Xiaomi Smart Band 9: 1 minute review
Few tech brands are as prolific in producing inexpensive fitness trackers as Chinese giant Xiaomi. The brand focuses on creating affordable alternatives to top-end smartphones, tablets, and smartwatches, and the same goes for gadgets like the new Xiaomi Smart Band 9.
The second low-cost fitness gadget to be released in the West in 2024 after the Smart Band 8 Pro, the Smart Band 9 doesn’t compete with the giants of the wearable world in terms of specs or features. Xiaomi doesn’t compete with Apple Watch, Garmin, or Fitbit when it comes to health monitoring.
Instead, the Xiaomi Smart Band 9 offers useful core features at an incredibly low price. This is the cheapest fitness tracker for sale online from the brand that I’ve ever heard of, significantly undercutting well-known rivals like Fitbit.
These core features include sleep tracking, step counting, heart rate monitoring, calorie counting, and more. You get even more when you turn on certain sport modes. The results are also fairly accurate, but not with pinpoint accuracy and doesn’t offer GPS.
Xiaomi Smart Band 9 can also be used as a smartwatch light with notification handling, music control, weather forecast, and more. Some rough edges in this area reflect the price. Notifications can be buggy, initial pairing can be tricky, and raising to wake doesn’t always work as intended. But once I remembered the price, my frustration faded and things worked out for the most part.
Among affordable fitness trackers, this is one of the best on the market right now, but it’ll be most enjoyed by those who haven’t tested the others. This is a great entry-level option for those who are new to the health monitoring game and want to try out a gadget without spending a fortune.
(Image credit: Future)
Xiaomi Smart Band 9: Specifications
Swipe to scroll horizontally Component Value Price $60 / £34.99 / AU$79.99 Dimensions 46.5 x 21.6 x 10.9 (mm) Display 1.62 inches AMOLED Display GPS? No Battery Life 21 days
Xiaomi Smart Band 9: Price and availability
(Image source: Future) Currently on sale $60 / £34.99 / AU$79.99 Below most rivals, but not as good as the Band 8 Pro after discount
Xiaomi Smart Band 9 was released in late September 2024 along with several other gadgets from the company, including the redesigned Xiaomi Watch 2 and Xiaomi Buds 5.
You can buy this tracker for $60 / £34.99 / AU$79.99, so this clearly falls into our coverage area for our list of the best cheap fitness trackers. This cost increases by just $10 in the US, but the price remains the same in the UK and US.
At its price, the Smart Band 9 easily undercuts the best-in-class Fitbit Inspire 3 and competitors like the Huawei Band 9, Samsung Galaxy Fit 3, Honor Band 9, and Amazfit Bip 3 Pro. If you’re looking for an affordable wearable product from a reputable technology company, this is one of the cheapest you can find before venturing into the dark side of Amazon.
The only one that is not inferior is its predecessor, the Xiaomi Smart Band 8 Pro. It was released in early 2024 for $99 / £60 / AU$95, but just six months after its release, it’s now being sold at multiple retailers for half the launch price. I found it. This chunky fitness tracker is Band 9’s biggest competitor, and we’ll talk more about this competitor at the end of this review.
Xiaomi Smart Band 9: Design
(Image credit: Future) Fitness tracker by numbers Bright 1.62 inch AMOLED screen Band is TPU, but other options available
Experienced fitness tracker customers will not be surprised by the Xiaomi Smart Band 9.
The screen is a 1.62-inch AMOLED panel with a resolution of 192 x 490, a refresh rate of 60 Hz, and a maximum brightness of 1200 nits. The latter has been significantly upgraded compared to past models, making the screen easier to see even in direct sunlight. The auto brightness has also been upgraded and we didn’t find any issues with its performance. This is the best evidence of its effectiveness.
Previously, we had an issue with the Xiaomi band (and other fitness trackers) having difficulty picking up touches, especially when our hands were wet, but that’s not the case with the 9th generation model. I found this screen very useful.
(Image credit: Future)
The lack of physical buttons may be a little confusing for some, but it’s easy to get used to the gesture-based navigation system.
The band itself measures 46.53 x 21.63 x 10.95 mm, weighs 15.8g, and is made of aluminum unlike some past models. This makes it feel nice and durable, and the 5ATM water resistance means it won’t be damaged even when submerged in water. It’s also one of the smaller fitness trackers I’ve tested, which is good news for those who don’t like bulky wearables.
Depending on your region, the Smart Band 9 will be available in several different color options. Black, silver, light blue, rose, and gray options are all available with matching straps.
The band Xiaomi sent me came with the default TPU strap and magnetic loop strap shown in the image. The former was a bit unwieldy when putting the watch on, while the latter I found to gradually shift during use, leaving the band a bit loose. As a result, I ended up using the default band the most. Xiaomi launched the Smart Band 9 with several different straps available for purchase online, but these are the only two I tested.
Xiaomi Smart Band 9: Performance
(Image credit: Future) 21-day battery life No GPS, but heart rate and other trackers 155 fitness modes (various usefulness)
According to Xiaomi, the Smart Band 9 has a battery life of 21 days. In my experience as a 20-year-old, this is mostly accurate, although I tracked an above-average amount of workouts during that time to test the watch (at one point I drove for 8 hours). However, the battery bar was barely dented).
This is a competitive battery life, with most rivals running out of tap in 2 weeks or 14 days, so if you’re worried about your battery, this is the fitness tracker for you.
Looking at the fitness performance, it doesn’t have the most robust or razor-accurate tracking ever, as you might expect from the price, but we never thought it was great.
GPS tracking is done using a GPS connected to your smartphone, so you can’t leave your phone unattended when you go for a run or walk. Also, the accuracy is not necessarily as high as a GPS watch. But it’s not wildly inaccurate either. After running a full marathon, I was only a few hundred meters away from my companion’s more accurate device.
(Image credit: Future)
The “in the right ballpark” theme is also reflected in the watch’s other tracking elements. Heart rate, steps, and travel time all felt fairly accurate compared to other devices. That’s not the case with sleep tracking, which sometimes mistakenly thought I was asleep when I was reading a book in bed. However, while the sleep stage breakdown was helpful, this isn’t something you’d expect from every budget fitness tracker.
By my count, there are 155 fitness tracking modes, with varying degrees of usefulness. Some provide useful activity-specific information, such as running, indoor rowing, and swimming, but most purely measure time, calories burned, and heart rate. However, I found the first and last to be helpful for spacing out sets during gym sessions, so I don’t knock it.
If you dig deeper into the menus, you’ll find some pretty strange training modes, including auto racing, chess, and group gymnastics, but these also all just measure heart rate and time.
I would most recommend this watch to runners, not only because it provides detailed information about your activity, but also because it has different “running courses” that are basically interval training sessions. The watch advises when and how fast to run, which is useful for people looking to increase their aerobic fitness.
Xiaomi also graphs your “Vitality Score,” a weekly point system that graphs whether you’re getting enough exercise during the week. However, it seems like it only monitors logged activity. So if you walk 20,000 steps but don’t set it as an activity to measure, you’ll get zero points.
Xiaomi Smart Band 9: Features
(Image credit: Future) Using the Mi Fitness app on your phone Playing music, handling notifications, etc. Some bugs in the app and watch
I use the Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 9 with a smartphone app from a company called Mi Fitness. Pairing the band with my phone was quite a pain, but I thought it might be due to my own incompetence until I noticed that a reviewer of the Xiaomi Smart Band 8 Pro had the same problem with that device. Ta. You can read about it here.
As you can see from the images attached to this review, not only was pairing a hassle, but parts of the Mi Fitness app weren’t in English. Otherwise, it’s a handy place to collect all your fitness data, including more than you can find on the watch itself.
You can also use this to change the watch face. Xiaomi has done a great job in creating a great-looking watch face that brings all your data together on one screen. I liked it when I saw it used in the review images, so it’s easy to look for information quickly.
Using your mobile phone, you can set up some very useful features outside of fitness. You can control music playback from your wrist (you can skip and pause tracks, change the volume, but you can’t find your perfect running track on Spotify). Turn on alerts if you lose your phone, enable Do Not Disturb mode from your wrist, check the weather, and more.
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Mi Fitness health and wearables page. (Image credit: Future) Mi Fitness sleep, heart rate and workout page. (Image credit: Future)Mi Fitness running record. (Image credit: Future)
A useful feature is notification alerts. My wrist buzzes when my phone receives a notification. It’s useful if you get an important email or text message, but the band hasn’t always been great at handling them. Sometimes persistent notifications (i.e. weather notifications, WhatsApp notifications that let you know you’re checking for new messages) give you repeated alerts, or new text notifications in a busy group message among other things. Sometimes I sent them individually instead of putting them all together. Fitness trackers do that.
The most annoying thing about notifications happened one morning at 6am. My fitness tracker apparently figured I was awake, so I could receive an incoming alert. That wasn’t the case for me, but the constant buzzing with new notifications quickly changed. Perhaps this is more of an issue with sleep tracking than with the notification system, but it applies here.
Another issue I found was that the watch’s raise-to-wake (which turns on the display when you turn the watch towards you) only worked half the time. I often had to tap the display to check the time.
These complaints may sound annoying, but I’ve been testing inexpensive fitness trackers for years, and overall, the experience with the Smart Band 9 was much smoother than before. It’s just not perfect.
Xiaomi Smart Band 9: Scorecard
Swipe to scroll horizontally Categories Comments Score Value An ultra-low cost fitness tracker that undercuts most rivals. 4.5/5 Design A numerical fitness tracker with a great-looking display. 4/5 Performance Mixed bag of fitness modes with other metrics tracked without GPS. 3.5/5 Features Despite a few other bugs, the watch and Mi Fitness have useful features. 3.5/5
Xiaomi Smart Band 9: Should you buy it?
(Image credit: Future)
Then buy it…
Please do not buy in this case…
Please also consider
Swipe to scroll horizontally componentXiaomi Smart Band 9Xiaomi Smart Band 8 ProFitbit Inspire 3Price$60 / £34.99 / AU$79.99$79.99 / £59.99 / AU$95$99.95 / £84.99 / AU$177. Dimensions46.5 x 21.6 x 10.9 (mm)48 x 22.5 x 10.99 (mm)39.32 lx 18.6 x 11.75 (mm) Display1.62 inch AMOLED Display1.74 inch AMOLED Display0.7 inch AMOLED TouchscreenGPS?NoYesNoBattery Life 21 Days 14 Days 10 days
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