Last month, Lenovo released the K12 Pro here in the country that comes with a competitive price tag, a Stock Android experience, a king-sized display, a triple rear camera setup, and a whopping 6,000mAh battery capacity. With an official local price of PHP 8,490, let’s see if it can keep up with other bang-for-your-buck entry-level smartphones today.
Table of Contents
Design and Construction
Coming in with a massive 6.8-inch IPS Max Vision display, this device is seriously a large and thick one. Using it one-handed can be quite tricky, but it’s fine for us since we know that we’re getting a big battery as well.
We get polycarbonate back that has a water-repellant design. It’s not waterproof, but it can handle spills or some light rain. Its design has a, somehow, wave textured pattern that makes it less prone to fingerprint smudges. The unit we have is in the Metallic Sage colorway but it’s also available in Electric Violet.
Despite the large form-factor, its fingerprint scanner at the back is easy to reach. Meanwhile, other things at the back are its triple rear cameras and LED flash in a square setup, and the Lenovo branding.
On the upper left part of the display is its front camera in a hole punch notch, and on top of that is a proximity sensor together with the earpiece.
On the right side, we can find the volume rocker and power button.
While on the left is a dedicated Google Assistant trigger that we often mistake as a volume button, but we guess it can be really useful in the long run. You can also find a card tray for a single Nano-SIM and a microSD card.
Up top are the secondary microphone and headphone jack.
Meanwhile, at the bottom are its loudspeaker, main microphone, and USB Type-C port.
Generally, we think its design looks modern and tough, although it is hefty to grip.
Display and Multimedia
The K12 Pro has a vast 6.8-inch 2.5D curved IPS LCD screen, with a 1640 x 720px resolution and a pixel density of 289ppi. We get sizable bezels and a slightly thicker chin. Honestly speaking, we are quite disappointed. We don’t expect it to feature a high refresh rate, but a 1080p resolution at least to highlight that massive screen. But thankfully, when watching YouTube videos, you can max out the resolution to 1080p. Quality-wise, it’s not the best, but you can expect accurate and vibrant colors, as well as average brightness levels under direct sunlight.
As for audio, tunes come out mainly from its down-firing loudspeaker, at the same time lowly from the earpiece. It produces a decent sound that focuses more on the vocals. It’s good enough for a small room, and I like that it doesn’t sound distorted at max volume.
OS, UI, and Apps
The Lenovo K12 Pro runs on Android 10 out of the box, and yes, it is pure Android. The UI is clean, straightforward, and Google-centric, of course. There’s not much to go around when it comes to customization, nonetheless, you can choose a style from the display settings that would change the interface color, font, and even icon shape.
As for additional features, it comes with dark mode, split-screen, Digital Wellbeing, and parental control to keep track of screen time and add content restrictions, and set other limits to help your child balance screen time.
Out of the 128GB of storage, we get a usable 110GB that can be further expanded via a microSD card.
Cameras
Camera-wise, the K20 Pro comes with 64MP wide, a 2MP macro, and a 2MP depth sensor. While the fourth circle is dedicated for the LED flash. On its notch resides a 16MP front shooter.
Quality-wise, shots taken with the rear camera often look well-detailed and perceive good colors under good lighting conditions. By default, it uses the 64MP lens and saves the images in 16MP. We like that its standard mode gives a subtle depth effect in most scenarios, although, sometimes you might want to take more shots as they can be blurry. Using the 64MP ultra res mode will give you an almost similar quality as in standard mode with sharper details of course.
You can zoom in up to 8x and get decent quality that looks a bit washed at times. Weirdly, unlike most phones, we get the macro button next to the 1x toggle instead of the usual ultra-wide switch. And for some reason, we don’t know if it’s just the device that we have, but we can’t use the ultra-wide lens as it doesn’t give us an option in the camera software. We only get 1x up to 8x zoom, plus the macro toggle. Hopefully, Lenovo can fix this with an update.
Anyways, for night photography, it’s actually not bad. We still get some good amount of light but some grainy areas. We can really see a significant boost with the brightness and sharpness in a not-so-harsh manner with the Night Vision turned on. Although, to achieve a good shot with the night vision, be sure to keep a steady hand for about 8 seconds.
As for selfies, we get decent outputs with vibrant colors and good details. There’s some slight skin smoothening going on even when you’re not using beauty mode, but it’s fine. We suggest taking more than one shot as some selfies can look pale.
When it comes to videos, you can shoot up to 1080p at 60fps and the quality is pretty good under well-lit scenarios. It doesn’t have some stabilization though.
Performance and Benchmarks
Under the hood, the K12 Pro is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 processor that’s paired with an Adreno 610 GPU and 4GB of RAM. Navigating the UI and launching apps is pretty smooth, though you’ll notice some slowness when many apps are running in the background. It’s got deliverable performance for your day-to-day calls, social media scrolling, or video streaming, but this isn’t for gaming. Playing graphically intensive games, such as Asphalt 9 and Genshin Impact can be a laggy experience.
• AnTuTu V8 – 162,793
• PC Mark Work 2.0 – 7,388
• 3D Mark – 1,159 (OpenGL), 370 (Vulkan)
• Geekbench 5 – 308 (single-core) 1,161 (multi-core)
• Androbench – 301.69 MB/s (Seq. Read) 182.92 MB/s (Seq. Write)
You can unlock the device via face-unlock and the rear-mounted fingerprint scanner. The fingerprint scanner responds quickly, while the face-unlock works well, with some struggle under low-light scenarios.
Connectivity and Battery Life
As for connectivity, the Lenovo K12 Pro is equipped with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0, NFC, GPS, 4G LTE, and even FM Radio. One of the highlight specs of this phone is its whopping 6000mAh battery with 20W fast charging and 2.5W reverse charging—which is nice to have.
The K12 Pro doesn’t have a high-consuming display, so if you’re not a heavy user, it can last you a day or two. We ran it through the PC Mark’s Battery Test, and the device yielded 18 hours and 9 minutes. Meanwhile, in our standard video loop test, wherein we loop a 1080p video at 50% brightness and volume with airplane mode turned on and earphones plugged in, the K12 Pro got a complete 22 hours and 15 minutes—which is impressive!
However, be ready to charge the phone for about 2 hours and 20 minutes from zero to a hundred.
Conclusion
The Lenovo K12 Pro is now available for PHP 8,490, which is reasonable enough for the specs it offers. It may not be the best in the budget segment today, but you get an excellent battery life and a widescreen real estate, and not to mention, it’s pure Android! So if those are just some of the aspects you look for in a phone, then the Lenovo K12 Pro is one good choice.
With inputs from Justine Basco
Lenovo K12 Pro specs:
6.8-inch HD+ Max Vision display
Qualcomm Snapdragon 662
Adreno 610 GPU
4GB RAM
64GB, 128GB storage
Triple rear cameras:
• 64MP F1.8 (wide)
• 2MP F2.4 (macro)
• 2MP F2.4 (depth)
16MP selfie camera
Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac
Bluetooth 5.0
GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO, LTEEP, SUPL
Fingerprint scanner (rear-mounted)
FM radio
USB Type-C
3.5mm audio jack
Android 10
6000mAh battery w/ 20W fast charging, 2.5W reverse charging
172.1 x 76.8 x 9.7mm
221g
