Xiaomi subsidiary Redmi has just released announced its new Note 12 lineup led by the Note 12 Discovery Edition, a midrange smartphone that supports its 210W HyperCharge fast charging standard. That’s enough wattage to fully charge the phone’s 4,300mAh battery in just nine minutes. Switch on the handset to charge and hop in the shower, and the phone’s battery will probably be completely topped up before you’ve had a chance to dry yourself off.
In recent years, there has been fierce competition to offer ever-faster charging speeds for mobile phones. Xiaomi offered 120W fast charging on its 11T Pro handset last year, before competitor Oppo announced its own 150W SuperVOOC standard. No doubt we’ve quickly reached a point where efficiency declines with these fast-charging standards (the OnePlus 10T’s 4,800mAh battery could go from one to 100 percent in 19 minutes at 150W), but I’ll never say no to progress as long as as it does not affect the overall battery life.
Fast 210W charging isn’t the only impressive spec included in the Note 12 Discovery Edition. In addition to the step-down Note 12 Pro Plus model, the phone also has a 200-megapixel camera sensor on the back. You can choose to take full-resolution 200 megapixel photos, or opt for 12.5 or 50 megapixel photos for faster photography and better low-light performance. It is accompanied by an 8-megapixel ultrawide, a 2-megapixel macro and a 16-megapixel selfie camera.
Redmi announces four phones as part of the Note 12 lineup. At the top is the Note 12 Discovery Edition. If you step down to the Note 12 Pro Plus, you’ll lose the 210W fast charge, but you’ll get a bigger 5,000mAh battery. Step back to the Note 12 Pro again, drop the charging speed again to 67W and swap the 200MP main camera for a 50MP sensor. Finally, the entry-level model in the lineup, the Note 12, offers just 33W of fast charging and is powered by a Snapdragon 4 Gen 1 instead of the MediaTek Dimensity 1080 found in the other three models.
But whichever model you’re looking at, they all have a 6.67-inch 120Hz 1080p OLED display, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a fingerprint sensor on the side and run Xiaomi’s MIUI 13 software on top of Android 12.
For now, there is no word on a worldwide release, and history suggests that the Redmi Note 12 is unlikely to ever reach the US in an official capacity. But the lineup will go on sale in China on October 30, starting at just RMB 1,199 (about $165) for the Redmi Note 12 5G with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. Meanwhile, the 210W fast-charging, 200-megapixel photo-taking Note 12 Discovery Edition costs RMB 2,399 (about $330).
