Xiaomi Mi Band 3 | Ownership Review | Indian Edition

Despite the usual hatred against the Chinese manufacturing industry, Xiaomi has always been intriguing to me, much like OnePlus. One can’t argue how they make one of the most cost-efficient consumer products packed full of features. They have had their blockbuster product sales here in India in terms of MI3 (remember that fellow?), Redmi note series, Mi band, Mi TV4 range.

I am not much of a sucker for smartwatches (because battery life is still not there!) but fitness bands do appeal my lifestyle. So, when Xiaomi launched Mi Band 3 a few months back, I knew it was time to retire my good old Fitbit Charge HR, which looks ancient now in 2018 despite being very costly, at least relatively (₹ 15,000/-).

The feature list looked really promising for the price:

• Up to 20-days battery life with normal usage
• 0.78” OLED touchscreen
• Call and Notification Alert: Read messages and receive call notification & alerts from applications such as Uber, WhatsApp etc
• Continuous Heart rate monitoring, sleep analysis and advanced step tracking
• Find my phone feature: Ring your phone, if it is misplaced
• 5 ATM – Water resistant up to 50 metres
• Phone Unlock feature (Android Only)
• Get Idle Alert and Weather Forecast

I was waiting patiently for Xiaomi to launch Mi Band 3 in India, and when I saw the advert on the Amazon yesterday (₹ 1,999/-), it was a no-brainer. I bought it with my AMEX card and in less than 24 hours, I had it delivered at my home. You have to praise Amazon Prime delivery, it’s just too fast sometimes.

Anyway, without a further ado, let’s see what do we have:

Unboxing.

As expected, Mi Band 3 comes in a neat little square box with Apple-esque white packaging. Guess, that’s everyone’s style now –Minimal. You get the following in the box:

• Fitness tracker pill
• Wristband
• Charging dock/cable
• User manual

That’s it. What else would you expect in a fitness-band box anyway?

Hardware.

Tracker pill.

The highlight of the band is the OLED screen.

The build quality feels solid and the curved glass shape has a nice touch to it. The 0.78″ OLED display doesn’t feel cheap by any means and provides a very good contrast ratio. The home/back button is now capacitive so registers click with a tap. The gestures are easy to use and UI is pretty intuitive.

I am not sure how scratch resistant this front glass would be, but I have my fingers crossed with a hope that Xioami has at least used some kind of scratch resistant glass on the front.

I didn’t have a Mi Band 2 but have seen one on my friend’s wrist. I can immediately tell that Mi Band 3 is a huge step up with a better screen (both size and quality wise) and looks much better with all that curved class and recessed button. I felt the screen to be a bit brighter with more contrast too but it still feels challenging to operate outside in sunlight, you might need to find a shade.

Here’s a Reddit post confirming the same hypothesis:

Wristband.

I got the standard black silicon wristband in the box. Xiaomi promises to launch a red and a blue variant soon. I love this disjoint-design choice. One of the huge design issue with my last band – Fitbit Charge HR was that it was built in one piece with no option to change the wristband. I went through 2 warranty RMA exchanges in 2 years of my ownership because the wristband was glued to the tracker and it started peeling off, thanks to scorching summers of North India.

Keeping both tracker and band separate is smart of the longevity of the band as you can simply replace the band in case it starts acting up which I found hard as the choice of material by Xiaomi is excellent. The silicon band feels pretty soft but solid. It has a nice statement to it as the matte band goes well with the glossy pill.

Band is comfortable to wear and does not irritate the skin even when it is wet (yep, Mi Band 3 is water resistant, so you can take showers with it too!).

The clip to close the band is n00b proof which makes it easy to take it off without looking at it. Xioami has provided enough holes in the band to accommodate everyone’s wrist, it is a unisex peripheral anyway.

Charging dock.

Mi Band 3 uses a similar setup like Mi Band 2 to charge with golden access points at one end, so whenever you wish to charge your band, you have to take out the pill and dock it up in the included USB charging cradle. They have claimed to improve the design to address the complaint of Mi Band 2 users about the pill not docking firm enough in the cradle resulting in slipping and not charging.

Mi Band 3 pill, slides and lock firmly in the dock. I used my OnePlus charging brick to charge it, you can probably use any USB Type-A adapter or even your laptop’s USB port (not far Macbook users) :P.

It took me ~2 hours to get it to 90% after which I took it off. Let’s face it, Xiaomi claims a 20-day battery life for this sucker. If you remember reading my Fitbit charge HR review, I praised it highly for its 4 days of battery life. I would say we have made some good progress in the last 3 years. This band has like 5x battery life with a 4x larger display and more functionality.

More power to technology!

One niggle I had with the charging process was taking out the tracker pill from the wristband. It’s not a very convenient process and I was scared at I will crack the front glass with my thumb pressure. Thankfully, I discovered that I can eject the pill by applying the pressure from the back side too. I guess this snug fit is to maintain the water-resistance capability and maybe a secure fit when you are lifting weights at the gym. You really don’t want it to pop out in middle of your deadlift, do you?

Software.

The band UI/UX.

I found UX of the band to be okay-ish. It involves a lot of horizontal and vertical swiping with sometimes break the flow, but I am sure I will acclimatize to it in a week or so. The panels are arranged in this order (configurable in the App):

1. Watch Face – has 3 options. Nothing too fancy.
2. Metrics – track your steps, distance, calories and battery.
3. Heart Rate – on demand, long press home/back button to initiate a measuring.
4. Weather – get weather updates for the next 3 days, based on your location or set one in the App.
5. Exercise – a new update in firmware, allows you to manually trigger exercise mode before exercising. It claims to help you track metrics more accurately by increasing the polling rate.
6. Notifications – to access missed notifications from your phone, can be customized per app from the App.
7. More – has some abstract options which Xiaomi didn’t know how to surface on the band
   1. Stopwatch – long press to start, tap screen to stop.
   2. Silent – allows you to trigger DnD mode on Android.
   3. Find device – nifty feature to trigger an alarm sound on your phone to find it in the Bluetooth range.
   4. Screen – basically to chose from 3 available watch faces, wish there were more.
   5. About – contains CE information.

As you can tell, the on-band experience is pretty balanced. I wish there were a few more watch faces or maybe allow us to make one on our own from available metrics. Still, the UX has a low barrier of entry and even parents, grandparents or kids should not have any problems in navigating around.

The companion app – Mi Fit. (Android)

I will be honest here. I am very sceptical when it comes to third-party software for anything. It is all about minimal high-quality stock apps for me and that’s one reason I love the Google Fit platform.

Good news? Mi Band 3 does support Google Fit! Yay. But that still doesn’t discount it from providing a decent experience for our iOS comrades. You need to install the Mi Fit app from your respective app stores to set up the Mi Band. The pairing process is pretty simple:

1. Open the app.
2. Click pair new device.
3. Let it find your band and tap home/back button on your band when asked.
4. ???
5.  Profit.

The Mi Fit app to my surprise is better than I expected. It doesn’t feel bloaty (if you know what I mean) and works pretty well in providing you information upfront in its dashboard. Xiaomi UX team has a nice job with the app. It’s minimal at first glance but does provide a lot of functionality once you start digging in. You can customise each and everything about your band. I am attaching some screenshots, I won’t go explaining each and everything in detail as it is mostly self-explanatory.

One feature which I felt to be a bit creepy was how Mi Fit app handles friends on the platform. So, you can add a friend by scanning his QR code under Home > Profile > Friends section and he would get a request and upon his acceptance, you can basically snoop into his data. Don’t get me wrong, I understand how social platform for fitness should enable you to share your metrics but I still feel there has to be some kind of granular control over what you are sharing with your friends. Don’t believe me? Here you go, I added a local friend who also got the same band with me and a day later this is everything I can see about him, from his last night sleep (timings, quality, quantity), steps, weight with all of his history. A bit creepy IMHO.

 

Mi Band 3 – worth it?

It’s too early to say but in my 2-day use of the band, it has been a reliable tracker and has been nearly accurate about my sleeping pattern and steps counting. If you are looking to get into fitness and want something to motivate you to improve your lifestyle, by all means, go ahead and buy it now. It doesn’t get better than this for the price – INR 1,999/-.

• Up to 20-days battery life with normal usage
• 0.78” OLED touchscreen
• Call and Notification Alert: Read messages and receive call notification & alerts from applications such as Uber, WhatsApp etc
• Continuous Heart rate monitoring, sleep analysis and advanced step tracking
• Find my phone feature: Ring your phone, if it is misplaced
• 5 ATM – Water resistant up to 50 metres
• Phone Unlock feature (Android Only)
• Get Idle Alert and Weather Forecast

You get basically all features from premium fitness bands from the likes of Fitbit Alta, Charge with great companion app and Google Fit integration. And it looks classy too in it’s all black avatar.

Anyway, I am going to test it vigorously in the gym next week and might come back with more information for this post. Let me know if you got the Mi Band 3 and how is your experience with the same till now?

That’s all folks. Cheers!

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I will update this space from time to time as I spend more time with the band.