Huami, the company backed by Xiaomi, is widely known for making the popular Mi Band series fitness trackers and Amazfit smartwatches. It’s been just a couple of months since the Mi Band 4 got launched and now Huami has started working on its successor.
During a Q&A session after Huami’s Q2 2019 earnings call, the company was asked if it will continue to cooperate with Xiaomi in the future and will make the Mi Band 5 as well. In response to that, the company’s founder and chairman Wang Huang said: “We are actually developing Mi-Band 5 with Xiaomi.”
Wang has confirmed that the work for the development of the upcoming Mi Band 5 fitness tracker has already started. He also revealed that the device could get launched sometime next year. He said: “We do not have – we do not have a fixed time when we’re going to launch Mi-Band 5. But I would say that we have already started working on Mi-Band 5 with Xiaomi and it’s not going to take that long. So we just launched Mi-Band 4, but potentially toward the [Indecipherable] of next year, we may launch Mi-Band 5.”
The Xiaomi Mi Band series fitness trackers have been hugely popular because of its budget price tag and tons of features. When the Mi Band 4 went on sale in June this year, its sales hit the 1 million mark in just 8 days.
The Mi Band 4 comes with a 39.9% bigger display than its predecessor and is now using AMOLED color screen, which is protected by a 2.5D scratch-resistant tempered glass. It is water-resistant up to 5ATM (50 meters) and sports an upgraded 6-axis high-precision sensor to intelligently recognize different type of swimming strokes including Freestyle, Backstroke, Butterfly stroke, and Medley.
It can also track six different sport modes like indoor running, outdoor running, exercise, swimming, cycling, and walking. The device comes with support for Xiao AI voice assistant which can be used for controlling Xiaomi’s IoT products.
XiaoAi assistant comes up when you lift up the band, so lifting your wrist lets you play music, set the schedules. On top of that, you can even set all these to work with voice commands. With the NFC variant, it can also be used to make payments using WeChat Pay and Alipay, among others.
As for the pricing, the NFC model of the Mi Band 4 costs 229 yuan (~$33) while the standard variant is priced at 169 yuan (~$25). The device went on sale in China in June this year but the company has not revealed details about global availability.
(Via)
