[REVIEW] Xiaomi Mi Smart Clock are extraordinary smart clocks that also stream camera footage

Xiaomi Mi Smart Clock are more than just ordinary clocks. They’re smart clocks with Google Assistant support, so you can listen to your favorite music on Spotify or watch a live stream from a security camera.

Where to buy the Xiaomi Mi Smart Clock?

We had the Xiaomi Mi Smart Clock smart watch available thanks to our new partner, the Slovak e-shop MiStores.sk, which has specialized in selling Xiaomi devices for many years. You can get the clocks for a better price with our coupon.

You can find coupons for the Xiaomi Mi Smart Clock here

You’ll be pleased with fast delivery in 1 – 3 business days and standard 2-year warranty.

Technical specifications at a glance

Simple packaging

The Xiaomi Mi Smart Clock smart watch comes in a small box measuring 15 x 9.6 x 8.9 cm. On the box, you’ll find not only pictures of the watch, but also basic information about its features.

Inside, the clocks are placed in a cardboard insert and a white film. The clock display is also protected with a transparent film. Next to the clock, you’ll only find the micro-USB power cable with an adapter and a user manual. The packaging is simple, but it includes everything you need.

Design and build quality

The clock design is minimalist and straightforward, much like many other Xiaomi smart devices for home use. The clocks are made of white, matte plastic with a black frame around the touchscreen. However, they still feel high quality.

As for the placement of the individual elements, on the front you only get the display. The sides of the clock are blank, and the only control buttons are on the top. There are three of them: for controlling the volume and turning off the microphone, the so-called mute. Besides that, you’ll also find a pair of microphones.

The back is where the micro-USB power port lives, and at the bottom you’ll find a speaker output grille.

The watch is quite compact. Its dimensions are just 113 x 68 x 81.5 cm, so it fits in any modern home. The display is a classic IPS, so don’t expect miracles. Black is more of a dark grey, but the resolution is good, so the display looks smooth.

First power-on and pairing with your smartphone

You can’t add the Xiaomi Mi Smart Clock to the Xiaomi Home app, but since it also supports Google Assistant, it works with the Google Home app. So far, we hadn’t used this app, so the first step was installing it from the Google Play store.

After successful installation and signing in with your Google account, the app immediately found the Mi Smart Clock device nearby and offered to add it. The next step was choosing a language, because Slovak isn’t available in the clock menu.

In the next step, we selected the room where the clock would be stored, entered the password for your home Wi-Fi network, and went through the initial settings. These include setting the default music service (YouTube Music or Spotify) and adding contacts to your household that you often call.

In the final step, the clock firmware update also ran, and the app offered us several voice control examples. The whole process of adding the clock to the app was very fast and easy.

Clocks with different designs

The primary purpose of the Xiaomi Mi Smart Clock is to display the current time. The home screen therefore shows the time and the day of the week. The clock offers fairly rich customization options for this screen.

There are 12 different designs, and you can customize each one. The change is done by pressing and holding on the home screen, where you’ll find all the designs with a pencil icon in the bottom-left corner, which is used for customization.

For example, with the default design with colorful numbers, you can change the background color, enable switching between light and dark colors based on the room lighting, display the current temperature, or show an information line for Google Assistant. You’ll find similar settings for the other designs as well.

Display quality isn’t the best. Viewing angles are good horizontally, but if you look at the clock from below or above, you can see noticeable color differences and the image on the display slightly loses clarity overall. However, it responds quite reliably to touch.

What the clock menu offers

In the Xiaomi Mi Smart Clock menu, you swipe right on the display to go to the next screen. You can set an alarm, view the weather, and play music.

For the alarm, you can customize its volume, snooze length, maximum duration, and ringtone tone. There are 7 different melodies available, with the last one coming from Google AI and changing every day—but it’s always a piano melody. You can also choose which days the alarm repeats, enable the so-called Sunrise alarm, and set up a Good Morning Routine.

The Sunrise alarm gradually increases the display brightness starting 30 minutes before the alarm rings. If you turn on Good Morning Routine, after the ringing alarm is turned off, you’ll also hear Google Assistant, which will tell you about the weather and current world news (of course in English) from multiple sources—switching between them the way you would when choosing your next track.

Weather and music playback

Another menu item is the weather, which shows the current, maximum, and minimum temperature. After you click on the weather screen, Google Assistant will tell you what the weather will be like today, using the weather.com source.

The last screen is music playback. The clock supports Spotify or YouTube Music. You can set the default service during the initial setup when pairing the clock with the app, or anytime later via Google Home.

However, with the change of the default music service, we ran into some problems. In the Google Home app, there is a Music service setting where you should be able to choose at least between Spotify and YouTube Music, but in our case, this settings screen was still empty.

The watch shows only 3 recommended tracks. If you want to play other music, you can use voice control. To choose a specific track, however, you need Spotify Premium. Without that subscription, you can only choose an artist. There’s also the option to play music from your smartphone using the Spotify app, where you can use Chromecast. To use the same feature in YouTube Music, you need a paid subscription.

As for sound quality, it’s surprisingly good. The audio is clear, the volume is sufficient, and the bass is also there.

The app environment and options for adding more devices

The main screen of the app shows our home. At the beginning of the testing, we only had Google Assistant – Mi Smart Clock on it. However, let’s move on to the more interesting part: adding other smart devices by connecting other accounts.

We can see an option to link Mi Home and SmartLife accounts right at the top of the main screen. In the Mi Home app, we have several devices, and in SmartLife we have the Moes thermostatic head.

We connected all the mentioned accounts one by one by entering the login credentials. Then, at the bottom, we can see the available devices from those accounts. If you want to control them with the Google Home app as well, you need to add them to your home in Google Home.

As you can see in the screenshot above, in the Mi Home app we have multiple devices. However, from all those devices, only the air fryer and the Mi 360° 2K Pro camera were imported. What a shame that the other cameras or thermometers aren’t usable. Unfortunately, we also couldn’t find any list of Xiaomi devices that are supported.

As for the SmartLife app, we used it to test a thermostat head, which imported into Google Home correctly. We also imported a Xiaomi Mi TV 4S smart TV into Google Home, where you can display different content using voice commands.

Google Assistant Voice

Unfortunately, the voice assistant isn’t available in Slovak or Czech, so to give commands we used English. If you know at least the basics of English, you can use the assistant really well. It’s activated with the command “OK Google”.

For example, you can just tell it to set the temperature in the living room to 23 °C, and since it has access to the thermostat head, it will adjust the temperature according to your instructions. In many cases, you don’t need any complicated sentences in English—simple phrasing is enough, and it doesn’t matter at all if it isn’t grammatically correct.

In most cases, Google Assistant understands what you want it to do. So on the watch, you can set an alarm this way using voice commands, change the clock face, ask about the weather, or start playing music. If you have Spotify Premium or a paid YouTube Music subscription, you can also pick a specific track.

However, Google Assistant can do much more. It can also work as a calculator, show you the current date, calendar events, or even play your favorite radio station. There are many possibilities—you just need to try what it can and can’t do. Controlling it with a voice assistant is very convenient and easy.

With the watch, it should also be possible to make calls through the Google Duo app. We could make a call directly from the Google Duo app on our smartphone, but we couldn’t get this feature working via the watch. The call failed every time, even though the other party had the Google Duo app installed as well.

Watching a live stream from the camera

As we already mentioned above, not all devices from the Xiaomi Home app were imported into Google Home. Among the ones we have in the Xiaomi Home app, there are also several cameras. Specifically, these are Imilab EC3, Mi 360° 2K Pro, Imilab A1, and Imilab Home Security Camera Basic.

Of all these cameras, we can only see one in the Google Home app: the Xiaomi Mi 360° 2K Pro. Unfortunately, we also can’t see the thermometers that are connected to this camera via Bluetooth. The Xiaomi Mi Smart Clock can display a video from the camera using the Google Assistant. This feature is available only through Google Assistant, which only needs to be told “Show [camera name]”.

At first, it didn’t work for us, but in the app we found a helper that helped us figure out that first you need to tell Google Assistant to synchronize the cameras. After this step, the live stream from the camera worked without any issues.

Xiaomi Mi Smart Clock: Final assessment

The Xiaomi Mi Smart Clock are smart watches with support for Google Assistant. Besides showing the time or setting alarms, they can do much more. The watch can also display the current weather, play music from Spotify or YouTube Music, or keep you updated with the latest news from around the world.

After connecting multiple devices in the Google Home app, you get additional options like watching an online stream from a security camera, but this worked for us only with the Xiaomi Mi 360° 2K Pro camera. Google Assistant can also set the temperature on the Moes thermostat head, turn on the air fryer, show photos on the TV, and it can also work as a calculator or a search tool for various information on Wikipedia and other websites. Google Assistant’s options are truly extensive.

You can find coupons for the Xiaomi Mi Smart Clock here

The Xiaomi Mi Smart Clock should be able to make calls through the Google Duo app, but we couldn’t get this feature to work. The overall settings in the Google Home app aren’t very clear, and we often had to Google for a bit longer to figure out how to set certain things up.