I’ve been using this watch for more than 2 weeks now and I really do like this Xiaomi Watch S1 Active in a few aspects. So in today’s video, let’s take a look at what the Xiaomi Watch S1 Active has to offer.
Inside the box, we only get the essentials. The Watch S1 Active with the strap already pre-installed, and also a proprietary charging puck that only snaps on in one direction. There are a few more paper documents inside but we’re really not going to talk about it.
The watch’s overall design is actually fairly simple and clean which I personally prefer. It has a large 1.43-inch circular AMOLED display and this makes the entire watch looks just so elegant. I would personally prefer the entire bezel of the display to be perfectly circular instead of this gear-shaped bezel, though. Also, the texts “outdoor” and “active” are pointless as there are no buttons on that side.
There are, however, two buttons on the right side of the watch and they are labeled correctly. I mean, it’s literally doing what the labels say. The top button goes back to home immediately and the bottom button goes directly to the list of sports modes.
There are “117 fitness modes and 19 professional modes” available for you to choose from – so have fun. This watch also has auto sports mode detection so it will still log your workout activity even if you forgot to select what workout you’re doing.
There are many more features available on the watch too. Swiping up from the home screen reveals the quick settings menu, and we can then head into the real settings menu.
There are a lot of features here – like Bluetooth connectivity with your headphones or earphones and WiFi connection too. I have no idea why they’re here since it’s not like we require to download massive files over WiFi to the watch directly and we cannot play music directly from the watch anyway.
Then we have sound because there are speakers on this watch so we can use it to answer calls – which is nice – and we have the brightness control. I think for the current firmware, the brightness detection and how it automatically changes from one brightness level to another is a bit too abrupt. I still left it on since auto-brightness is a very nice feature to have.
After that, we have the PIN setup which I will talk about it later – and that’s about it. Those are all the features available on the watch itself, and now we’ll have to jump into the Mi Fitness app instead.
The interface is fairly standard as it acts as a dashboard for all the health data collected by the Xiaomi Watch S1 Active, but what I want to highlight here is the “device” menu. We have a few more features that is not found on the watch – namely being Xiaomi Pay, formerly known as Mi Pay. I tried setting it up and it required me to configure a PIN for the watch – but there were no available banks that support this feature as of now. Quite a bummer, honestly.
Then we have one more item in the settings menu – that is the watch face. Xiaomi claims there are over 200+ watch faces available and yea there are a lot to choose from but not exactly customizable unless you use those under the “photos” category. There is also no option to download watch faces from apps like Facer or Timeflik (formerly known as Mr Time) because the Xiaomi Watch S1 Active is not a smartwatch like the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4.
Xiaomi didn’t even mention the word “smart watch” on the Xiaomi Watch S1 Active’s product page so I don’t know why many other reviewers are calling this a “smart watch”.
There are still some apps that we can install on the Xiaomi Watch S1 Active but there are only 3 apps available and they are all proprietary. So, no Google Play Store support.
But, since it doesn’t have those advanced smart features, the Xiaomi Watch S1 Active has extremely long battery life. I wore it for nearly 2 weeks – including when I sleep, and I still got about 20% battery left. I just don’t like the charger since it’s using a proprietary wired charger that connects via these pogo pins. I mean, come on – it’s time to go for a wireless charger.
My other complaint about the watch is the super grippy watch strap. I find it very difficult to wear and take out because the strap is just difficult to work with. We can change the strap if we want to, but from my measurement – it seems to be using a 22mm strap? I can’t find the exact strap width on the product page so I can only rely on my own measurements.
Should you buy the Xiaomi Watch S1 Active?
It’s a fairly featureful smartband but I really do want apps like Facer or Timeflik to be supported on the Xiaomi watch OS so we can download even more fancier watch faces. Currently, for the price of RM649 – I think it’s expensive for what it has to offer.
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