The Xiaomi Mi 12 will have the hard task of confirming the good things seen on Xiaomi Mi 11 and, possibly, to arrive even earlier on the market.
After the success and the great reviews received by the Xiaomi Mi 11 series, it's already time to look at next year's model: Xiaomi Mi 12. It will be a very important model, because with the current Mi 11 Xiaomi (Ultra version in the picture) has managed to touch the roof of the Android world, bypassing for sales even Samsung in some quarters, and the Mi 12 is the task of confirming this success.
It will try following the same path traveled by Xiaomi Mi 11: hardware and build quality of true top of the range, but at prices lower than the competition. It will not be a cheap smartphone, of course, but a device with an excellent price/performance ratio. The timing of launch and actual availability on the market will be crucial, because Mi 12 will have to be the first device with the new SoC from Qualcomm, just as the Mi 11 was the first with Qualcomm Snapdragon 888. The good news is that, according to the latest rumors coming out of China, Xiaomi will be able to unveil the Mi 12 with Snapdragon 898 (or 895, it's still unclear what the successor to Snapdragon 888 will be called) very soon. The bad news is that perhaps it will also fail to equip it with the custom Android interface MIUI 13. Here's what we can expect, listening to the rumors coming from the Far East.
Xiaomi Mi 12 arrives in November
Already with the launch, unfortunately at the moment only in China, of the new Mi Mix 4 Xiaomi has shown everyone how it can combine technological innovation with a standard hardware platform and consolidated. From the Mi 12, therefore, a lot is expected in terms of power, screen, cameras and battery life.
Xiaomi Mi 11 arrived at the end of December 2020, Xiaomi Mi 12 could arrive as early as November 2021 (and not December, as initially planned) because this year the delays due to the pandemic will be less than last year. As for the priority in the supply of chips, then, Xiaomi should not have any problem by now: it is on the podium of the largest smartphone manufacturers globally, who would not want to remain its supplier?
Here, then, that the hypothesis of the early launch and Snapdragon 898 on board the device becomes credible. Recall that the Snapdragon 898 will be decisively more powerful and efficient than the current 888. While the 888 has 1 ultra large ARM X1 core at 2.85 GHz, three large ARM A78 cores at 2.42 and four small ARM A55 cores at 1.7 GHz, in fact, the new Snapdragon 898 is expected to have 1 ultra large ARM X2 core at 3.09 GHz and the remaining cores with no difference from the past, but it will be manufactured in 4 nm instead of 5 nm and, consequently, will consume less.
Xiaomi Mi 12 with MIUI 13?
The bad news for Xiaomi fans, however, is that maybe the Mi 12 will hit the market too early to get the new MIUI 13 and you'll have to make do with MIUI 12.5.
Lei Jun, Xiaomi founder and CEO, has repeatedly said that MIUI 13 will arrive in late 2021 and, as a result, it's not at all a given that Mi 12 and MIUI 13 will arrive together. It remains a foregone conclusion, however, that the Mi 12 will be the first smartphone from Xiaomi to be updated to MIUI 13 as soon as the new interface becomes available in standard version.