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Sep 2

Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 Review: $50 Fitness Tracker With Stacks Of Features – Forbes

Fitness Comments Off on Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 Review: $50 Fitness Tracker With Stacks Of Features – Forbes

The Xiaomi Mi Band 5 is a petite fitness tracker

The Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 is a cheap fitness tracker. It costs $50, or around 35 in the UK.

This band is significantly more affordable than the Fitbit Inspire HR or Samsung Galaxy Fit, and even undercuts the otherwise great value Huawei Band 4 Pro.

Is the Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 too good to be true? For the most part, it is not. However, there are some weaker parts to consider.

This review will break down the positives before switching to the negative Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 elements, and then a look at some of its additional features.

Want the quick verdict? The Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 is a great value tracker for those short on funds.

The Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 does not have its own GPS chip, but it does have Connected GPS. This uses the location data from your phone to provide accurate distance stats, and maps for your runs and rides.

This is important, as the bands accelerometer-derived estimates are not particularly accurate when running. Connected GPS makes the Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 a fair, at the very least, tracker for serious runners.

Just make sure its setup before you start running: the process isnt as seamless as other Connected GPS devices.

It is not the thinnest band, but is smaller than a smartwatch

Most cheap fitness bands offers just a few different watch faces. The Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 has loads. There are 57 in my review sample.

Three are preloaded, the other 54 can be syncd using the Mi Fit companion app. Some are cringeworthy, but handfuls are not. A new watch face is a quick way to give the band a fresh look every few weeks.

Thousands of additional designs can also be added using third party apps. Xiaomi takes a far more open approach than most, and you get the benefit. The designs are almost limitless, and feature info beyond the basics, such as the step count, heart rate and battery life.

Here are just some of the Mi Band 5's built-in watch faces

The Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5s battery drained almost strangely slowly to start, seeming only to drop a few per cent each day. This is because a lot of the advanced features are switched off as standard, but its battery life is still excellent with most turned on.

Xiaomi says the tiny 125mAh battery lasts up to 14 days, which seems perfectly believable. You will see shorter battery life if you max out display brightness (needed for outdoors workouts) and look at notifications all through the day. However, advanced features like all-day heart rate tracking dont seem to have a party-ruining effect on stamina.

Expect the Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 to last a week of solid use, including some tracked runs, and you wont be disappointed. This beats both the Galaxy Fit and Fitbit Inspire HR.

The Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 can receive notifications from any app you like. Emails, Whatsapps and SMS are all invited.

Its vibration motor buzzes as these come in, and the display lights-up. You cant read full emails, as this is a basic tracker rather than a smartwatch, but unread items do stay in a Notifications section until you take a look.

As in the Huawei Band Pro series, notifications handling feels a little fiddly. But it is good enough to let you check email headers and messages without taking out your phone. It ticks off the basics.

You flick up and down on the Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5s screen to scroll through each of its main functions. Each primary feature gets a page with a colourful icon. I recommend you prune these down, as the 11 homscreens are a few too many to flick through every day.

The Mi Fit phone app lets you choose which get a spot on the interface. Keep it to four or five of the ones you actually use and the Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 will feel slicker.

The Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 has a 1.1-inch full colour 294 x 126 pixel OLED screen. This is much more advanced than the monochrome display of the Galaxy Fit E. Its very sharp, colourful and the pure black of the OLED panel looks great against the black surround.

The display covering is glass rather than plastic, which is seen in some budget trackers. And maximum brightness is good, with enough power to make the screen clear when you go for a run on a sunny day.

The screen offers OLED black and a curved glass top

Xiaomi claims the Mi Smart Band 5s optical heart rate (PPG) sensor is 50% more accurate than that of the Mi Band 4. The main positive observation in testing is that it responds very quickly to drops in exertion, and fairly quickly to increases.

It also does not have one issue noted in my Samsung Galaxy Watch 3 review, of overestimating your heart rate if you begin tracking during a low-key pre-run warm up.

The Mi Band 5 has a dual-LED PPG heart rate sensor

Does this mean the Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 heart rate sensor is better than the Galaxy Watch 3s? No, it does not.

It is more erratic, with the occasional leap to the ~120bpm range when the rate should be around 70bpm. Mid-workout comparisons with the Wahoo Kickr HR chest strap also suggest the Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 makes significant use of cadence data to pre-empt actual drops and rises in heart rate.

Heart rate readings dropped more quickly in the Mi Smart Band 5 than the strap, before normalising, when slowing from a run to walking pace. And its actual bpm accuracy is only OK, with fairly frequent differences of 4-8bpm at consistent exertion levels.

It appears to make significant use of HR prediction to patch up the limitations of a basic PPG sensor.

Resting heart rate readings are not handled particularly well either. Rather than waiting for the correct reading, it usually displays a much higher one before locking onto the correct heart rhythm.

However, look back at the Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5s automatic readings in the Mi Fit app and you shouldnt see too many odd blips where a high resting heart rate has been recorded. The app stores a graph of your heart rate through the day.

The Mi Band 5 doesn't have a standard watch band, typical of an entry-level tracker

The Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 is not the most comfortable budget fitness tracker. Its band is a simple silicone affair with a prong and hole mechanism, not a traditional watch type.

However, its the style and shape of the main unit that causes the lingering problem. The body of the Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 is largely flat, with a lump that holds the HR sensor.

This means the main points of contact are this HR mound and the back of the strap. Wear it with a fit tight enough for accurate heart rate readings and youll see a pronounced indent in your skin each time you take it off.

The Fitbit Inspire HR and Huawei Band Pro series watches are more comfortable, because the points of contact are larger, spreading the pressure.

The Mi Band 5 is not the most comfy fitness tracker

The Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 also lacks an ambient light sensor, used by phones and smartwatches to alter the display brightness to suit your surroundings. Brightness has to be changed manually.

You will need to do this if you want to make the screen visible during outdoors workouts and keep the battery lasting a week or more.

A lack of auto brightness is not surprising in a cheap but otherwise feature-rich tacker. But it should be quicker to alter manually. It takes eight swipes and taps to reach the brightness control, which is about six too many.

A solution? The Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 should make a screen brightness control widget. I need to use it far more often than the Weather, Stress, PAI or Breathing shortcuts.

A greater sin: the Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 does not have an always-on screen mode. This is absent to ensure fairly good battery life no matter the number of features you have switched on, like 24/7 heart rate sensing. 10 seconds is the maximum screen time-out.

The Mi Band 5 has a great screen, just not an always-on one

However, a fitness tracker should have, at the very least, an always-on screen feature for workouts. Thankfully, there is a mode that turns the display on when you turn wrist to face, and there are customisable sensitivity settings for this.

This flick to wake mode, and the vast majority of its useful extra features, are not switched on as standard.

Until you go into the Mi Fit app and turn then on, the Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 seems a little inert. Extras you may want to turn on include notifications, lift-to-wake, SMS alerts, incoming call alerts, activity monitoring, stress monitoring and GPS via the app. More should probably be enabled as standard.

The Mi Fit also features an ad slot, populated by Xiaomi sub-brand Amazfit during testing. Its not what you want to see, or accidentally touch, after paying out for the companys products.

The Chinese version of the Mi Smart Band 5, called the Mi Band 5, has NFC. This is used for wireless payments, but the feature is missing on the international model.

The Mi Smart Band 5 has 11 tracker modes, including running and cycling both inside and outdoors, rowing, yoga, jump rope and "freestyle".

There are some neat specific extras in a few of these. Youll see lengths in the indoors swimming mode, a stroke count in rowing and the number of jumps in rope-skipping.

As the swim mode suggests, the Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 is ready for the pool with 50m (5ATM) water resistance too.

Flick through the Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5s screens and youll see one called PAI. This acts as a point-based indication of your activity level through the span of a week. The idea is you should keep it at 100 or above at all times. You might get on with it, but it doesnt not offer any great insight if you already exercise regularly.

The Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 offers the typical sleep tracking experience. Wear the band overnight and youll see your sleep and wake-up times, and a breakdown of your REM, light and deep sleep segments.

This seems no less accurate than the category average, although the testing period was blissfully free of the broken sleep that might highlight missed wakeful periods.

Here's how your nights of sleep are represented in Mi Fit

Theres a stress monitor function too. This grades you using a fairly rudimentary system, most likely based on current heart rate versus normal resting heart rate and heart rate variability. Its not particularly useful as a manual feature to set off. But you can take a look back over the day in the Mi Fit app if you have a stinker of an afternoon and want proof of its awfulness.

Shutter Camera control is the Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5s one Labs feature. You can set off the camera shutter with a press on the bands display. It works perfectly well, tested with the Moto G Pro.

The one homepage shortcut not turned on as standard is Cycles. This is a period tracking feature, but I havent been able to test it.

The Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 also offers basic music control. This is not relayed in one of the primary shortcuts. You have to dig into the menu a little, but it does let you change the track, pause and control volume fairly easily.

None of the little hidden extras are missing either. The Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 has alarms, it can be used to keep your phone unlocked and theres a find my phone feature. Very handy.

The Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 does a lot for a small amount of money. Its most important extra is Connected GPS, from a fitness tracking perspective.

The heart rate tracker seems to have a highly algorithm-led approach that does not always show you the right reading, but it does a fair job of showing your exertion as long as you dont look too close at the data. And, to be honest, you can only really tell by comparing it to a more accurate chest strap sensor.

Huaweis Smart Band 4 Pro is arguably even better, with built-on GPS and a more comfortable design, but the Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 is an excellent choice if every dollar counts.

See the article here:
Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 Review: $50 Fitness Tracker With Stacks Of Features - Forbes

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