of course. And it’s not the only speed
improvement. In benchmarks, the new A14
processor is around 20% faster than the A13
chip in the iPhone 11 Pro. Apps open almost
instantly, and the interface is totally smooth.
Yes, the iPhone 12 Pro is expensive. But the
iPhone has always been more than the sum of its
parts: sure you can get an 120Hz screen here or a
longer battery life there but no other phone is
class-leading in so many areas at once.I