Xiaomi Mi Band 7 Activity Tracker, AMOLED Screen

 The entire reason I purchased the Mi Band was because my Apple Watch screen shattered when I dropped it. I decided that I didn’t want to pay for another watch and was looking for a solid alternative. Now I am not a “gym rat” or a fitness guru. I try to walk or jog occasionally to stay healthy. I did some research and decided to give this a try. Here are the pros and cons I have experienced up to this point after about 3 weeks of wear.

Pros:
Battery life!! Now understand that this is relative. A lot of the life is going to be determined by what you have turned on or off. During the first weeks I had most of the options on. Heart monitoring, notifications etc. I recently trimmed that down to essentially just step tracking, sleep tracking and heart monitoring every 30 minutes. I’m on day 6 and still have 52% battery so quick math says I’ll hit possibly the 10 day mark which to let is outstanding. Apple Watch battery doesn’t come close.

Customization of the screen. There are pay options with the app for a couple bucks but I have found that the free versions are enough for me.

Ease of use. It’s pretty intuitive once you play with it a bit. There are two apps that will work with the Mi Band. One is Zepp Life and the other is Mi Fitness. I tried both but for me, I found Zepp life to be more to my liking. One reason is Mi Fitness only allows for metric and Zepp allows imperils measurement. Essentially they are very similar in layout and use so you may find one more to your liking.

Comfort. The band is very light and comfortable to wear. There are options to change to other bands should you wish for color or style and eventually I will probably bed looking to purchase some.

Water proof. It’s not made for scuba divers but washing hands, showering or swimming will not lose an issue. I typically don’t wear mine to shower but that’s due to one of the cons I’m about to lost.

Syncing to Apple Health. Both Apps sync to Apple health which I found extremely useful. I tried a Casio gshock that did not and found it very irritating.

Cons
False registering of steps. I noticed in the shower that the movements of my hand were picking up as steps. Now to be fair I may have had the incorrect sensitivity level setting on the app. Have not tested since.

Screen does not auto adjust to light. That hasn’t been a huge issue. Ut it is worth mentioning. I’ve had a couple of times that it was noticed mostly outdoors.

Notifications. You receive them on the band (texts, alarms, notifications from apps) but you can’t respond. I turned it off because I wasn’t utilizing it but you should understand what your getting before you purchase. Calendar notifications showed but unlike Apple Watches they are not shown until the time of the event which doesn’t help me if it’s meant to be a reminder.

NFC. The Chinese version supposedly has it. I never really used it in on my apple watch so I didn’t really miss it but just mentioned it for you to be aware.

All in all I’m very happy with the results. I did purchase a screen protector to keep the screen from becoming scratched with wear. Probably not a bad idea for you to do the same. Considering the battery life and the fact that it is probably enough for the casual fitness person I think you won’t be disappointed.

seit vielen Jahren habe ich eine die Mi Band von Xiaomi. Meine bisherige hatte ich einige Jahre und so langsam war der Akku nicht mehr ganz so stark. Dieses Modell finde ich richtig gut, es hat ein paar gute Weiterentwicklungen, ist einfach zu bedienen und ein guter Begleiter im Alltag. Ich mag die Größe, denn viele richtigen Smartwatches sind für mich als Frau viel zu wuchtig am Handgelenk. Da es eine große Vielzahl von Ersatzbändern gibt, lässt es sich auch gut zum Outfit anpassen.

This watch accomplished everything I wanted it to accomplish and more. I believe it was an excellent buy for this price point and definitely recommend it. I’ve had a number of other similarly priced watched in the past and each one seemed to have some area where the software or a function was lacking. So most of what I will mention are things I was pleasantly surprised by or have found lacking in other products that this has. I’ve had the watch for more than 2 months.

APP – Right away it will prompt you to download the “Mi Fitness” app (Xiaomi Wear), which has a pretty good interface and settings, but I found that the watch also connects well to the “Zepp Life” app (formerly Mi Fit) and this app gives the watch a few more functionalities that I wanted. The Zepp Life app connects to Google Fit without a third party app as well as allowing you to reply to messages (from a bank of up to 10 customizable messages or with emojis (find in ‘Fast Reply Management’ under ‘Notifications and Reminders’ in the app), and it allows you to remotely take pictures by clicking your watch. I think the notification reply feature is worth the switch.

HEALTH – It has over 100 workout modes (including chess, esports, and foosball), but does more data for the more common ones. The workouts have been pretty accurate it seems and it does pretty good at doing continuous monitoring of heart and calories and speed and whatnot. If you choose an outdoor workout it will take a second to connect to your phone GPS and then you can start, but you don’t have to open your phone at all. It has done a pretty good job with tracking swimming and I did not have trouble exiting the locked mode for swimming.
Note that the watch does not have continuous heart monitoring except when in a workout mode (the most frequent otherwise is every minute), so if you forget to start a workout on your watch then it probably won’t be very accurate in calculating your heart rate zones during that workout. But the watch will record ‘light activity’ or ‘slow walking’ among other things without you doing anything if you take a closer look at your step count.
– Blood oxygen and stress measurements require you to be pretty still while measuring, so even if you have the setting where it is supposed to measure every few minutes it most likely won’t unless you are very still. It mostly measures when you are asleep.
– Most watch companies have some formula for basically showing how active you have been recently. Xiaomi has PAI (Personal Physiological Activity Indicator), which takes all of your data and your personal physical data (height, weight, gender) and gives you points based on how much activity you have done in the last week. It adapts to what it knows about you and makes it harder to gain points the fitter you are. I like it, another fun thing to track.
– You can also see that it calculates your VO2 Max, which I don’t know if you can trust, but it fun to compare against your past self; and it shows your ‘workout load’ for the past week, which shows if you are exercising an amount that will not have much impact on your athletic ability, or if you are doing too much and are likely to cause fatigue or injury, or if you are in the green zone of growing athletic ability. It’s another fun measurement.

BATTERY – The battery is very good. When I first got it I ran a few tests:
1. The battery lasted 7-8 days when I used it at medium functionality (1-2 short workouts/day, smart heart monitoring, and only manual stress and blood oxygen measurements, no Always on Display)
2. The battery lasted 4 days when I turned pretty much every feature that could drain battery on (I didn’t turn AOD on but made the tilt-to-wake more sensitive)
3. There is a battery saver mode that only records steps and basic sleep information that I didn’t try, but I imagine it will reach the 14 or so days that they claim it can reach.
Now I have most of the features on and I just charge it for about 20 minutes when I take a shower each day (it recommends keeping the watch away from heat) and the battery stays in the 80-100% range.
I didn’t find the sleep breathing quality (beta) feature to be very helpful, but it does seem to give a good drain on the battery (it uses the blood oxygen levels somehow; it might be more helpful if you are older and have worse sleep).

OTHER FEATURES – See the picture for all the apps on the watch.
– I do like that you can set and change and add new alarms all from the watch. I also like that there is a ‘smart alarm’ function you can turn on that will wake you up a little before your alarm if it senses that you are in a lighter sleep stage.
– You can control the media playing when you are in workout mode, and you can lock your screen on workout mode to prevent accidental touching (automatically does when swimming).
– There is a find my phone feature that I have found to be helpful.
– There are plenty of watchfaces to choose from and you can even upload your own picture on some of them. Some of the watchfaces allow you to customize what information you have on the screen.
– I’ve also had no problems in staying connected to the app. It always delivers notifications and syncs easily with the app.
– It has all the other functions that you might expect a watch at this price range to have.

ISSUES – You should note that the device does not have a light sensor on it so it will not automatically adjust the brightness for you, and for some reason you have to dig through settings to be able to change it at all (which is hard to do if you can’t see your screen).
I don’t usually need to turn the brightness up, and actually wish the screen could be less bright at the lowest setting, so I just changed my background to a darker one and that helped.

La Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 7 es un producto excelente en todos los aspectos. Ofrece una amplia gama de funciones, desde el seguimiento de la actividad física hasta las notificaciones inteligentes, todo en un diseño elegante y cómodo. La duración de la batería es impresionante y la pantalla es clara y brillante. No tengo ninguna queja y la recomiendo encarecidamente a cualquiera que busque una pulsera inteligente de alta calidad.