Xiaomi has recently launched its new series of affordable Mi Band fitness trackers; Mi Smart Band 6. The Mi Band has dominated the cheap tracker space, but with Amazfit, Samsung, Huawei, and even Fitbit pushing the price down of their most affordable fitness trackers in the market.
While the Mi Smart Band 6 has been the talk of the town right now, we have got one of the Mi Smart Band 6 with me to test it out. After 2 weeks of trying it out and below are our reviews on this sought-after fitness tracker.
First Impression
The Mi Smart Band 6 looks similar to its predecessors and some other third-party’s fitness tracker. But after a longer look, we agree that it looks more premium than those in the market. The Mi Smart Band 6 is almost as light as paper. Once we have put it onto our wrist, I could almost feel nothing. As if it was not there.
The strap comes in black by default, but there are other livelier colors to choose from, such as yellow, blue, white, and black. Fit and comfort on my wrist are excellent.
The Screen
The Mi Band 6’s new 1.56-inch screen has a 152 x 486 resolution and gets up to 450 nits of brightness which its colors feel more punchy and sharp. Stunning Full-Screen Touch Display created a larger view and touch space which is a plus point for us.
The Features
The Xiaomi Mi Band 6 tracks all the basic metrics such as steps, active and resting heart rate, distance walked, calories burned, breathing, sleep, as well as 30 specific exercises (up from 11 last year). These exercises include basic stuff like running and cycling to more niche activities like rowing and badminton and HIIT.
To shift the emphasis away from steps and onto good heart health, Xiaomi once again includes PAI. This is a single score, based on time spent in elevated heart rate zones in the last seven days. If you go for a brisk walk, workout, or run you get more points. You need to make sure you have 100 PAI to ensure you’ve met WHO guidelines of a healthy active time.
The new blood oxygen (SpO2) monitoring seems accurate. It takes about 20 seconds of holding still, after which the score will be listed on the screen. Even though it doesn’t continuously monitor blood oxygen levels, it actually does use it for sleep monitoring features. Besides that, here’s also women’s cycle tracking for women’s menstrual tracking too.
The Apps
Xiaomi’s health app (Mi Fit) is very well-designed, with detailed charts showing us our exercise data and heart rate history. There are also more than 70 types of watch faces in its MiFit apps store to choose from for FREE, catering to different styles and aesthetics.
When it’s time for bed, it will automatically track that sleep time and you’ll need to head to the companion app to view your stats.
There currently isn’t a way to see those sleep stats on the Band itself but it could be seen in the MiFit apps. You’ll find a record of sleep duration, sleep stages including REM sleep and it’ll even pick up naps too.
There’s also a sleep quality analysis to let you know if you fell asleep at the right time or even got enough sleep. You’ll also generate a sleep score, see how you compare to other users, and see your sleep regularity over the last 7 days.
There are female health tracking some pretty standard fare breathing exercises and there’s stress tracking. This uses heart rate variability measurements to generate that stress data.
You can perform on-the-spot measurements or continuously monitor stress. Both of those measurements are stored in the Mi Fit app where a color-coded system is used to identify stressed and relaxed moments. Our stress data seemed very bare on most days, with one or two spikes of those colors usually indicating mild stress or relaxed moments. It didn’t feel hugely useful with the graphs usually very sparse.
Since the Mi Band 6 lacks physical buttons, navigating is done via swipes and taps. For the most part, the UI is easy enough to get around as everything is where it should be. You can also customize the things that show up on the band within the Mi Fit app.
The Mi Band 6 also allows direct music control on the wrist, which is a bonus. So overall, the Mi Band 6 does a fine job of helping us check our phones less often.
Inside, there are more sensors, including an accelerometer and gyroscope. There is no built-in GPS, but there are connected GPS, which means the band can use your phone’s GPS and track your runs.
Battery Life
The Mi Band 6 packs in the same 125mAh capacity battery as the Mi Band 5, which Xiaomi again says is capable of getting you 6-14 days of battery life; depending on what settings and features you make regular use of. So having the screen nice and bright, turning on continuous heart rate monitoring and advanced sleep-tracking features, and regularly tracking exercise will dent the battery performance.
In our experience, with the screen nice and bright, notifications enabled, those advanced health and sleep monitoring features and continuous stress tracking enabled and tracking an indoor or outdoor exercise once a day, we saw a daily drop-off of about 15%, which worked out to around 7 days. Of course, if you prefer more staying power, you can turn some of these off for 14 days of use in a single charge.
Conclusion
What we like about the Mi Smart Band 6 is always its long-lasting battery which could last longer than what we have expected it to be. Its Steps and Sleep tracking it the most used feature in the band.
Its Heartbeat and Stress monitor was one of the best features to be included in the band in our opinion. As we are working in a fast-paced world, monitoring our stress and heartbeat consistently is important for early health issues detection. Its Inactivity notification is also useful to us as we sit down in front of the computer working for a long time. Getting up a few seconds and move around after a long time seating at a place would definitely be good for our human body.
Xiaomi’s Mi Band series has been one of the best-selling fitness trackers globally for good reason — they offer a solid set of features, long battery life, and an affordable price. With the price at RM 189, this Mi Smart Band 6 is definitely a worthwhile device to consider buying.
Compare to our health what is RM 189 right?
If you are interested to know more about Xiaomi’s Mi Band, check out Xiaomi’s official stores on Lazada and Shopee and offline at Authorised Mi Stores and other official retailers in Malaysia.
