iQOO 12 Pro debuts as world-first up-to-3,000-nit 144Hz display Android smartphones

The 12 and 12 Pro are iQOO's latest flagship smartphones made with BMW M Motorsport as a Premium Partner, and as such come with the partnership's traditional Track and Legendary colorways, not to mention a new Burning Road red vegan leather option that replaces the Isle of Man green of the 11 series.

Both smartphones are also graced with the new "Wanli Porthole" camera housing, which contains a new 50MP "VCS OV50H" main camera, not to mention a (reportedly popular) 64MP periscope zoom lens touted to support "10x high-def zoom" as well as 3x optical zoom and 100x digital zoom specs. 

The 12-series rear cameras are rounded out by a 50MP ultrawide-angle shooter also rated to handle macro duties. Their new hump, finished with a distinctive 'gear-tooth' metallic border, is found in full on both the vanilla and Pro variants.

Both new devices also boast 6.78-inch 144Hz AMOLED displays, although iQOO's well-touted upgrade to Samsung E7 technology is exclusive to the 12 Pro. It confers a new peak brightness rating of no less than 3,000 nits on the smartphone - then again, its HBM levels reach a more down-to-earth 1,600 nits.

That new top-end display is curved, whereas the vanilla variant has the only flat screen of its series. It a resolution of 1.5K, however, as opposed to 2K in the 12 Pro.

Nevertheless, iQOO asserts that every new flagship SKU, even the base-model 12, will be capable of exclusive "in-house" resolution, frame-rate and fluency enhancements thanks to a Q1 "self-developed e-sports chip" to go with its Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 platform.

Both new 12-series smartphones also come with an extra-large 5,705mm² vapor chamber. Then again, the 12 Pro's new "super graphite"-enhanced (yet still lithium) battery has a new typical capacity rating of 5,100mAh, compared to 5,000mAh for the 12.

iQOO has now also confirmed that they both support "120W UFCS" charging, thereby discarding the advanced in-house 200W spec of the 11 Pro for a greater chance of compatibility with whatever power brick the owner has around.

The 12 also supports reverse wired charging, whereas the Pro alone adds 50W wireless charging to that list. Finally, both new flagships boot OriginOS 4 based on Android 14 out of the box.

The iQOO 12 and 12 Pro are available to pre-order from today (albeit in China only, with international availability for at least 1 of these new flagships almost certain to follow). The 12 starts at 3,999 yuan (~US$550) - same as the new Xiaomi 14, except that its iQOO rival also starts at 12GB of LPDDR5X RAM rather than 8.

On that note, all SKUs of the 12 Pro have 16GB of RAM, unlike the 14 Pro, yet still start at 4,999 yuan for one with 256GB of UFS 4.0 internal storage. iQOO's new flagships also have top-end 16GB/1TB options across the board, priced at 4,699 yuan (~US$646) for the 12 and 4,999 yuan (~US$687) for the Pro.

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