Display
The 12S Ultra ditched last year’s display panel for the 12S Pro’s slightly smaller display. It measures 6.73-inch diagonally and curves into the bezels. The bezel is even on all sides aside from the slightly thicker chin.
Another design deviation from the Mi 11 Ultra is the position of the selfie camera. The 34 MP selfie shooter has been shifted from the left side to the middle.
Speaking of the specs of the display, it has a resolution of 14403200px with an aspect ratio of 20:9 and a 522ppi pixel density. The LTPO2 AMOLED panel enables dynamic refresh rate switching between 1 and 120Hz. What this means is that if you stop touching the display, the refresh rate will drop to 1Hz to conserve power. There are options to just stick to 120Hz, but that is not advisable.
The display comes with all the goods you would expect from a flagship. HDR support with DolbyVision, DC dimming, and a 10-bit panel capable of rendering 1 billion color gradations. It also has a 500nit peak brightness and that means you can use it on a sunny day without getting washed out.
Xiaomi 12S Ultra’s display also provides options for you to choose from three preset color modes (Vivid, Saturated, and Original color). You can choose which mode works best for you depending on how saturated you want the display colors to look.
Software
Chinese MIUI 13 over Android 12
Every Xiaomi fan has come to expect their device to run MIUI over the latest Android version. In this case, it is the latest MIUI 13 over Android 12 with a very Chinese flavor.
When you power up the 12S Ultra, you are greeted by a bunch of Chinese bloatware. As a person currently living in China, I could appreciate some of the installed apps, but they were all Chinese versions. So I had to delete them in the end and reinstall their English versions.
There are also no Google apps, but the 12S Ultra comes with the Google framework, so a quick trip to the MI store will get you the Google Play store, and then you can download the good stuff from there.
Since the current version of the 12S Ultra is designed for the Chinese market, completely westernizing the phone is a “Mission Impossible”. There will be signs of Chinese elements here and there, no matter how hard you try.
Even with all that, the user experience is still one of the best you can ask for on a smartphone. Swapping around on the home page is fast and snappy, there are tons of optimization options, and the general feel is quite pleasing.
For example, there are tons of new and improved widget interfaces to choose from, though a lot of them are in Chinese.
There are also a bunch of themes to choose from, some of which are free. I went crazy with this. Since getting this phone, I’ve used a different theme every day, and I haven’t even explored half of the options. Another interesting thing is that some theme changes will affect wallpapers, ringtones, icons, and, in some cases, ringtones.
MIUI also comes with its proprietary multimedia apps: Gallery, Music, and Mi Video.
Security
In the security tap, you have all the popular options, fingerprint scanner, face ID unlocks, patterns, and passwords. The scan area of the under-screen fingerprint scanner is a bit smaller and a bit slower than on other flagships. But it’s fast enough and very reliable.
Another way to unlock the device is the 2D Face Unlock option, which is very fast and responsive.
Still, on the issue of security, there is a security app that scans the phone for malware, restricts data usage, optimizes battery behavior, and can free up memory. You can also manage apps from this app: for instance, you can restrict the activities of the apps to conserve battery.
Performance and benchmarks
Before we go into the technical terms and benchmarks, I did a lot of gaming on this device, and just from the point of view of how it feels: most games were fast, and for the first hour or two they ran very fast, but as time went by there was a little bit of lag. It wasn’t too frequent to disturb the experience, though.
And one more thing, Xiaomi did a great job with the cooling on this device. Even after hours of gaming, there was a little heating but it wasn’t as bad as you would expect after hours of gaming.
The 12S Ultra is one of the first phones to use the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, an improved version of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. It is advertised as having a 10% improvement in CPU and GPU performance over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 model and a 30% improvement in energy efficiency.
Now to the benchmark scores. Starting with Geekbench, the 12S Ultra posted 1319 in the Single-core test and 4135 in the Multi-core test, which is pretty high. In Antutu, it went over the million thresholds with 1016700, which is expected from a high-end chipset. It isn’t uncommon for flagship phones to score that high in benchmarks.
And the high scores are reflected in the performance of the phone. Everything is just smooth and buttery. As I mentioned earlier, it handled my PUBG and Call of Duty for hours without any heating or noticeable lagging issues.
When it comes to memory, Xiaomi 12S Ultra is available in various configurations. The base configuration is an 8GB LPDDR5 RAM paired with 256GB UFS 3.1 storage. Other configurations include a 12GB RAM + 256GB storage and finally, a 12GB RAM and 512GB storage setup.
