Xiaomi 12T Pro vs Xiaomi 12 Pro: What has changed?

Xiaomi has just released a new Pro smartphone. But where do the 12T and the 12 differ in their specifications?

Now that the sequel to the excellent Xiaomi 12 Pro has been unveiled, you might be wondering what’s new – what the upgrades and potential downgrades are to this new handset, and whether you should buy one.

While there are quite a few minor specifications differences, this article concentrates on three major differences between the two handsets: the camera, the processor, and the battery.

Camera

The main difference to be found is with the camera system, and that’s not particularly surprising when the new device’s tagline is “make moments mega.” To this end, it packs a 200-megapixel main camera sensor, an extremely high resolution for a smartphone, and you can get a strong in-sensor 2x zoom from this as well. Accompanying this snapper you also have an 8-megapixel ultrawide lens and a 2-megapixel macro sensor.

By contrast, the Xiaomi 12 Pro seems to have a more balanced and versatile arrangement. There are three rear camera sensors (wide, ultrawide, and telephoto) and each of these has a 50-megapixel resolution. We judged it as “a very capable camera system that works very well across its three lenses”, and we lavished praise on its abilities in both daylight and when shooting in lowlight conditions; you take a look at three sample images from this device above.

Processor

Another change between the two devices, which is perhaps to be expected when they’re released at opposite ends of the year, is that to the processor. The Xiaomi 12T Pro runs on the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1, which is the very latest mobile chipset from Qualcomm, and we’ve already seen it used to great effect by the likes of the Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro and the OnePlus 10T.

By contrast, the Xiaomi 12 Pro runs on the previous chipset from the same manufacturer, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. This is also highly capable flaghsip-grade silicon. Ultimately you’re likely to get brilliant performance levels from both of these, but given that the 12T Pro is on a more recent edition then you’re likely to hit higher peaks with that device; however, we’ll have to test it with benchmarking software to make sure of that.

Battery

Both the Xiaomi 12 Pro and the Xiaomi 12T Pro share impressive 120W fast-charging, but there is however a difference in the battery capacity of the two handsets, in favour of the newer model.

While the Xiaomi 12 Pro has a fairly generous 4600mAh capacity, the 12T Pro builds on this with a 5000mAh battery capacity so in theory at least we should expect longer battery life from it. However, smartphone specs don’t always work in practice as one might expect, so we’ll put it through our rigourous tests to find out if this is really the case.

Another difference to be found in this field is that the Xiaomi 12 Pro offers 50W wireless charging, but the new Xiaomi 12T Pro does not offer this feature at all.