Xiaomi 17T Pro Review vs Honor 600 Pro – Affordable Flagship Android Phones

The Xiaomi T series of phones has historically been one of the best options for people looking for a more affordable alternative to a flagship smartphone, and I have given high praise to the Xiaomi 15T Pro and 14T Pro in my past reviews.

For the 17 series, this is especially true. There is the Xiaomi 17 Ultra at £1300, or the smaller Xiaomi 17 at £900. Xiaomi did not release the Xiaomi 17 Pro or Pro Max in the UK.

Similar to last year, the timing of the launch is not far off the Honor 600 Pro, which I reviewed recently. That phone is positioned similarly to the 17T Pro, sitting a small step down from the superb Honor Magic8 Pro.

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Xiaomi 17T Pro vs 15T Pro vs Honor 600 Pro Specifications

Here is how the three phones line up on paper before I get into how the Xiaomi 17T Pro behaves in day-to-day use.

Xiaomi 17T Pro vs 15T Pro – What has been upgraded?

The headline upgrade is the battery. The 17T Pro jumps from 5,500mAh to 7,000mAh, which is a substantial increase. Wired charging ticks up slightly from 90W to 100W too, though the 15T Pro’s rated 36-minute full charge was already excellent.

The chipset moves from the Dimensity 9400+ to the 9500, a generational step up in both CPU and GPU performance that should show in sustained workloads and gaming.

On cameras, both use a 50MP main sensor with Leica branding and the same 50MP 5x periscope telephoto. The 17T Pro shifts to a different sensor design, the Light Fusion 950 with 2.4 micron super pixels, versus the 15T Pro’s larger 1/1.31-inch native sensor. It is an interesting trade-off, and one worth testing properly rather than taking the spec sheet at face value.

Peak brightness nudges up from 3,200 to 3,500 nits on the 17T Pro’s display, and it gains Dolby Vision support. The 15T Pro actually holds a slight water resistance edge, rated to 3 metres versus standard IP68 on the 17T Pro.

Overall, the battery capacity is the most meaningful real-world upgrade. If your 15T Pro battery life is fine, there is not a pressing reason to jump.

Xiaomi 17T Pro vs Honor 600 Pro Key Differences

The Honor runs Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite against Xiaomi’s Dimensity 9500.

The Honor chipset is actually the SM8750, the same Snapdragon 8 Elite that appeared in devices like the Honor Magic 7 Pro, Samsung Galaxy S25, and OnePlus 13. So it is technically last year’s flagship chipset.

The Qualcomm flagship chip has traditionally beaten the equivalent MediaTek part, but with the generational gap here, the MediaTek will likely come out ahead. In the real world, though, the difference should be negligible.

On cameras, the Xiaomi leans on its Leica partnership with a 50MP f/1.67 main sensor and a proper 5x optical telephoto. The Honor counters with a huge 200MP 1/1.4-inch main sensor, but only a 3.5x telephoto. If zoom range matters to you, the Xiaomi has the advantage. The Honor tops out at 4K video too, while the Xiaomi can shoot 8K and Log footage.

The display picture is more nuanced. The Xiaomi is bigger at 6.83 inches with a 144Hz refresh rate, but the Honor’s 8,000 nit peak brightness absolutely demolishes the Xiaomi’s 3,500 nits in direct sunlight. Both carry large silicon-carbon batteries, 7,000mAh on the Xiaomi and 6,400mAh on the Honor in the EU, with 50W wireless charging on each, though the Xiaomi charges faster over a wire at 100W versus 80W.

Where the Honor genuinely pulls ahead is in build and practicality. It is lighter at 195g versus 219g, carries the superior IP68 and IP69K rating, has an infrared blaster, and ships with a six major Android update commitment. At £899 RRP, but with a discount to £699, it is well priced. At the time of writing the price of the Xiaomi is unknown, but last year’s model launched at £699, so I would expect it to come in cheaper than the Honor once you factor in early bird discounts.

Design & Build Quality

The 17T Pro is a large phone. At 162.2 x 77.5 x 8.25mm and 219g, it is one of the heavier devices in this price bracket, and that weight is the first thing you notice when picking it up next to the Honor 600 Pro, which comes in at 195g. After a couple of hours of use the difference is easy to feel, and for one-handed use the Honor is the more comfortable of the two. If you want something pocketable, the smaller standard Xiaomi 17 or the Honor are the more sensible picks.

That said, the build itself is good. Xiaomi has gone with a brushed metal finish that wraps around the sides, micro-curved edges that take the hard corners off the in-hand feel, and a flat front. The Leica-branded camera module sits in the usual square housing in the top corner. My only real grumble on the design front is the height, which makes reaching the top of the screen a stretch.

Xiaomi makes a point of the bezels. The Pro uses what it calls a LIPO packaging solution to fold the display driver under the panel, giving even 1.29mm bezels on all four sides. In practice that does look tidy and adds to the sense of immersion, even if it is not quite the 0.98mm figure Honor quotes for the 600 Pro. The front is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 7i, and there are three colours to choose from, Deep Blue, Deep Violet, and Black.

The under-display fingerprint sensor is an optical unit and works reliably enough in day-to-day use. The one area where the Honor clearly wins is ingress protection. The Xiaomi is rated IP68, which is fine, but the Honor adds IP69 and IP69K on top, so it will shrug off high-pressure and high-temperature water jets that the Xiaomi is not certified against. For most people IP68 is plenty, but it is a gap on the spec sheet.

Display

The 17T Pro uses a 6.83-inch 1.5K AMOLED panel at 2772 x 1280, with a refresh rate of up to 144Hz, 68 billion colours and the DCI-P3 colour gamut. Peak brightness is rated at 3,500 nits at 25% APL, with a 1-nit minimum brightness that is genuinely useful for late-night reading without blasting your eyes. It supports HDR10+ and Dolby Vision.

In normal use this is a very good display. Colours are accurate, motion is smooth at 144Hz, and the panel is sharp enough for the size. The 1-nit floor is a nice touch that the base 17T does not get. Where it falls behind the Honor is outdoor brightness. The Honor 600 Pro pushes a sustained 4,000 nits in its Sunlight Mode and a quoted 8,000 nit peak, and in direct sunlight that difference is obvious. The Xiaomi is perfectly readable outside, but it is not class-leading on this front.

The more interesting story is flicker. The Pro uses full-brightness DC dimming across the whole luminance range, which is the better approach for anyone who suffers eye strain or headaches from PWM flicker. The base 17T and the Honor 600 Pro both fall back to high-frequency PWM at low brightness, in Honor’s case 3,840Hz. That figure is high enough to be a non-issue for most people, but full-range DC dimming on the Pro is the more comfortable option if you are sensitive. Xiaomi has also leaned hard into eye-care marketing here, with Xiaomi Vision Care and a full set of TUV Rheinland eye-care certifications. The certifications are real, though it is worth keeping in mind that Xiaomi itself notes the phone is not a medical device, so I would treat the health framing with a degree of caution.

One thing the spec sheet does not confirm is whether the 144Hz panel is a true variable LTPO display that can drop to 1Hz to save power on static content. Xiaomi quotes up to 144Hz rather than an LTPO range, so I would not assume the same battery efficiency on static screens that you get from an LTPO panel.

Performance and Benchmarks

The 17T Pro is built around the MediaTek Dimensity 9500 on a 3nm process, with an octa-core CPU clocked up to 4.21GHz, a Mali G1-Ultra GPU and an NPU 990 for on-device AI. It is paired with 12GB of LPDDR5X (rated at 9600Mbps) and UFS 4.1 storage, in 256GB, 512GB and 1TB options. Heat is handled by the Xiaomi 3D IceLoop system, which uses a vapour and liquid separation design to move heat away from the chipset.

As usual with Xiaomi, and many other devices these days, I was unable to run either AnTuTu or 3DMark, as the upload functions are blocked on recent handsets. The benchmarks I was able to run are below.

• Geekbench 6: 3,245 single-core / 9,518 multi-core
• Geekbench GPU: 22,656
• PCMark Work 3.0: 17,962
• AI Benchmark: 17,364

The Geekbench results are notable, as they put the 17T Pro ahead of the Honor 600 Pro, which managed 3,049 single-core and 9,175 multi-core. That fits with what I said earlier about the chipset gap. The Honor’s Snapdragon 8 Elite is last year’s flagship silicon, and the newer Dimensity 9500 edges ahead on raw numbers. The GPU score of 22,656 is strong, sitting just below the 23,648 best-loop figure the Honor recorded in its 3DMark stress test.

The one caveat is sustained performance. Because I could not run the 3DMark stress test on the Xiaomi, I cannot give you a stability percentage to compare against the Honor’s 50.1% figure. The 3D IceLoop cooling should help with longer workloads, but I would want to run a proper stress test before drawing firm conclusions on throttling under extended load. On everyday tasks, app switching, multitasking and general browsing, there is nothing to fault here.

Gaming Experience

The Mali G1-Ultra GPU in the Dimensity 9500 has plenty of headroom for the current crop of mobile games. Titles that support higher frame-rate modes run smoothly, and the large 6.83-inch panel with its 144Hz refresh rate is a good fit for fast-paced games where the extra frames are visible. The slim, even bezels also help reduce accidental edge touches in landscape.

The dual stereo speakers with Dolby Atmos produce a reasonably full sound for games and media, with decent volume and clear directional cues, though they are not the best I have heard at this level. The 3D IceLoop cooling is there to keep things stable during longer sessions, and in shorter bursts the phone stayed comfortable. The trade-off is the size and weight. At 219g this is not the phone I would pick for long handheld gaming sessions, as it does get tiring to hold compared with the lighter Honor.

Battery Life and Charging

The 7,000mAh silicon-carbon battery is the standout feature of the 17T Pro and the biggest reason to choose it over the Honor. Xiaomi uses a high silicon content cell to pack more capacity into the same space than a traditional graphite battery would allow, and it is the largest battery Xiaomi has put in one of its international phones to date. Xiaomi quotes an average of 1.88 days for typical users, and while manufacturer figures are always optimistic, a 7,000mAh cell paired with an efficient 3nm chipset should comfortably see heavy users through a full day with charge to spare, and lighter users into a second day.

Charging is rated at 100W wired HyperCharge and 50W wireless HyperCharge, with up to 22.5W wired reverse charging for topping up accessories. The 100W wired figure is faster than the Honor’s 80W, and 50W wireless matches the Honor. As ever with Xiaomi, whether a charger is included in the box depends on your region, so check with the seller before assuming you get one. Reverse charging is the one area the Honor edges ahead, at 27W wired versus 22.5W here, though both are useful for charging earbuds or a second phone in a pinch.

Taken together, the larger battery and faster wired charging give the Xiaomi a genuine advantage in endurance. If all-day battery life is your priority, this is the stronger of the two phones.

Camera Hardware and Features

The 17T Pro runs a triple rear camera system co-engineered with Leica. The main camera is a 50MP unit with an f/1.67 aperture, OIS, a 23mm equivalent focal length and the Light Fusion 950 sensor with 2.4 micron 4-in-1 super pixels, sitting behind a 1G plus 6P hybrid Leica Summilux lens. The telephoto is a 50MP Leica 5x periscope at f/3.0 with OIS and a 115mm equivalent focal length, and the ultra-wide is a 12MP f/2.2 lens with a 120 degree field of view. The front camera is a 32MP f/2.2 unit.

Xiaomi is pitching this as a telephoto-led phone, and the hardware backs that up. A native 5x optical telephoto with OIS is a genuinely useful tool, and it gives the Xiaomi a real reach advantage over the Honor’s 3.5x periscope. There is also 30cm telemacro shooting through the telephoto lens, which is a practical way to get detailed close-ups with natural background blur, and it is one of my favourite features here. On top of that sits the marketing-friendly 120x AI Ultra Zoom.

I would treat the 120x figure with a healthy dose of scepticism. The reviewer materials themselves tell you to shoot static subjects at 20x, toggle on an Ultra Zoom mode and wait for an on-screen stabilisation frame to turn green before pressing the shutter. That is a clear sign this is a tripod-friendly, AI-reconstructed mode rather than something you will use handheld on a moving subject. It is the same pattern I saw on the Honor, where AI-enhanced zoom produced painterly artefacts on organic subjects like foliage at very long ranges. The optical and optical-grade range up to around 10x is the part I would actually rely on day-to-day, with the AI zoom treated as a fun extra rather than a serious tool.

The software side leans into Leica’s branding. There are Leica colour profiles and portrait looks, a Stage mode tuned for the harsh, high-contrast lighting of concerts and theatres, and a new format Xiaomi calls Leica Live Moment. Live Moment captures a short burst of motion either side of the shutter press, a bit like an extended live photo with Leica colour applied, and it works across all the rear focal lengths including portrait. It is a neat idea, though sharing it is fiddly. On platforms that do not support the format natively you have to export it as an MP4 and stitch the still frames on at each end, which is more effort than most people will bother with.

On video the Xiaomi pulls clearly ahead of the Honor. It records up to 8K at 30fps, 4K at 120fps, 4K HDR10+ at up to 60fps, and Log footage up to 4K 60fps for those who want to grade their own colour. The Pro also adds a Movie mode that shoots 4K at 60fps with real-time depth-based background blur. The Honor 600 Pro tops out at 4K 60fps with no 4K 120fps or Log option, so for video the Xiaomi is the more capable tool. The one selfie point in the Honor’s favour is its higher 50MP front camera versus the 32MP unit here.

Photo Quality

In good light the main camera does what Xiaomi’s recent Leica phones have done well. Detail is strong, dynamic range is handled sensibly and the Leica colour science gives images a slightly richer, more deliberate look than a stock Android camera. The f/1.67 aperture, OIS and the large 1/1.31-inch sensor give it a good base for lower-light work, and the relatively large super pixels help keep noise in check, though I would want a longer test in tricky lighting before making firm claims about how it stacks up against the Honor’s 200MP sensor at night.

It is worth being clear about the sensor sizes here, because the spec sheets are easy to misread. The Xiaomi’s main camera uses a 1/1.31-inch sensor, which is actually a fraction larger than the Honor’s 1/1.4-inch unit. The Honor counters with a much higher 200MP resolution against the Xiaomi’s 50MP, so the two take different routes to a similar end. The Honor’s pixel-heavy approach gives it more to work with for cropping and full-resolution detail in good light, while the Xiaomi’s larger physical sensor area, lower pixel count and brighter f/1.67 aperture lean towards light gathering. On paper that should put the Xiaomi in a good position for low-light work, though I would want a longer side-by-side before declaring a winner at 1x.

Where the gap is clearer is zoom. The Xiaomi’s proper 5x optical telephoto gives it a real advantage as soon as you start reaching past the main camera. Through the mid range, from the 5x optical up to the 10x optical-grade setting, the Xiaomi holds detail and texture well, where the Honor’s 3.5x periscope has less room before it starts relying on cropping. Push past 20x into AI zoom on either phone and the results become more of a software interpretation than a true capture. The Xiaomi’s telemacro mode is a highlight, producing sharp, well-separated close-ups that many phones at this price cannot match without a dedicated macro lens.

In short, which camera you prefer comes down to how you shoot. The Honor’s 200MP sensor and the Xiaomi’s larger, brighter 50MP sensor are both strong, and the everyday difference between them will be smaller than the headline megapixel figures suggest. If you value reach, telephoto portraits and video flexibility, the Xiaomi is the clearer choice. Both are strong cameras for the money, and neither will disappoint for everyday photography.

HyperOS 3 & Android 16

While HyperOS does not have the best reputation, I find it perfectly fine, albeit not as polished as the Pixel and some other brands. The 17T Pro ships with HyperOS on top of Android 16.

I would say I prefer MagicOS on the Honor, though I think that is mostly because I have spent more time with Honor phones long-term. One thing I did note was that the Xiaomi had significantly less bloatware than the Honor, which is a point in its favour for anyone who dislikes wading through pre-installed apps on a new phone. The Honor does offer more features through its apps, particularly around AI, though whether that is a positive or a negative depends on how much of that functionality you actually use.

On the AI and Google side, the 17T Pro includes Xiaomi HyperAI, Circle to Search and Google Gemini, along with a Xiaomi Offline Communication feature that allows short-range voice calls between two supported devices without a network. Buyers in eligible markets also get a set of bundled trials at no extra cost, namely three months of Google AI Pro, three months of YouTube Premium and four months of Spotify Premium. The one area I would like more clarity on is software support. The Honor commits to six major Android updates, and at the time of writing Xiaomi had not confirmed an equivalent figure for the 17T Pro, so it is worth checking the update policy before buying if long-term support matters to you.

Price and Alternative Options

As is often the case with these launches, pricing is the missing piece. At the time of writing, the UK price of the Xiaomi 17T Pro had not been confirmed, with the press materials only listing a placeholder. For context, last year’s 15T Pro launched at £699, the standard Xiaomi 17 sits at £900, and the Xiaomi 17 Ultra at £1300. On that basis, I would expect the 17T Pro to land somewhere around or a little above the £699 mark, with early bird deals likely to bring it down further at launch.

The obvious alternative is the Honor 600 Pro itself, at £899.99 RRP but discounted to around £699 with launch promotions. There is also the Honor Magic8 Pro, which can be found for around £839 and offers a better telephoto and faster charging. Within Xiaomi’s own range, the standard Xiaomi 17 at £900 is a more compact flagship option, and the base Xiaomi 17T, with its Dimensity 8500-Ultra, 6,500mAh battery and 67W charging, will be the cheaper way into the same camera and design language for those who do not need the Pro’s faster chip, larger battery and 8K video.

As with the Honor, the value verdict hinges almost entirely on the street price. If the 17T Pro launches at or below the £699 to £749 range, it is a strong proposition against the Honor. If it lands closer to the Honor’s RRP, the decision becomes much more about which set of strengths you want, the Xiaomi’s battery, telephoto and video, or the Honor’s lighter build, brighter screen and longer update commitment.

Overall

The Xiaomi 17T Pro is a well-rounded affordable flagship that continues the strong run of the T series. The standout features are the enormous 7,000mAh battery, the genuinely useful 5x optical telephoto with its telemacro and AI zoom modes, the strong Dimensity 9500 performance that edges ahead of the Honor on benchmarks, and a video feature set including 8K, 4K 120fps and Log that the Honor simply cannot match. The display is excellent in everyday use, and the full-range DC dimming will appeal to anyone sensitive to screen flicker.

It is not without compromises. At 219g it is heavy and large, which counts against it for one-handed use and longer gaming sessions. The IP68 rating trails the Honor’s IP68 and IP69K, the 3,500 nit display cannot match the Honor outdoors, the 120x zoom is more marketing than tool, and the lack of a confirmed software update commitment is a question mark next to the Honor’s stated six versions.

Set against the Honor 600 Pro, the choice is genuinely close and comes down to priorities. The Honor is the better pick if you want a lighter, more pocketable phone with the brightest screen in this class and the longest update promise. The Xiaomi is the better pick if you want the biggest battery, the most flexible camera for reach and video, and a little more raw performance. As always, my advice is to check the actual street price of each before committing, because at this end of the market the deal you can find on the day matters as much as the spec sheet.