Mi Smart Band 5 has launched in India as the latest fitness band offering from Xiaomi. It is equipped with a 1.1-inch AMOLED color full touch display and is offered in various color options. The Mi Smart Band 5 comes with 11 professional sports modes including yoga, rowing machine, and free exercise. Other fitness and health features include heart rate monitoring, sleep tracking, women health tracking, stress monitoring, and more. The Mi Smart Band 5 is touted to last for up to 14 days on a single charge.
Mi Smart Band 5 Key Specs
- Display: 1.1-inch AMOLED, full-color touch screen
- Dialog DA14697 (Arm Cortex M33)
- Colour depth: 16-bit
- Screen brightness: Up to 450 nits
- Resolution: 126x294
- Button: Single touch button (wake up, return)
- Connectivity: Bluetooth version 5.0 BLE, NFC on some models
- RAM: 512 KB
- Storage: 16 MB
- Battery: LiPo, 125 mAh, 14 days of battery life (NFC), 20 days (non-NFC)
- Sensors: accelerometer, gyroscope, PPG heart rate sensor, capacitive proximity sensor, infrared sensor (NFC Variant), barometer[citation needed]
- Waterproof: up to 50 meters for 30 minutes, 5 atmospheres
Mi Smart Band 5 Features
The Mi Smart Band 5 features a 1.1-inch AMOLED color full touch display with 126x294 pixel resolution, 16-bit color, and 450 nits brightness. It is said to have approximately 20 percent more display area than the Mi Smart Band 4. The new fitness band is touted to offer 14 days of battery life in regular use and up to 21 days of battery life in power saving mode.
Xiaomi has introduced magnetic pins at the back for eliminating the need to remove the capsule from the strap just for charging. The total charging time for the Mi Smart Band 5 is less than two hours. There are about 11 professional sports modes on the Mi Smart band 5 including outdoor running, walking, riding, indoor running, indoor swim, free exercise, yoga, rowing machine, indoor riding, elliptical machine, and rope skipping.
Health and fitness features on the Mi Smart Band 5 include 24x7 heart rate monitoring, resting heart rate, sleep monitoring, deep sleep, light sleep, REM (rapid eye movement), stress monitoring, guided breathing exercise, step count, calorie count, and goal setting. It also tracks women's health like their menstrual cycles and ovulation phases. Xiaomi says that it has integrated an upgraded PPG Biosensor to enable up to 50 percent more accurate heart rate monitoring.
The Mi Smart Band 5 is also able to offer a PAI score (Personal Activity Intelligence) enabling you to know how active you need to be to stay healthy. This is calculated by using gender, age, heart rate, and other vital data points. Other key features include 50-meter water resistance, customized watch faces, music control, remote shutter, notifications for calls and messages, weather forecast, timer, and alarm.
Design
At first glance, the Mi Smart Band 5 at first glance doesn’t look all that different from the Xiaomi Mi Band 4. It still pairs up a similar-looking tracker module with a TPU plastic strap that comes in six different colors (compared to eight for the Chinese version) It’s a bit of plain in terms of design, and less stylish than Fitbit's trackers, but it feels well built and nowhere as 'cheap' as some trackers at this price point.
It’s the display that really elevates this tracker above the competition, though. Xiaomi uses a 1.1-inch, 126 x 294 resolution AMOLED touchscreen, which is a bump up in size and resolution on the 0.95, 120 x 240 resolution screen on the Mi Band 4. Xiaomi has also upped things in the brightness department, cranking up the max to 450 nits. The result is a display that pretty much wipes the floor with the competition.
Compare it to what you get on Fitbit or Samsung’s cheapest fitness trackers, and there’s no contest. The Mi Smart Band 5's screen is bright, colorful, responsive, and crucially, easy to view in bright sunlight.
That extra screen real estate is also welcome because it means more information can be displayed at once, which is most noticeable on the watch screen. Xiaomi also seems to have increased the size of its icons, making it easier to glance at your information during the day.
Below that touchscreen display is a capacitive button, which is primarily used to wake the display up while around the back you’ll find the onboard heart rate monitor.
A more important detail to highlight around back is the change in the way the Mi Band is charged. Previously, you had to pull the tracker module out of the strap to plug it into its charging cradle. The new magnetic charging cable plugs directly into the back of the tracker, which means you no longer need to separate the tracker from the band.
Like its predecessor, the Mi Smart Band 5 has a 5ATM waterproof rating, which does make it suitable for jumping in the shower with it or putting its pool swim-tracking features to good use.
Daily Use
With every new Mi Band, Xiaomi has sought to improve its uses outside of fitness and sports tracking and that doesn’t change with the Mi Smart Band 5. It’s compatible with Android phones and iPhones, bringing you features like the ability to view phone notifications, view weather forecasts, control music playback on your phone, and taking smartphone photos remotely. Bottom line: it crams in a lot.
As far as the smartwatch experience goes, it’s a bit of a mixed bag, simply because of the limited amount of space at your disposal. Music playback controls and weather forecasts are well optimized, but notifications still feel a little cramped.
Features like setting alarms and accessing the camera remote require digging into the Band’s settings, but thankfully it’s software that’s easy to get to grips with and navigate once you know where things live.
We shouldn’t forget to talk about the Band faces you have to pick from on that main screen. The bump in screen quality on the Mi Band 4 meant Xiaomi could be a bit more playful and adventurous with faces, and with the Mi Smart Band 5 it’s added a number of animated faces that need to be synced over from the Mi Fit companion app. You also have more control over what health and fitness data is displayed on those faces, which can be changed on the device itself.
It does seem that at least for the time being, Xiaomi has left out some of the more high profile branded faces it announced at launch, including the SpongeBob SquarePants faces we were very much looking forward to trying out.
The Mi Smart Band 5 is light and comfortable to wear at night, and will automatically go about its business monitoring your sleep. To get the best sleep data, you’ll need to enable the sleep assistant mode in the companion app, though you'll be warned that this will affect its battery life.
In the morning you’ll get to see things like a sleep score, a breakdown of sleep including REM sleep, naps, sleep quality analysis, sleep regularity, and sleep data comparison with similar users.
In terms of the reliability of the data, we found that it tended to be in the ballpark for most data compared to another fitness tracker. It generally recorded the same amount of deep sleep and light sleep and usually an hour less of REM sleep. It was pretty reliable identifying when we’d fallen asleep and woken up. The sleep regularity and analysis are nice additions to the monitoring process too.
Xiaomi's fitness trackers have long been praised for their battery life, though this new model offers slightly less impressive performance than its predecessor. The Mi Smart Band 5 houses a 125mAh battery, which promises 14 days of uninterrupted use, whereas the Mi Band 4's 135mAh battery could last 20 days.
It is indeed possible to keep the Mi Smart Band 5 running for two weeks between charges, but what is very clear is that there are more features here that demand a lot more of that battery. Heart rate monitoring and turning on the sleep assistant for more accurate sleep tracking particularly have a noticeable impact. You can of course disable those feature, but unlike previous Mi Bands, you need to be careful about which features you’re using
Fitness Tracking
The Mi Smart Band 5 relies on the same sensors as its predecessor to deliver its fitness tracking features: namely accelerometer and gyroscope motion sensors, plus a heart rate monitor. There’s no built-in GPS, but you do have the option to use your phone’s GPS signal to map outdoor activities.
You can view basic fitness-tracking stats from the main watch screen or delve into the Status menu to see more. There you'll find your daily steps, distance covered, calories burned, idle alerts to indicate how much you’ve been inactive, and your seven-day step totals. Accuracy-wise, we put it up against a Garmin watch and found it produced similar data.
When you’re ready to step things up, head to the Workout screen where you can pick from 11 different sports modes. There’s outdoor running, power walking, cycling (indoor and outdoor), treadmill running, pool swimming, skipping, elliptical, yoga, and a freestyle mode. As is typically the case, the range of real-time metrics on offer varies. Though we were surprised to find that it tracked strokes and stroke rate for indoor rowing, and even jumps for a skipping session.
For core sports like running and swimming, it fares well from an accuracy point of view. Getting GPS support set up for outdoor activities is a bit fiddly because you need to head into the phone app to enable it, but once that’s done, you’ll be able to record key metrics like pace, distance, and cadence, which we found to be pretty reliable.
You also get real-time heart rate data, with the option of alerts when you hit a certain level. Compared to a Polar H9 chest strap, the data accuracy was a mixed bag. On one run, it was 1-2 bpm out for average and maximum readings. On another run, the average heart rate data was 2bpm off, which is acceptable. The maximum heart rate, however, was 8bpm different from the chest strap.
Things are a bit more reliable for on-the-spot readings, continuous monitoring, though as mentioned, turning on the latter does impact battery life performance.
The heart rate sensor is put to use for a new feature and called PAI (Personal Activity Intelligence), which first appeared on Amazfit devices. This is intended to shift the focus away from hitting daily step counts to doing regular activities that raise your heart rate. You’re then given a PAI score to indicate your daily totals.
The idea of getting people to think more about heart rate than counting steps is actually a positive thing. It’s displayed nicely on the device, and if you want to see scores and get a better understanding of PAI scores, you'll find more detailed information in the Mi Fit app. Other notable features include stress tracking and guided breathing exercises, which we've seen crop up on many other wearables, and round off a comprehensive set of features.
Three Health Modes Helping You to Improve Your Health
Personal Activity Intelligence
The personal vitality index is calculated using sex, age, heart rate, and other data, and gives suggestions for activities that may improve your score.
Stress Monitoring
Keeps track of your stress levels and gives suggestions for easing and recovering from stress.
Breathing Exercises
Quickly ease your body and mind with a guided breathing exercise of 1–5 minutes’ duration, following the breathing patterns shown on the display.
24-Hour Sleep Monitoring
It’s easy to get a good night’s sleep Upgrades to sleep analysis technology have boosted accuracy by another 40%*, allowing for professional interpretation of your sleeping patterns, And offers scientific advice to help you quickly improve sleep issues such as insomnia. Rapid eye movement (REM), An important sleep stage, that allows the body to recover, Naps Record the quality of naps
24-Hour Smart Heart Rate Monitoring
Comprehensive upgrades to algorithms and hardware* have improved monitoring accuracy by up to 50% for forms of exercise with irregular movements such as cross country running, climbing, hiking, and so on. Comes vibrating reminders when your heart rate is unusually high. PPG biosensors Up to 50% increased accuracy. Heart rate alerts, Vibrating reminders when heart rate is too high Example of all-day heart rate monitoring
Mi Smart Band 5 Price in India
The Mi Smart Band 5 is priced at Rs. 2,499 in India. It comes in Black, Navy Blue, Teal, Purple, and Orange strap color options. The fitness band will be available from October 1 on Mi.com and Amazon.in. It will soon be available through retail stores and Mi Home stores as well.
Mi Smart Band 5 Full Specifications
General
|
Brand |
Mi |
|
Model |
Smart Band 5 |
|
Release date |
29th September 2020 |
|
Model Name |
Smart Band 5 |
|
Color |
Black, Navy Blue, Teal, Purple,
Orange |
|
Ideal For |
Unisex |
|
Suitable For |
Health, Lifestyle |
|
Touch Enabled |
Yes |
|
Water-Resistant |
Yes |
Display and Battery Features
|
Display Resolution |
126x294 |
|
Display Type |
AMOLED |
|
Backlight Present |
Yes |
|
Battery Life (Days) |
14 |
|
Battery Type |
Lithium-Ion (Li-ion) |
|
Charge Time (hours) |
Less Than 2 Hours |
Performance Features
|
Water-Resistant Depth (meters) |
50 |
Connectivity Features
|
Bluetooth Enabled |
Yes |
|
Bluetooth Version |
v5.0 |
Compatibility
|
Compatible Devices |
Android |
|
Compatible Android Version |
Android 5.0 and above |
|
Compatible iOS Version |
iOS 10 and above |
Activity Tracking Function
|
Alarms |
Yes |
|
Calories Burned |
Yes |
|
Distance Covered |
Yes |
|
Do Not Disturb Mode |
Yes |
|
Heart Rate Monitor |
Yes |
|
Phone Notifications |
Yes |
|
Reminders |
Yes |
|
Sleep Tracking |
Yes |
|
Step Counter |
Yes |
Workout Modes
|
Treadmill |
Yes |
|
Exercise |
Yes |
|
Outdoor Running |
Yes |
|
Cycling |
Yes |
|
Walking |
Yes |
|
Swimming |
Yes |
|
Other Workout Modes |
Indoor running, Indoor swim, Yoga,
Rowing machine, Indoor riding, Elliptical machine, and Rope skipping |
Sensors
|
Accelerometer |
Yes |
|
Electrical Heart Rate Sensor |
Yes |
Dimensions
|
Weight (grams) |
11.9 |
|
Width (mm) |
18.15 |
|
Height (mm) |
46.95 |
|
Depth (mm) |
12.45 |
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