Vivo iQOO 12 and 12 Pro announced in China with upgraded design and specs

There is not much to introduce about the iQOO series from Vivo. This is already a very established series for a long enough time for remarkable performance, special design and so on. But here, two flagship iQOO phones have been introduced, namely the Vivo iQOO 12 and the Vivo iQOO 12 Pro. These phones were announced on 7th November in China and are supposed to be available for order from 14th November. We have witnessed some outstanding features and facts in this gadget and think that these are some of the leading mobile phones right now. iQOO 12 price starts from CNY 3999 (about BDT 60,900) for the 12/256 GB model and the Pro version starting cost is CNY 4999 (BDT 76,100) 16/256 GB. But note that the global variants are usually priced higher and often much higher.

iQOO 12

The main attractive design element in this one is the official BMW M logo in the white color model. Yes, Vivo partnered with the Motorcar company BMW for the release of both phones. The other colors seem to have a fine texture as well. The primary camera module looks pretty striking and a bit futuristic as well. But it’s not overly done. It looks professional, polished, classy and not fancy. The bezels are symmetrical.

The screen is large, 6.78” and has 1260 x 2800 pixels high resolution with 3000 nits peak brightness. The back camera is splendid with a 50+6+50 MP setup of which one f/1.7 aperture main lens, one periscope telephoto lens and one ultrawide lens, respectively. There is up to 8K video recording as well. The 16 MP front facing camera has only up to 1080p@30fps recording, therefore, we think it’s more on the average side. You’d expect at least 60fps up to 4K recording in a gadget like this.

There are 4880 and 5000 mAh batteries depending on the color or model, but we are not sure at this point which color contains which battery. But all models come with a 120W wired charger. Of course, one of the major highlights is the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset with 12 or 16 GB RAM. So, it’s a full-on powerhouse. It is one of the first phones to include the Android 14 version after Google Pixel 8 series and the Xiaomi 14 series. For the Chinese region, Vivo will use its OriginOS UI and the global models will run on Funtouch 14 version. We didn’t receive any official information about its OS and security update policy. But we are expecting at least 4 further Android upgrades and 5 years of security updates.

iQOO 12 Pro

The Pro version has a lot of similarities with the regular version, but offers a few valuable added features. Firstly, it’s IP68 waterproof, a very prominent feature that is missing in the regular variant. We have got a curved screen here with more premium material on the back. The white model has a porcelain enamel textured glass. The red one comes with an artificial vegan leather back and the black color has fluorite AG glass. These are very premium materials. There is no protection, such as Gorilla Glass, but the screen should still have some sort of inbuilt drop resistance and the same for the glass backs.

Apart from that, the screen resolution is also much higher here (1440 x 3200 pixels). The cameras look the same, both having the same OmniVision OV50H sensor. In the battery section, we are getting an additional 50W wireless charging support and 10W reverse charging facility. The performance section looks no different. Here we got a vapor chamber for cooling and we don’t know if the same feature is available in the iQOO 12 as well. The sound quality is upgraded to 32-bit/384kHz audio. Its OS and security policy should be the same as the above one.