Xiaomi is continuously increasing its pace, releasing more and more of its own and partner gadgets in the same category, leaving no chance for competitors.
Apparently, the company’s marketers work on the principle: “The more devices and hype around, the better.”
There is no other way to explain the appearance of the Xiaomi Mi Watch Round smartwatch based on the WearOS operating system: the most long-awaited and strangest wearable gadget in the last six months.
I tested it and tell you.
What are Xiaomi wearable gadgets?
Main screen
Experiments by Xiaomi marketers: a lot of devices that are quite similar to each other appear under the brand logo. Startups associated with the company are trying to produce devices that are slightly different from each other, occupying all possible niches. For example:
1. Xiaomi releases under its own logo the most advanced Mi Watch and its simplified model Mi Watch Round, both based on WearOS.
2. Redmi makes a tracker of the same name and is preparing to release smartwatches for the domestic market under the same brand.
3. Huami/Amazfit is responsible for all existing Mi Band (our review), stylish GTS and GTR with AMOLED displays, protected T-Rex, budget tracker watches Bip and Bip S, as well as very advanced sports Stratos.
4. Haylou is trying to master the budget segment, releasing simplified analogues of the Amazfit Bip in several modifications, and a rather original Solar watch with a solar battery.
5. TicWatch started under the YouPin logo, and today they sell a line of advanced watches on Android WearOS. Judging by the model range, it was they who gave birth to Xiaomi’s own smartwatches.
Due to the large number of options, some models remained regional novelties. This list also includes Xiaomi’s own watches: Mi Watch is designed to use local services, payments using AliPay/MiPay and eSIM of Chinese operators.
The simplified Mi Watch Round model was planned for the international market, but six months later it did not go beyond the local niche.
Let's try to figure it out: why did this happen and is this watch needed by a Russian buyer?
The best premium Xiaomi smartwatches
Elite models have an elegant design and a large number of useful functions. Top smartwatches track physical activity of various types - from regular walking to skiing and weightlifting.
Gadgets can be used for telephone conversations and listening to music. Their cost ranges from 7,000 to 12,000 rubles.
Amazfit GTR
4.8
★★★★★
editorial assessment
87%
buyers recommend this product
See review▶
The manufacturer presents this new product for 2020 as an expensive sports accessory for men and women.
The round metal case imitates a regular wristwatch, but instead of a dial there is a 1.39-inch AMOLED display.
The powerful battery lasts 24 days on a single charge, and 2 days when using GPS. The user can select any of 12 sports modes, including walking, swimming, exercise equipment, etc.
Pros:
- receiving text messages from a smartphone;
- collection of training data;
- weather forecast;
- phone search function.
Minuses:
- GPS works with errors;
- uncomfortable strap.
The watch is aimed at people who like high-tech gadgets. The spectacular design of Amazfit GTR will fit perfectly into a business look.
Amazfit Verge
4.5
★★★★★
editorial assessment
83%
buyers recommend this product
See review▶
An important feature of this model is the presence of a speaker and microphone, with which you can conduct telephone conversations. The AMOLED screen operates in 3 modes: standard, economy and “always on display”.
The device receives call notifications, text messages and signals from all applications installed on the smartphone. Offers 12 functions for a variety of sports including cycling, skiing and exercise equipment.
Pros:
- good battery life - from 3 to 10 days;
- 2.5 GB internal memory;
- interaction with GPS and GLONASS satellites;
- detailed training reports.
Minuses:
- Program errors occur periodically;
- small font messages.
The watch is quite capable of replacing a smartphone, fitness tracker and music player. They are suitable for everyday wear and travel.
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The main thing in a watch is beauty
They look nice on the hand.
In terms of design solutions, the Mi Watch Round, also known as the Mi Watch Color, does not offer anything unique: it is just “another round smartwatch.”
Not a clone of the Apple Watch, and that’s good, right?
They are slightly thinner than the Apple Watch and direct analogues of Amazfit: with the diagonal of large models, the thickness of the case is close to the women's versions. Comfortable.
Women and teenagers should look for another option: the large dial and strap mounts make it uncomfortable to wear on narrow wrists.
The reverse side is practically devoid of protruding parts
The body is cast - the outer part is painted aluminum, the inner part is durable hypoallergenic plastic.
Mi Watch Round uses a 22mm silicone strap with a grooved inner side and a quick-release fastener. The quality is worse than in the Mi Band; your hand can turn red under the bracelet overnight.
Amazfit GTR 47 mm (left), Xiaomi Mi Watch Round (right)
It is recommended to immediately change it to an analogue from Amazfit GTR 47 mm or any watch of the appropriate size you like.
These watches are uncomfortable to wear around the clock - unlike more ergonomic, square models, including the Apple Watch.
Bright and pretentious AMOLED display
GTR looks brutal, Mi Watch looks logical and stylish
One of the most important advantages of the Mi Watch Round is its beautiful AMOLED screen with an impressive resolution of 454x454 pixels, a diagonal of 1.78 inches and excellent pixel density.
The image is clear and legible. The brightness in Always-On mode is low, but the same cannot be said about the active mode.
There is no difference with the most modern models - like our favorite Watch, Mi Watch Round is perfectly visible under the bright sun.
The main drawback of the screen is the form factor itself. The frames are very large even when it comes to the watchface.
The interface displays only 3x3 icons - it doesn’t fit anymore. But on a regular Mi Watch, with a smaller diagonal, there are 3 more of them, and the frames are much smaller.
The imitation bezel, which rises 3 millimeters above the screen, protects it well in addition to Gorilla Glass . And it forms a “dead” zone 3-5 millimeters away from itself, depending on the thickness of the fingers.
Xiaomi Mi Watch: review and specifications
As we all know, the nimble Xiaomi has already put a spoke in the wheels of the global technology industry, because, no matter who you ask, he has a Xiaomi phone or is indirectly familiar with this Chinese brand.
Nothing at all, but Xiaomi has thoroughly penetrated the technology market of the world, and of Ukraine, naturally, by producing inexpensive analogues of very well-known manufacturers such as Samsung and Apple, which lived well until 2010, sharing first and second place, respectively, in global dominance over innovation. But as soon as Xiaomi appeared on the market, with its budget, fairly good phones and equipment, something bad and not at all sweet life began for the two kings.
And now, in addition to the whole cloud of technological “new products” that only Samsung and Apple could offer us today, they appeared - smart watches from Xiaomi, which are predicted to “kill giants”. Is this true, let's find out?
First impression
My first words when I saw the Xiaomi Mi Watch were: “Is this definitely not an Apple Watch?” No, seriously, see for yourself - this watch is just awfully similar to Apple technology as long as you look at it from the windshield, hand or screen.
The design is impossibly similar, if you don’t look closely, and you’ve rarely ever seen or held an Apple Watch in your hands. But, if you look closely, you can see the differences and they are, to put it mildly, disappointing.
The display of the Xiaomi smartwatch itself is somehow too “sharp”, it does not have the same elegance as our favorites from Apple, they do not have the smoothness of the corners that is created from the transition of one texture to another, and their “curved” glass is a little sticks out from the body, which makes it seem like you are holding a fake in your hands. In other words, this is true, but the fake is really quite good.
It’s good at least for the materials from which the watch case is made: when you look at it from all sides, when you touch it, you feel the weight, quite considerable, and the transition from the texture of the metal to the smooth glass under your fingers - it’s really good and deserves recognition, approval and such love (a little bit).
I would rather compare this smartwatch to the Fitbit Versa 2 because they have very similar back panels and all sorts of sensors are located in the same location as the Fitbit, not the Apple Watch.
Strap
Does the strap start where the screen ends? No, Xiaomi has not heard about this. They made these mini extensions of the “legs” that make the watch even longer, even more ridiculous or what?
A standard strap wants to be the best, even if it is made of high-quality, according to the manufacturer, material that does not cause allergies and should not fade. To me it seems very rough, hard and thick, and it doesn’t look very good on the hand, if we talk about a woman’s hand.
As we know, Apple Watch makes unisex bands to fit both women and men, so there is no need to buy another Apple band unless you want a special edition or the one that came with it is broken. And here I would definitely have to buy a new one.
But, we must pay tribute, the company did a good job making it, because the material is really good, pleasant, does not make a disgusted face and generally lies so softly and well on the hand. A good clasp, not the same as Apple’s, more classic, and I like this, because they will hold well on the hand, plus, the kit should come with exactly 2 straps: one long and one short, for different body configurations.
The interesting thing is that Xiaomi equipped their Mi Watch with a rather thin strap clip, making the strap itself disproportionately large, and, I don’t understand why, but they also made it textured. This makes the watch cheaper because even the Versa 2 uses a simple, matte texture, without those “stripes.” But we can always change the strap, right?
The change is similar to Versa 2, but you will need to suffer a little with it, it is not as simple as with Apple: take it off and that’s it, put it on and that’s it. Here you need to understand the circuit and, most importantly, not break the clock.
In general, it should be simple, press a button, pull the strap. But just “pressing on” is quite difficult, especially if you don’t have the thinnest fingers.
Display
The elongated, rectangular screen with beveled edges looks quite powerful, especially considering that it consists of a special sapphire crystal that increases its resistance to impact and also reduces the risk of scratches. Although, you know, I wouldn’t risk it and still buy protective glass, because you can never trust what they write “on the package,” even when they write it at Apple.
I'm more interested in the screen content itself, because Xiaomi announced that this smart watch has a 1.78-inch AMOLED screen with an extension of 326 PPI. The Apple Watch has something similar, but it has an OLED technology screen and it behaves much cooler, which is why we love Apple.
The brightness of the new product is very good. I had a Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 phone, so this “cold” theme, color presentation and widgets are very recognizable. If you look very closely, you can still see slight bugs in the pixels, but this is not so critical.
I was very worried that these square shapes would distort the picture and make it unreal, but it seems that everything works well and there are no questions about the “squareness” at all.
Processor and operating system
The watch is designed internally with a Qualcomm Wear 3100 4G processor, which has 4 cores and a clock speed of 1.2 GHz. It seems that the Apple Watch Series 5 has a 64-bit dual-core S5 processor and, I don’t even know, because the number of cores seems to make me hesitate between choices, but something tells me that this is the same story as with megapixels in Xiaomi phones – quantity does not mean quality.
It is important that this watch has 1GB of RAM, and, most likely, 8GB of internal memory, when the Apple Watch 5 has as much as 32GB.
The watch runs on a special MIUI 11, developed specifically for the MI Watch, and it’s logical that it pairs with devices on Android and iOS; it’s hard to say about Windows and others now, since we were not provided with this information.
Programs
Now the Mi Watch has an application store of 40 standard applications, but the problem is that they are all Chinese, albeit top-end ones. I think that over time, the company will add others there, but this will take time. It should be noted that the watch has 3 standard dials, not very pleasant in appearance. The placement of application icons is also strange and a little inconvenient, because even the loading sometimes freezes. Also hidden inside this watch is a GPS, heart rate monitor, and a bunch of activity analyzers for climbers, athletes and other sports people.
Battery
I was very surprised by the battery of this watch. It’s true, this is one of the most pleasant things that is in Mi Watch. Because they have a capacity of as much as 570 mAh and the watch can work for up to 36 hours, while the Apple Watch, with its 245 mAh, can simply remain nervously smoking on the sidelines.
But, owners of Xiaomi smartphones will not be particularly surprised by a large battery, you will agree. Because even though their devices have many hours of charge, they are oversaturated with advertising, poor graphics quality and many other disadvantages that cover this pleasant bonus.
General impression
It’s impossible to say that this new product is simply “wow,” but we must give credit to Xiaomi, which was able to make a high-quality copy of the Apple Watch, but with a slightly different twist. The Mi Watch is excellent in its own way, but if there was a choice between the Apple Watch, then, of course, the second would win, because whatever one may say, the Xiaomi Mi Watch is far from being the watch that you want to wear every day and show to your friends with pride.
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This is the interface.
But the bezel is not a problem. The problem is the official Chinese firmware. There is no local multilingual either. English is available in the interface; during pairing, only Traditional Chinese is available.
In well-known smartwatch models, WearOS allows you to install widgets, programs from the Google app store and modify the interface.
And both independently through the watch and through a smartphone. But this is in international devices: there you can create firmware modifications.
Xiaomi watches use their own monolithic version of WearOS without support for Google services, which are replaced by local Chinese ones.
The branded application store offers the minimum: it has a WeChat client and a lot of non-local browsers, but no Telegram, no WhatsApp, no banal Facebook.
So, in fact, a European will have to be content with a store for 150 watch faces, among which analogue options from Amazfit GTR predominate.
The synchronization application is a Chinese Wear OS application, which has nothing in common with the well-known one.
What parameters and options to pay attention to when choosing a Xiaomi smartwatch
There is one golden rule for electronics - there are several priority characteristics that you need to pay attention to when looking for a good watch model at an affordable price. But here’s the trick – each device will have its own set of priority parameters. So what should you pay attention to first when studying progressive Xiaomi products?
Manage calls, messages and multimedia content
It’s not always possible to quickly take out your phone to answer an incoming call, read an SMS, or find out what a friend wrote to you on a social network. But if a smartwatch has an option to control the functions of mobile technology, you can easily display any information on the device’s screen. This function will also help you switch your favorite song or change the radio wave.
NOTE!
Models that can work regardless of the presence of a smartphone deserve special mention. These types of equipment even have a built-in module for SIM cards or Wi-Fi support. They are very beneficial when traveling, but the small size of the screen does not allow you to comfortably use it as an alternative to a larger gadget.
Track your health and athletic performance
As we said earlier, Smart Watch products and fitness bracelets have the ability to measure your health indicators and the results of various workouts. If you lead an active lifestyle, are obese or have problems with the cardiovascular system, the best solution would be to buy a Xiaomi smart watch with sports tracker functionality.
You can monitor biological rhythms even every second - hypochondriacs will definitely like it
GPS/GLONASS module
If you like to travel a lot or want to be quickly found in an emergency situation, take a closer look at devices with a built-in geolocation module. Thanks to this improvement, you can navigate any terrain, and the chance of getting lost is almost zero.
This option is especially revered among parents who care about the safety of their children.
Housing protected from damage and external influences
Nobody likes when a new gadget quickly breaks down. And the conditions of our life are such that unexpected breakdowns are possible every day - from falling, water getting on the surface and inside, clogging with sand and dust. To prevent this, give preference to products with housing protected to IP67 or IP68. The presence of such protection is especially important for fans of extreme recreation.
If your device has a similar feature, it will literally “come out unscathed”!
Battery
Studying reviews about Xiaomi smartwatches, you often come across comments that, despite all the positive aspects, the device turns off at the most inopportune moment. Indeed, the battery capacity in most representatives of the class is extremely small and forces users to recharge the equipment daily. Therefore, before purchasing, carefully study this characteristic - it is better not to consider options with an indicator below 150 mAh at all.
“Small but mighty” - this proverb accurately describes the positive aspects of a high-quality battery for Smart Watch
What can Mi Watch Round actually do?
In the simplest scenarios, knowledge of Chinese is not required.
The watch is controlled using a touch screen and a pair of mechanical buttons.
The top one is needed to turn on the screen and go to the main menu, the bottom one is to activate training modes. There are 10 in total, including running and swimming.
The moisture resistance of Mi Round is stated to be up to 50ATM , but I would not risk diving with them to depths of 50 meters. You don't have to take it off in the shower or bath.
In addition, the watch measures the number of steps taken and calories burned, heart rate, tracks sleep, and shows the weather.
There are also more prosaic functions like an alarm clock, a flashlight (maximum screen brightness is used)
All this is located using swipes from right to left. There is also a menu with settings, including selecting a watch face and adding widgets (set in the firmware).
Swiping up opens the quick settings menu, where there is a music control section and your own clock settings (brightness, activation of energy-saving mode, etc.).
What about eSIM, GPS and NFC?
Messages display only English and Chinese
Like its predecessor, the Mi Watch Round is powered by the vintage Snapdragon Wear 3100 . It is still relevant due to the lack of serious competitors. But even hardcore Android fans find it funny.
In addition, there is 1 GB of RAM and 4 GB of internal memory on board. True, for some reason the latter is not available to the user - neither for any personal files, nor for music (and this works even in Amazfit Pace).
There is no Wi-Fi, but there is Bluetooth 5.0 (direct connection to headphones is not supported) for synchronization with a smartphone, as well as a GPS/BEIDOU/GLONASS navigation module.
A proprietary Chinese application with the Chinese language is used for navigation. They work, the navigation is accurate, the maps are very detailed. But the language is only Chinese, as in the messages.
Then it’s even more fun: the watch does not have a microphone, speaker and eSIM, which have become the main feature of the “square watch from Xiaomi itself.” That is, you cannot call from them.
The watch has an NFC module into which you can add AliPay and access cards with the appropriate interface for opening doors or activating smart home sensors.
You can connect a Russian payment card, but it will not work. "Troika" is not defined.
Who needs Mi Watch Round?
Always-On is dim
Like any other watch running WearOS, Xiaomi Mi Watch Round works on a full battery charge for about 2 weeks, but no more than 2 days with active GPS or in training mode.
When charging in 2 hours the problem is small. But against the backdrop of numerous long-lived Amazfit, Huawei and Mi Band, the pleasure is dubious.
Wearing them on my small wrist is unusual and uncomfortable: classic men's watches are more comfortable and often smaller. It’s completely impossible to wear around the clock - the bracelet is too big and lets you down.
The performance of the reference PPG Tracker from Amazfit is almost the same
The accuracy of the various modes is good, but it stands out from its competitors: the old-style heart rate monitor and the inability to connect external sensors speak for themselves.
In the end, the absence of at least a third-party application store or custom firmware could give life to this watch. But for now, Xiaomi Mi Watch Round is created by the Chinese for the Chinese. And no more.
The "Square Xiaomi" were surprisingly more ergonomic, comfortable and advanced - although their general shortcomings are the same as the Round.
Water resistance
We've received a lot of concerns about the watch's water resistance. After our simple test, they appeared to be somewhat waterproof. And we can say that there is no problem if you want to swim with them.
The Mi Watch has not received a certified level of water resistance; the company claims that the Mi Watch supports shallow swimming, but will not withstand hot showers, steam baths or diving. And the water resistance will weaken over time, and water damage will not be included in the Mi Watch warranty. So pay attention to this.
