Review: Xiaomi Mi Band

Xiaomi's Mi Band has been added to my collection of Xiao Mi gadgets. I bought my first Xiao Mi phone and portable battery last year and just lately I bought their Mi Band. 

It was meant as a Christmas gift to Derp. I also bought one for myself since it's not that expensive as compared to those similar bands produced by big brands. A Mi Band only cost SGD $19.99. No harm trying it out :)

I told myself if I wear it for one month consecutively it's already considered as good enough and value for money.

I will first talk about the hardware of this Mi Band.

It comes with this USB cable for you to charge the mi band to your computer. The battery lasts up to 30 days after every charge.

After wearing it for a week (I took it off during bathing time even though it's water resistant), the back of the band start to turn white. 

It can be scratched off quite easily and the reason behind my band turning white is due to sunblock! No idea why too but oh well, at least stains can be easily removed so I think it shouldn't pose much a problem.

The recommended number of steps to take each day is 8000 and so I set my daily target to be 8000. You can set up to 20k steps if I did not remember wrongly. They have this light indicator to indicate how far you are from your goal everyday. You can set the color of the light too and I set mine to pink! 

2 lights means you are almost reaching your daily target.

And this will means I've reached my daily target.

When you have reached your daily target, it will vibrate and the lights will blink to inform you. It's not difficult to reach 8000 steps and achievable whenever I go for a more than 2km run after a day of work. 

Anyway, I wore my Mi Band to my yoga lesson and I do wonder how it will turn out. So here's a screen shot of it..

19:44-20:00 is the time I walk to my yoga lesson venue. I didn't took that long to walk because it's around 5 mins away only, rest of the time I'm probably hanging around and it's being recorded. 

From 20:15 to 21:08 is when I'm doing my yoga. Before that I'm probably warming up hence no much walking about too. Can't believe that just walking from front of the yoga mat to the back of it for that 1 hour I walked nearly 373m. lol.

After which, I walked home again and the steps are being recorded.

I bought the Mi Band mainly to track my sleeping pattern. I've always wanted to find out how much sleep I'm getting and whether are they deep sleep or light sleep. Did some research and found out if your alarm rings when you are in deep sleep, chances of you finding hard to wake up is very high! No wonder some days I feel extremely tired the moment I open my eyes.

Moving on to the downside of the Mi Band. There's one downside of this Mi Band which I think it's common among other similar type of bands in the market. If I leave It there too long, they will think I went to sleep and start recording my sleeping pattern.

Forgot to wore it after I bathe and this is what happen. -_-".

Another time was after I woke up in the morning, I brushed my teeth and took out this band before bathing. The Mi Band recorded me as going back to sleep -_-",

In short, whenever you are not doing anything or just leave it there, it will record you as sleeping.

Below are some of the other interfaces of the Mi Band app which I installed onto my IPhone (yes Mi Band do work with iphone and at least ios 7 if I'm not wrong)..

You are required to key in your weight, height and age at the start so that they will be able to count the calories you burn through your activities. Not bad eh, I burned 404 daily lol. In order to lost one Kg you need to burn 500kcal a day! 

The app has a page to show the battery life of the Mi Band

Earlier on I was talking about setting your daily steps goal and the color of the light indicator you want it to be. This is the page which you can set your daily goal, and the color of the light indicator all on this page too. 

That's all for my review of the Mi Band.

All in all, I think it's a good buy and it is value for money. The app for the Mi Band is very user friendly and not difficult to use at all. It may not be very precise because Derp tried moving his hands, the steps count did increase even though he was seated while doing so to test the Mi Band.

We wore it out for our run before and it's actually quite accurate in counting the amount of steps we took. If you are looking for something not complicated, you can try out the  Mi Band :)

For more information about the Mi Band, you can go to http://www.mi.com/sg/miband/ Do note that only the black color Mi Band are being sold here for the time being.