Another year, another Xiaomi Smart Band. The company has released these just about like clockwork, with mostly minor alterations and improvements each time, and the ninth iteration is no exception.
That’s not to sound overly critical: Xiaomi’s series has long been the band to beat when it comes to cheap fitness trackers, often packing the same specs and features you’ll find in Fitbits two or three times the price, so there’s been little need to reinvent the wheel. And so here we are again, with another great Smart Band that isn’t worth upgrading to for owners of last year’s model, but has a lot to appeal to everyone else.
Xiaomi Smart Band 9
Xiaomi’s Smart Band 9 is almost unchanged from the 8 — a bigger battery and slight sensor upgrades are about it — but it remains the best budget fitness tracker around despite that. This delivers all the tracking most of us need for a fraction the price of a Fitbit, so long as you’re happy missing out on GPS.
- Fantastic battery life
- All the tracking essentials covered
- Bright AMOLED display
- No GPS
- Few upgrades from the Band 8
- Strap doesn’t clasp securely
Price, availability, and specs
The Smart Band 9, like other Xiaomi products, isn’t officially on sale in the US – but that doesn’t mean you can’t get hold of one. The global version of the Smart Band 9 is available on Amazon US through importers for $6, and will work perfectly well in the States, so don’t let official availability put you off.
What’s good about the Xiaomi Smart Band 9?
Great tracking for weeks on end
The Smart Band 9’s strengths are what we’re used to from previous models in the line. Simply put, this delivers the majority of the health and tracking you’re likely to care about, does it all pretty well, and keeps doing it for up to three weeks. The tracking is all the standard stuff: steps, workouts, sleep, heart rate, and blood oxygen levels. All of these can be measured automatically, though that’s switched off by default for blood oxygen. Xiaomi says the sensor is 16% more accurate than last year’s, though in practice this upgrade isn’t obvious.
You can access some of your data on the band itself, but you’ll find the bulk in the Mi Fitness app for your smartphone. The app side of the equation used to be Xiaomi’s weak spot, but Mi Fitness has come on a long way. It’s now a comprehensive health app that lays out your data simply and cleanly, offers integrations with Strava and Google Fit, and includes most of the band’s settings options, freeing you from fiddling about with loads of menus on the tiny screen.
Xiaomi’s metrics focus on customizable daily targets for calorie burn, step count, and movement minutes, but you also get a Vitality Score — an indicator of your activity levels over a rolling 7-day window, adjusting to take into account your age, heart rate, and other data.
Workout tracking covers over 150 different activities, with a handful also supporting automatic detection: walking, running, cycling, rope jumping, elliptical, and rowing. Tracking mostly proved reliable, though I did have one run where the Band 9 quite considerably under-counted my activity, so I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s perfect. For the most part, though, it agreed with my other trackers.
Battery life is one of the key upgrades over the Band 8 — it was good before, but now goes up to 21 days without a charge, though this depends on the settings you enable. Activating the always-on display drops Xiaomi’s estimate to nine days, and it could fall further if you enable all the more advanced options for sleep, stress, SpO2, and other tracking. I’ve switched about half of those on, together with the AOD, and I’d say a week or so of life is about right.
Fortunately, charging is quick, too — it only takes an hour or so to top up to full with the included USB-A charging cable, so even if you let it run low, there’s no stress when it comes to topping up.
All of this is wrapped up in the sort of compact, lightweight package you’d expect. The tracker weighs a mere 16g, and the included TPU strap doesn’t add much. It’s small and light enough that I genuinely forgot I was wearing it a few times during my review, falling into the fitness tracker version of looking around for your glasses when they’re already on your head.
The small size means a small screen, but it never feels too small, so long as you don’t expect to do anything complex with it. The 1.62in AMOLED panel impresses, too, with deep blacks and bright colors. It’s brighter than last year’s, which is a welcome change, though I wish it would spare a little more of that brightness for the always-on display, which is sometimes hard to make out in bright light.
What’s bad about the Xiaomi Smart Band 9?
Best for the basics
As a cheap tracker, it’s inevitable that the Smart Band 9 should have some limitations. The obvious one remains two features that are usually limited to the line’s Pro models: GPS and NFC payments. Both absences limit how useful the Band 9 is if you don’t have your phone with you, meaning it isn’t an especially independent device.
My other big concern is with Xiaomi’s included TPU band. Aesthetically speaking, it’s simple and inoffensive enough, but I’ve had issues with both ends of the attachment mechanism.
The loop attaches to itself with a simple push-through plug. It keeps things simple, but I’ve realized it isn’t reliable. More than once in my testing, the clasp has simply popped undone, usually when catching on a sleeve or backpack strap. So far I’ve always noticed, but it would be all too easy for the Band to simply drop off my wrist entirely. And remember what I said before that sometimes I forgot I was wearing it? That sounds great until you realize it might swing the other way, and it means you don’t even notice when it’s fallen off.
On the other end, bands connect to the tracker’s body with a proprietary button-release mechanism. This is firm, but a little too firm. One of the two buttons on my review unit is stiff, and it takes repeated attempts to force it to release. If you’re a one-band-for-life kind of person, then this isn’t an issue, but if you’d like the option to swap your band out occasionally, this might prove problematic.
Should you buy it?
If you want a small fitness tracker without spending a fortune, you should probably buy this one. This offers comparable tracking to the Fitbit Inspire 3 or even Charge 6 for a fraction of the price, with better battery life than either. If you already own another Xiaomi tracker that works well, you might not see much reason to upgrade — things haven’t changed a whole lot year-on-year. Or if you need a built-in GPS, more advanced health features, or something closer to a fully-fledged smartwatch, you might find it worth spending more.
But for the basics done well, this is pretty hard to beat.
Xiaomi Smart Band 9
Xiaomi’s Smart Band 9 is almost unchanged from the 8 — a bigger battery and slight sensor upgrades are about it — but it remains the best budget fitness tracker around despite that. This delivers all the tracking most of us need for a fraction the price of a Fitbit, so long as you’re happy missing out on GPS.
