The Xiaomi Mi Band has become one of the most popular wearable products thanks to its competitive price. Accompanied by its success, Xiaomi has already become a giant in the wearables market and got opportunities to participate in the rule-making of the market.
Recently Xiaomi released its fourth generation of Mi Band, which is considered as a most important upgrade of Xiaomi Eco-Chain.
Unlike other budget products, Mi band 4 doesn’t feel cheap or poor quality either. On the contrary, it’s amazing that we can have all those features inside such a small body at a good price. In this review, Let’s look at how well the Mi Band 4 keeps satisfied their users, and some experience detail as well.
Design & display
The biggest surprise of Mi band 4 is this 0.95-inch colorful AMOLED display with a 240×120 resolution, updated from a smaller black-and-white display on Mi band 3. Thanks to the RGB display, now you can download colorful info surfaces that you like in the Mi-Fit app.
But visually the display doesn’t fill the whole screen but leaves the upper blank area, which makes you not easy to ignore the obvious edges of the display. Besides this better display, the Mi band 4 also has better scratch-resistant glass protection. Unlike the entirely curved glass on the Mi Band 3, the Mi Band 4 uses a 2.5D glass. The new glass gives better and more angles to view the larger display. Another upgrade on the Mi band 4 is the brightness, highest at 400nits. It helps users to make out what’s going on the direct sunlight. An unfriendly experience about the display is that the band doesn’t provide options for changing the lock-screen time of inactivity, which is set at only around 4 seconds.
The weight of 22g, containing an RGB display and a multi-function tracker. Such a wonderful weight makes it not cause any discomfort on my wrist. The device is basically made by TPU material and the strap that comes with the device is rubbery, which is quite similar to the Mi Band 3. And the surface of the strap is quite smooth that it really feels good to contact with skin. Thanks to the comfort and well-made strap, it should fit most users’ wrists. The straps can be swapped out for different themes and colors, so you can have multiple-color straps from Xiaomi online shops, and some third-party alternatives as well.
Another added bonus is that the Mi band 4 supports 50-meter (5ATM) waterproof, which allows you to swim or even dive with it, but not just wear it in the shower.
Battery
Great battery life has been a great feature for Xiaomi Mi bands. Though Mi band 4 has an RGB display, there is no compromise of its 20-day battery life. Mi band 4 has two different versions, the standard version, and the NFC version. According to Xiaomi official experiment results, the standard version can last for over 20 days, while the NFC version can last for over 15 days. As I used both versions for only one week, they both haven’t run out half of their battery life. The NFC version consumed a bit more power in terms of the NFC functions and the internal voice assistant.
Experience
In my daily uses, there’re some details that I have to share with you. The first one is the wake-up action. it’s a pretty good experience to lift my wrist to view the info, which sometimes fails to recognize my action, but usually working quite well. Another problem is that charging is pretty annoying stuff here because you need to swap out the strap and put it into the charging base. It is not so difficult but not that easy either. A good message is that thanks to the long battery life, such an annoying feeling only occurs every 20 days. On the other hand, you don’t need to worry that it gets lost accidentally one day, because the annoying strap design is to ensure the device can stay firm and solid with the strap.
The only two differences between the standard version and the NFC version are the NFC function and Xiaomi voice assistant, Xiao Ai. However, these two features are more likely to attract Chinese users. Because most usage scenarios of NFC function were mainly advertised to replace some unencrypted transportation card in specific china cities. Thus, it won’t be very practical in other countries. As for voice assistant Xiao Ai, it’s Chinese-language based. So, if you’re not very good at Chinese, the NFC version is not in the list of my suggestion either.
Trackers & performance
As a basic health tracker, Mi band 4 gives you a step counter, heart-rate monitor for the fitness purpose and a six-axis sensor for exercise tracking. It can recognize your workout moves, including running, cycling, swimming and so on. The functions here are pretty similar to the other trackers, like giving you running detail including average speed, pace, stride, total steps, uphill and so on. As a workout tracker, it can give you almost all you expect. The heart-rate monitor seems quite accurate and it can also work consistently throughout the whole day. It has options of various detection frequency between 1, 5, 10 and 30 minutes, which can accurately detect your state when doing something that brings your more emotional impact or focuses.
Meanwhile, it also contains a sleep tracker, which needs you to wear it when sleeping. Though I’m fine with it, I know some users may feel uncomfortable to wear something when sleeping. This is a very welcome feature for me to learn my exact time between light and deep sleep. But a small problem is that it cannot recognize shorter naps.
Besides the trackers, there’re some small functions like setting an alarm clock, setting a timer, and setting an idle alert to remind you to get some walk from sitting for a long while. You can also connect it with your phone to check all your fitness data, control the music player, see all kinds of notification and incoming calls. One more interesting function is that you can find your phone through the band, and find your band through your phone as well. It is a truly good experience for those who always waste time on finding their phone, like me.
Conclusion
Though I have experience of unpleasure on the Mi band 4, there is no excuse to admit that it’s still one of the most attractive basic wearables in 2019. But are there any better options beside Xiaomi Mi band 4? Absolutely, yes, there are. However, if you consider their price, it’s no doubt that those top-end smart bands or watches would cost significantly more. But will most users think it would be worth paying that money? I think the market share of wearables has already told us the answer.
Buy Mi Band 4 global version: https://www.giztop.com/xiaomi-mi-band-4.html
