[REVIEW] Xiaomi Mi Watch are excellent smartwatches with an AMOLED display, diacritics support and Spotify support

Xiaomi only has a few smartwatches in its direct lineup. Most smartwatches are sold under some of the subsidiary brands that belong to the brand’s ecosystem. We’ve already tested the Mi Watch Lite, but this time we’ll take a look at the bigger brother of these watches, Xiaomi Mi Watch.

These watches are also known as the Mi Watch Color. However, the global version is labeled Xiaomi Mi Watch. In the review, we’ll take a detailed look at the individual watch functions and their reliability.

Where to buy the Xiaomi Mi Watch?

You can buy the global version of the Xiaomi Mi Watch from an international seller of the Xiaomi brand on the online marketplace AliExpress. The watches are available in the Polish warehouse, so you don’t have to worry about any extra fees.

Current coupons for Xiaomi Mi Watch

Technical specifications

Package contents

The Xiaomi Mi Watch smartwatches come in a blue elongated box with a picture of the watch and basic specifications. Inside the reinforced cardboard box, you’ll find the watches themselves, with a protective film on the display.

Under the watch, you’ll find two compartments with the user manual and a charging cable, without an adapter. Thanks to the hard case, the watches are well protected against the adverse effects of rough handling during shipping.

Design, build quality, and control elements

We have the tested watch in blue. The blue isn’t just the strap—it's also the watch’s frame, complemented by black elements. Overall, the watches feel very high quality. They’re made from polyamide reinforced with glass fibers.

The display is covered with tempered glass, and the watches have just two buttons. One is used to access the main menu, and the other provides quick access to tracking sports activity. The strap is made from TPU and also feels well made. Unlike regular straps, it has a fine texture on the outside where dirt and dust can get caught.

Pairing with the Xiaomi Wear app

The Xiaomi Mi Watch watches, just like the lighter Lite version, work with the Xiaomi Wear app. We’ve already written about the app in the review of the Xiaomi Mi Watch Lite.

Pairing is very easy. The app immediately found the watches near the smartphone, but if that doesn’t happen, just select the model from the app’s list. First, we chose the language on the watches. You’ll find Czech there too, but we selected English. Slovak isn’t available.

In the next step, we only confirmed the pairing on the watch, where a numeric code is displayed—just like in the app. The whole process is simple and took us only a few minutes.

Watch display and the environment

Since the watch has an AMOLED display with a size of 1.39″ and a resolution of 454 x 454 px, the screen looks really nice and smooth at first glance. The colors are vivid, black is completely black, and we have nothing to complain about with the display.

The pre-set watch face shows not only the time, but also the date, battery capacity, steps taken, and calories burned. To get to the main menu, you press the top button labeled “Home”. The menu is the same as on the Lite watch version, so the individual functions are shown as small square icons in a grid. There are up to 23 of them, which indicates a lot of features.

The icon symbols are pretty self-explanatory, but not all of them are obvious at first glance. After a few minutes and trying out all the functions, though, we quickly got used to the individual symbols. The most used functions, notifications, and the quick access screen are also available by swiping your finger across the display in different directions from the main watch face.

Heart-rate measurement and SpO2

One of the usual features of fitness trackers and smartwatches is heart rate monitoring, which is also included here. You can enable continuous heart rate monitoring throughout the whole day, so you’re informed about your heart rate non-stop. If you want to save battery, you can turn this function off and measure your heart rate via the main menu whenever you want. Such monitoring takes up to 10 seconds.

We compared the accuracy of the heart rate measurement with a pulse oximeter and an Omron blood pressure monitor. In most cases, the deviation was minimal or none. After physical exertion, differences showed up in some places in the range of 10 – 12 bpm.

Blood oxygenation can’t be set for continuous measurement. Measuring SpO2 is only possible once, and this measurement takes longer than heart rate measurement. Sometimes the watch would fail to measure the oxygenation level on the first try, or the measurement would still take almost 1 minute. However, the accuracy is good and comparable to a pulse oximeter.

Sleep tracking

Monitoring sleep quality and duration is also among the favorite features of smart watches. Sleep information can be found in fairly detailed form directly on the watch. Here it shows the score of your last sleep and its duration. There’s also a clear graph where we can see the individual sleep stages as REM, light sleep, deep sleep, and the time during which we didn’t sleep.

Sleep tracking seems reliable because, unlike some other watches, Xiaomi Mi Watch doesn’t count all the time spent in bed as sleep. Recently tested, the much cheaper Imilab W12 watches did count the entire time when we were lying in bed as sleep, regardless of whether we were actually sleeping or just lying there.

However, Xiaomi Mi Watch doesn’t count such plain lying around after waking up in the morning as sleep, and it also doesn’t start sleep tracking immediately when you lie down on the bed. The watch monitors during sleep also your vital functions that help with detecting it. Occasionally, though, we noticed that the sleep graph contained empty spaces, like you can see in the photo above.

Additional features and settings

Besides the standard features we described above, you’ll also find plenty of others here. An interesting feature is energy tracking, where you’ll find a total score as well as a graph showing when you were drawing and spending energy.

Stress level monitoring is also included. Here you’ll also find a clear graph with a timeline, showing the stress level during the day – high, medium, low, and no stress.

The watch also displays air pressure, includes a compass function, weather, breathing exercises, a stopwatch, a timer, an alarm clock, control for the smartphone camera app, music playback control, and it also features the Amazon Alexa voice assistant. Music control works for the Spotify app as well – you can switch between tracks, pause playback, or adjust the volume.

When it comes to settings, the options are quite rich. What’s interesting, though, is that most settings are configured via the watch menu rather than through the app. The app therefore doesn’t include most settings, and everything—except for a few exceptions—you set directly on the watch.

The Settings menu on the watch offers a choice of four watch face designs, display brightness settings (automatic or on a scale from 1 to 5), silent mode, the option to set the display to light up when you raise your hand, heart-rate monitoring, automatic activity detection, language, and other settings.

There’s also support for the always-on feature, with 8 different designs—whether classic analog or digital. However, using this function should reduce battery life on a single charge by roughly half.

Activity tracking and GPS

The Xiaomi Mi Watch can track activity for up to 117 different sports. The watch menu includes 17 sports, but you can add more at any time. The sports that can be added later are nicely divided into categories.

You’ll also find less traditional sports such as parkour, paragliding, various dances, martial arts, and even car racing. We tried a classic walking workout during an autumn walk. The activity was monitored not only on the watch, but also using a smartphone and the Runkeeper app so we could compare the results.

The watch locked onto the GPS signal in open space almost immediately. During the walk, based on the watch, you covered 2.39 km, burned 232 kcal, and took 3602 steps. The watch also shows a number of other pieces of information such as cadence (steps per minute), pace (time for 1 km), heart rate, and more.

Using the Runkeeper app, the smartphone measured the distance as 2.12 km, along with a slightly worse pace.

Watch face design

As we already mentioned above, on the watch you’ll find 4 different watch face designs. However, more of them are available in the Xiaomi Wear app, divided into several categories.

All in all, there are more than 130 different watch faces, many of which are genuinely nice and practical. You can’t create your own design. Even though Xiaomi’s official website mentions customization with your own photo, we couldn’t find that option anywhere in the app.

Notifications and their reliability

Notifications are one of the few features that you set directly in the app. Here you can turn them on or off, and also choose which specific apps you want to receive alerts from.

In the list, you’ll find all the apps we have installed on your smartphone. The special thing is that the only setting — turning on the display after receiving a notification — is set via the watch, not on the smartphone through the app.

We don’t really like this split between watch and app settings. We’d welcome the option to set everything you need from a single place, or to have the same settings available on both the watch and in the app.

As for the reliability of notifications, we didn’t notice any issues at all. All notifications display reliably, including diacritics and emojis. The only thing we missed here was notification history, where you could look at previous messages. The notification for an incoming call shows the caller’s name, their number, and a pair of buttons—– to cancel the call and to mute the ringtone.

Xiaomi Wear app features

The Xiaomi Wear app is among the better ones, especially from a design point of view. On the home screen, you’ll find all the necessary data about step count, calories burned, last sleep—as well as all the other functions that measure heart rate, SpO2, stress, and similar metrics.

For all that information, you’ll find plenty of interesting details and statistics in daily, weekly, or monthly overviews. The app also stores all monitored sports activities.

In the “Profile” tab, you can see the current battery capacity, the option to change the dial design, and several settings. These include notification settings, incoming calls, and weather. You can also customize which items appear when you swipe your finger across the watch display into the pages.

Runtime and charging

The battery in the Xiaomi Mi Watch has a capacity of 420 mAh, which, according to the manufacturer, should be enough for 16 days of normal use. However, “normal use” isn’t defined in any more detail. We used the watches to the fullest: all notifications were enabled, the display lit up when we raised our wrist, and continuous heart-rate monitoring was on.

During testing, the display was frequently turned on, and with such intensive use, we saw the battery drop by 40% in 5 days. With the always-on display enabled, battery capacity decreases faster, and it’s not a problem to drain the battery by 30% in 24 hours.

Charging is fairly fast, though. From 15% to 100%, it took us about 1 hour and 30 minutes.

Xiaomi Mi Watch: Final verdict

Xiaomi Mi Watch are beautiful smartwatches with a fine AMOLED display sized at 1.39″. They also come with GPS support, heart-rate monitoring, SpO2 measurement, sleep tracking, stress level tracking, and energy tracking.

You’ll be happy with the truly extensive sports selection, so you can track your activity during workouts. There are up to 117 of them here, including combat sports, dancing, and even motorsport. One downside for us is that the settings are split up—some are available only on the watch, while others are only available in the app. That means you can’t set everything up from one place.