Mi Watch is Xiaomi’s First Attempt at Building a Smartwatch

Xiaomi is already renowned for its best-selling fitness trackers, with Mi Band 4 being the latest and offering a color display. The company has dominated the fitness tracker space, beating even Fitbit, which is great. But, users have long demanded Xiaomi to develop its own smartwatch and well, all our wishes have been answered today in the form of the Mi Watch. It’s Xiaomi’s first-ever smartwatch under its own brand name.

Mi Watch: Specs and Features

There’s not a lot of room to play with a smartwatch’s design. It could either be circular or rectangular. Well, Xiaomi chose the latter but its Mi Watch has an uncanny likeness to the super popular Apple Watch. It’s the first thought that comes to mind when we see the Mi Watch, which has a curved display up-top, ceramic bottom, and a digital crown on the right. The only difference here is that it boasts a boxier design.

Mi Watch features an aluminum alloy frame and these straps are swappable – like is the case with most smartwatches. It features a 1.78-inch AMOLED display up-front with 326 ppi pixel density and mentions that it’s using 4D curved sapphire glass to make its Mi smartwatch scratch-resistant.

Xiaomi’s smartwatch is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 3100 platform and features all the connectivity options that you may need on your wrist. This includes eSIM connectivity for calling on the move as Mi Watch includes a speaker and microphone.

The device supports Wi-Fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 5.0, NFC, and even GPS as well. It means you don’t need to carry your phone on your while jogging. Mi Watch includes 6 sensors to let you track over 10 activities (including swimming, running, and more), heart rate, sleep tracking, and oxygen saturation as well.

One of the key highlights of the Mi Watch will have to be its software experience. It runs MIUI for Watch, which is based on WearOS, and well, it’s natural to see it adopt MIUI’s design guidelines and philosophies. It’s based on Google’s Wear OS platform (which should get a boost from its Fitbit acquisition) and it’s in line with the leaks.

MIUI for Watch offers you over 100+ dial options out-of-the-box, which is great, but you also set a custom message. It will be the first thing you see when you raise your wrist. It comes packed with 40+ essential apps out-of-the-box, including Keep, QQ and more. You can even book cabs, talk to the cab driver, and scan your subway pass all from your wrist with Mi Watch.

Mi Watch also supports native music playback, includes an app drawer to easily scroll through all installed apps, and an app store to download more apps and update existing ones. The watch also comes equipped with Xiaomi’s voice assistant, Xiao AI, to let you control smart home devices from your wrist. You can use the digital crown, which is coupled with a vibration motor, to control the temperature or volume with a gentle haptic feedback.

Xiaomi’s Mi Watch comes equipped with a 570mAh battery, which is big enough for a smartwatch and promises to offer 36 hours of battery life on a single charge. This seems short, but it’s comparable to other popular smartwatches including the Galaxy Watch and Apple Watch, especially when you have the add-on features enabled.

Price and Availability

Xiaomi’s first-ever smartwatch, the Mi Watch has been priced at 1,299 yuan (around Rs. 13,000, $185) in China and will go on sale from 11th November. There’s also a more premium version of Mi Watch, with a stainless steel frame and 4D curved sapphire glass protection. It has been priced at 1,999 yuan (around Rs. 20,000, $285). It will come in 2 stunning color variants – silver and black.

There is currently no information about Xiaomi’s plans to bring the Mi Watch to India, but we’ll make sure to update you once we hear anything. Do you want Xiaomi to launch the new Mi Watch in India too? Share your opinions down in the comments section.