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Xiaomi 12 Lite Performance & software: price before power
Here’s where the 12 Lite’s more affordable nature starts to show again. A Snapdragon 778G CPU is not to be sniffed at, but neither can it compete with the more powerful silicon powering the rest of the Xiaomi 12 line-up. It’s a mid-range chip, paired with either 6 or 8GB of RAM, and 128 or 256GB of on-board storage. Our sample was the top-end 8GB/256GB version.

Android 12 isn’t a challenge to run smoothly, with the phone delivering stutter-free animations that take advantage of the 120Hz refresh rate. Apps load reasonably quickly, you don’t need to wait for the onscreen keyboard to appear whenever you try to open a web page, and you can multitask with a couple of apps before it’ll need to redraw them. That should be plenty of power for most, especially anyone stepping up from a sluggish entry-level handset – but anyone going the other way will notice how it’s not quite as snappy as a high-end phone.

That’s true of gaming, too. the 12 Lite can run most things in the Play Store at medium to high settings, but don’t expect it to hit the full 120fps in titles that support it. More demanding games like Diablo Immortal have a bit of hitching every now and then, with moderate quality settings, but stays playable for an hour-long session. This bodes well for the upcoming Nothing Phone 1, which is set to use a tweaked version of the same chip, and is expected to compete closely on price.

On the software side, Xiaomi has stuck with what it knows: a largely stripped-back skin on the surface, but with lots of customisation options and bespoke features once you go searching for them. The iOS-style control centre remains alongside the traditional notification tray, and there are a handful of pre-installed apps we could do without, but at least it’s less OTT on that front than sub-brand Poco.