I’ve tried several different fitness trackers in the last year to keep tabs on my step count and how many calories I burn, but I found all of them annoying.
For instance, I started testing a high-tech smartwatch, but I quickly stopped using it. The constant vibrations from phone notifications put me off and my sleeve touching it would start phone calls. I also found it difficult to sleep in.
I assumed I'd have similar problems with the Xiaomi Smart Band 9 but I couldn't have been more wrong. It meets my needs, doesn't annoy me and it's reasonably priced. While it's discounted on Amazon to just $49.99, it's under $30 on AliExpress.
If you're after a no-fuss tracker that does the basics well, I'd recommend it. Here are the main things I liked.
It's comfortable to wear
Unlike many fitness trackers, it’s genuinely light and I didn't notice it on my wrist. Unfortunately, this also meant I would often forget to put it back on after a shower, and I'd only realize when I went to check my steps and saw a blank wrist instead—oops.
I decided against wearing it to sleep, as I find having anything around my wrist at night disruptive, but I kept it on through several naps and it didn't leave any marks on my wrists, or make them feel uncomfortable or itchy.
The band fastens with little rubber poppers, which stays flush with the rest of the strap meaning there is nothing sticking out to cause irritation. Overall, it is the most comfortable fitness tracker that I’ve ever tested, and I’m very happy wearing it all day.
Plus, it doesn’t vibrate automatically. While you can set it up to notify you of things coming into your phone, like calls, I chose not to do this.
It's easy to use
The band does what it says on the tin: the home screen tells you the time, date, calories burned, the number of steps you’ve taken, and whether or not you need to charge it. It also has little bands of color for steps taken, calories burned, and time active that fill up the more you do in a day, which I found handy for tracking my progress and motivational—I wanted to make the little rainbow complete!
You can swipe to other screens, such as a heart rate monitor, activity tracker and more detailed stats, but I didn’t end up using the tracker for this after my initial exploration of the layout.
The battery lasts for weeks
The smartwatch I had previously tried needed charging at least once a day. Annoying. The Xiaomi Smart Band 9, on the other hand, was still going strong three weeks after I took it out of the box. Xiaomi lists the battery life as 21 days, so it over-delivered for me. Admittedly, I very rarely actively used the device for more than a few seconds at a time to check my stats, which will have helped extend the battery life, but it was still impressive and not having to think about when I would charge it for weeks at a time was fantastic.
The app is easy to use—but you can ignore it
You need to download the Mi Health app to your smartphone and connect to the watch via Bluetooth. The most important reason, for me at least, to do this is that to get a more accurate estimate of calories burned, you need to enter your weight and height.
Otherwise, while you can use the app to keep an eye on trends, you can just use the watch to see how you're doing that day. If I had tracked my sleep, perhaps it would have been handy to see how my sleep patterns changed over time, particularly over the switch from daylight savings time, which always makes me sleep erratically.
There is also the option to track your periods, stress, blood oxygen levels and blood sugar, although you will have to add some of this data manually.
The only thing I found difficult about the app was that some notifications requesting permissions on my smartphone weren’t in English, although the rest of the app was.
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