Smartphone charging has come a long way over the last several years. It used to take at least an hour to fully recharge a phone from dead, which has recently fallen well below 30 minutes on some top end models. But that wasn’t good enough for Chinese smartphone manufacturer Redmi, a sub-brand of Xiaomi. The Redmi Note 12 Discovery Edition is able to charge at 210W, with the HyperCharge technology fully charging the device in nine minutes.
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HyperCharge is controlled by three 100W fast charging chips, which fully charge the phone’s 4,300mAh battery in just 9 minutes. The new Redmi Note range is also the first device running MediaTek’s mid-range Dimensity 1080 processor. It has a 1080p Full HD OLED display with a fast 120Hz refresh rate and an upgraded 16MP selfie camera up front. The camera setup on the back includes a 200MP main camera (the new Samsung HPX sensor), an 8MP ultra-wide camera and a 2MP macro camera.
The device is only available with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. You’ll also find dual-SIM slots, dual speakers, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a side fingerprint sensor, NFC, and an infrared blaster on this Android 12 device (expected to receive the new version of Android in early 2023).
Despite the name, the Redmi Note 12 Discovery Edition is actually based on the Redmi Note 12 Pro+, with the main difference being the lesser charging power (120W) but bigger battery (5,000mAh) for the latter.
The rest of the range includes the similar-looking Redmi Note 12 Pro, which swaps the 200MP main camera for a 50MP one (using Sony’s IMX766 sensor), and it only uses 67W charging for the same 5,000mAh battery. Then lastly, the Redmi Note 12 is positioned as an affordable smartphone. It packs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 4 Gen 1 chipset, a slightly lesser-grade OLED display of the same size (mainly lower brightness and contrast, as well as the lack of HDR support), less powerful cameras (48MP main, 2MP depth sensor and 8MP front), weaker charging power (33W) and just a mono speaker.
