[Review] Xiaomi Mi Band

Xiaomi has been gaining its popularity with its smartphones and power banks with affordable price. Still remember that when the Xiaomi 10400mAh power bank was just released in Malaysia with just RM 36, a huge online buying tornado has hit the website. All went poof within seconds – and that’s just the beginning of Xiaomi. At the end of 2014, Xiaomi has introduced its smartwear – Mi Band, into Malaysia with the affordable price of RM59. What has attracted to me is actually its compatibility with both Android phones (running Android 4.4 and above) and iPhone 4s and above (running on iOS 7.0 and above). Unlike the other smartwear where usually only limited to its own brand smartphone or mostly Android phone, Xiaomi has made a different choice to open up its market to iPhone users also, which I think is a wise decision. Let’s look into the features of Mi Band before we talk about the REAL performance. As what we read from here, the features of Mi Band are:

• Monitor your daily fitness level – steps counting, track walking distance, calculate calories burned
• Smart vibration alarm – gently nudge to wake you up in the morning
• Monitor your sleep cycle – automatically activated, track your sleep cycle
• Sync with the app, Mi Fit (Android/ Apple) – show steps track, sleep cycle, battery level of Mi Band
• Unlock your phone (only works with Xiaomi smartphone)
• Incoming call alert – vibrate and lighting

Okay, that’s about all features that they introduced to public. Let’s look at the real thing!   The box itself is rather simple, cardboard all over and have information at the bottom. Opening up, the Mi Band is right here at the center. Removing everything from the box, we’re presented with a necessary amount of things that comes along with the Mi Band. Inside the box, you get one Mi Band, one charging dock, one piece of manual. Simple and neat. Let’s start the journey! Open up the Mi Fit in my phone and pair it with the Mi Band. After pairing , you can see the battery information in “My devices”. Under that page, you can choose what colour is the light when you reach daily goal and some other settings. The highlight of the page is the “Find band” function. To be frank, I don’t find this function to be useful. If you forgot where did you left the band, then you use “Find band”, the band will vibrate and light up but the light is really faint in daytime. Moreover, the band will only react if it is within Bluetooth range. Not a really practical function, if you ask me. There’s two main page in Mi Fit. One is for steps tracking – including calories burned and distance walked/run. For the distance tracking, you can set your daily goal in the setting. The recommended daily goal for healthy lifestyle by Mi is 8000 steps per day. On the band, one indicator light will come up if you achieve one-third of your daily goal; two lights up for two-thirds of your daily goal; all lights up and vibration when you achieve your daily goal.

Another one is for sleep cycle tracking – showing you how long you slept yesterday night and also how long is your deep sleep and light sleep. Well, I must say that this function is quite accurate. This is where I find the Mi Band amazing. It can detect the exact time that you fell asleep and also the time when you wake up in the next morning. The sleep mode is activated automatically and the sleep cycle will be recorded. All you have to do is just wear the Mi Band and sleep. The sleep cycle will be recorded every night you wear it and the average of your sleep time will be shown in the summary page. It can be viewed in weekly or monthly summary so that you can track and monitor your sleep cycle. [Reminder: To keep our body healthy and clear mind, we need at least 7 hours of sleep. ]

For the alarm function, it works as vibrating to wake you up gently. It will vibrate for around 3 times with one second interval. If the band detects no movement after several minutes, it will vibrates again. This process will be repeated till you get out from the bed. This is better than shocking yourself with the noisy alarm clock or your mum pouring cold water right on your face, right? Next, let’s look at the incoming call alert. In setting, there’s an option where you can set how long is the delay before the band vibrates. For me, I chose “vibrate if not picking up after 3 seconds”. The band will light up and vibrate in the same time. This is the best feature for me. For girls, you know we often put our handphone in bag, so it’s often that we miss some calls while shopping around, getting distracted by beautiful clothes and shoes. Hence, this feature saves us! The band will vibrate and notify you that you have an incoming call! Although it does not have a mic and speaker nor a button to pick up the call, it subtly notified us that there’s a call waiting for us to pick up, which is the major reason that made me buy the Mi Band. What I talked about so far is the function that is introduced to public. Actually, there’s two more extra features – jumping rope and sit-up. It can track how many times you jump and also how many times you do sit-up. The counting is not really accurate, sometimes I jumped for few times, it only record one or two, same goes to sit-up. Hope to see some improvement in these two features. Now, let’s take a look at the specification. The body of the Mi Band consists of a metal surface with three indicator lights and polycarbonate casing. The metal surface is made of 100% aluminum alloy while there’s four colours for indicators light – blue, green, red and orange. As I mentioned above, you can customize the band by choosing which colour to light up when you achieve your daily goal. Notice that, the band is also water and dust-resistant. Inside the band, there’s an ultra-thin lithium polymer battery with only 8mm thick with capacity of 41mAh. It uses 25mA while taking in DC 5V, making it a very low-powered device. A fully charged band can last for a month, even if it is connected to smartphone whole day. In order to able to track steps accurately, they used the military-grade accelerometer by ADI. As for the Bluetooth, Dialog’s Bluetooth 4.0 chip is implemented in the band’s core. Not a fan of black colour? Worry not, Xiaomi has been very thoughtful to provide total of 6 colours for consumer to choose with – black, blue, green, orange, pink and green. However, till today, only black colour is available in Malaysia.

Conclusion

I have to say that using the Mi Band on Android systems prior to Lollipop, there will be some features like Trusted Devices for selective password locks are not present. Sure, it’s a small feature, but it’s the little things that count – especially when it adds value for the users. On a base of 10, the Mi Band is rated as below. Performance – 7/10 Battery – 10/10 Practicality – 5/10 Price – 9/10 If you are interested to get one, click me! Thank you for your time to read until this end.

---

Like our Facebook Page here at NasiLemakTech.com for more news and in-depth reviews! Also, join our Facebook Group for insightful information and memes!

Subscribe to our YouTube channel too!

---