We have in our hands the latest Xiaomi Smart Band 7 that was recently launched last June.
The Xiaomi Smart Band 7 gets an additional upgrades from its previous model with a wider screen, more battery and new extra modes for health and wellness tracking. Now available on Shopee and all Xiaomi Concept stores nationwide the Xiaomi Smart Band 7 is offered with a suggested retail price of PHP 2,399.
Let’s dive in to see if the Xiaomi Smart Band 7 would be the perfect health and fitness tracking wearable companion today.
UNBOXING
The packaging of the Xiaomi Smart Band 7 is very simple. It’s outer box including its inner box that holds the contents inside are made of a long thick cardboard material. The color of the outer box are printed everything in black with an image of the Smart Band 7 and other useful information about it.
Inside the box you’ll get the Smart Band 7 (case and strap), charging cable and user manual.
DESIGN AND DISPLAY
Looking at its previous model, it’s almost nothing has changed in terms of the overall aesthetics on the Smart Band 7. It still has the same form and the materials used like the replaceable wrist strap and buckle is made of TPU.
Without the wristband it weighs around 13.5 grams. It’s very comfortable in your wrist and you can even feel like you’re not wearing one at all. To tighten the wristband it uses a button type clasp that can be attached securely or easily unfasten it from the holes of the wristband.
The whole display case can be detached from the wristband which enables you to change the strap from any colors. There are a total of 10 colorways to choose from starting with Ivory, Olive, Orange, Blue, Black and Pink. Then they added four more eye-catching colors in Neon Green, Neon Orange, Khaki Green and Khaki Blue. If you want an extra strap from these colors you can buy them separately.
At the back you have a Xiaomi logo on top, sensors at the middle and charging contact points located below.
The previous model sports a 1.56-inch, the Smart Band 7 now gets a larger screen at 1.62-inch. The screen uses an AMOLED display with a resolution of 152×486 pixels and brightness of up to 450 nits. There’s no ambient light sensor on the device but the brightness level can be adjusted if you prefer to increase or lessen it. So far, the display offers a bright, sharp and a vibrant color.
You can change the watch face of the band and choose from around 100+ dynamic designs with some having animation effects. In the band, you have already five default watch face designs but thru the Mi Fitness app you can see the other designs that are available.
For protection, the display used a 2.5D tempered glass due to its slight curvature edges with an additional anti-fingerprint coating. It gets a standard 5ATM waterproof rating with depths of up to 50 meters great for pool swimming or snorkeling.
There’s no buttons in the Smart Band 7, the whole display relies on touch control that’s capacitive and tappable you can swipe from all directions and very responsive. Swiping down lets you see your notifications and swiping up will access your app widgets. Going from left to right will just bring you back and forth to the watch face and shortcut widget apps that you can customize. To go back or exit an app you just simply swipe to the right.
SOFTWARE AND CONNECTIVITY
The Mi Band 6 works well with the Mi Fit app and prior to using the band you should first connect it with the app. During our initial setup the Smart Band 7 already gets a software update before letting us continue to pair with the Mi Fit app.
It uses its very own Mi band software version 1.16.0.8 with supported systems on Android 5.0 or iOS 10.0 and above. It uses Bluetooth Low Energy 5.2 for its connectivity commonly used in any fitness trackers and wearables with its low consumption cost.
What we like on the band is the array of notifications it can receive and alert you simultaneously when your phone receive your emails, incoming calls, sms and other third-party apps such as Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and more.
HEALTH AND FITNESS WIDGETS
You have a total of 23 different widgets found on the Xiaomi Smart Band 7 to track and monitor your health or fitness goals as well as other useful functions.
You can monitor your health all-day with these set of available widgets:
- Heart Rate Monitoring – Track your real time heart rate with easy-to-read graphs and a vibrate alert in case your heart goes out into the safe zone.
- Blood Oxygen – It checks the oxygen levels of your blood with vibrate alert if detected to be low.
- PAI (Personal Physiological Activity Index) – It turns the heart rate data into a intuitive value via an algorithm and showing goals on how much activity needed to stay healthy.
- Sleep Monitoring – Automatically records and checks your sleep patterns such as sleep duration and distribution once user falls asleep while wearing the band.
- Stress Monitoring – Measures the current stress level and the previous progress of it.
- Female Health – Tracks the menstrual cycle to learn the physiological patterns.
- Breathing – It helps you reduce anxiety thru breathing exercises with durations of 1 to 5 minutes.
I like the sleep monitoring widget, it’s helpful as every time I wake up I can see how much hours of my sleep time and sleep phases from deep, light and awake. You can get additional sleep information by turning on the high-accuracy monitoring or sleep breathing quality in the sleep settings.
Now one of the main highlights of the Xiaomi Smart Band 7 is the ability to track your sports or fitness activities with the Workout widget. Xiaomi claims that the band offers support with up to 110 sports modes or workouts from core training, cycling, outdoor, indoor, dance, winter and even board & card games.
It can also show your workout history and status letting you know how much you trained and where to make more progress.
With the Personal Activity Intelligence widget it tracks the number of steps produced by any activities such as walking and running. It also calculates the consumption of daily activities and workouts.
Other useful widgets equipped on the Smart Band 7 are Weather, Music, Event Calendar & Reminder, Flashlight, Find My Phone, and Silent.
You also have time monitoring widgets like Alarm, Stopwatch, Timer and the Promodoro Timer which focuses on work and study in a short time period reminding you after 25 minutes to take a short break for 5-minutes.
The Smart Ban 7 helps me track my heart rate and monitor my workout progress during my gym sessions. Then when I get back home I can see a summary of my stats thru the Workout History.
BATTERY
Battery life on the Xiaomi Smart Band 7 also gets an upgrade to 180 mAh.
Juicing up the band it uses a magnetic charging cable that’s very convenient without the need to remove the strap.
Xiaomi claims that the battery on the Smart Band 7 in typical usage could last you up to 14 days and if you’re a heavy user can still last up to 9 days.
We were able to charge the band at around 1 hour and 48 minutes from 10% to 100%. After the full charge, we then tried the workout widgets for two days at the gym before letting it stay in our desk for another three days, then wearing it the next day for an event. With all those said tasks happening on the Smart band 7 the 100% battery went down at 54% only in just 6 days.
If you wanted to extend more its battery life, there’s an available battery saver mode under its settings but the band can only records the steps and basic sleep information.
Lastly, It does not have wireless charging capabilities and the charging cable is a bit shorter.
WHAT WE LIKE
- AMOLED Display
- Health and Fitness Monitoring Widgets
- Battery Life
- Simple Design
- Comfort and Fit
- Intuitive Touch Control
- Price
WHAT WE WANT
- Longer Charging Cable
- Ambient Light Sensor
VERDICT
Good thing Xiaomi did not make so much changes on the design of the Smart Band 7. We just love the overall simplicity of the design and the replacement of straps to other different colors. As well as the choice of material used on both the strap and display case are very durable, comfortable and super lightweight.
The improvements are great especially adding more screen size offering an AMOLED display and longer battery life up to 14 days.
For the widgets everything is very useful especially if you want to monitor your health all-day. If you’re working out especially on the gym or any type of sports activities the Smart Band 7 can help you monitor and see your progress.
Minor concerns we experienced on the Smart Band 7 is the short length of the magnetic charging cable. Sometimes we would missed swiping the display but once you use it everyday you’ll get it right by then.
Overall, I love how well the Xiaomi Smart Band 7 is designed and built with an assortment of widgets that can importantly monitor your health everyday and dedicated fitness buffs to monitor their sports activities or improve their performance. For only PHP2,399, The Xiaomi Smart Band 7 is pretty much a solid lifestyle health & fitness tracker you can rely on.
FULL SPECIFICATIONS
- Price: PHP2,399
- Dimensions: 5 x 20.7 x 12.25 mm
- Weight: 5g
- Band Strap Size: 160 mm-224 mm
- Material: TPU
- Strap buckle: Aluminium Alloy
- Display: 62 inch AMOLED Touch Display
- Resolution: 192 x 490 pixels,326 PPI
- Brightness: up to 500 nits, adjustable
- Display Protection: Tempered glass with anti-fingerprint coating
- Band faces: 100+
- Sensors: High precision 6-axis sensor and PPG heart rate sensor 6-axis sensor: Low power consumption 3-axis accelerometer and 3-axis gyroscope PPG heart rate sensor
- Charging type: Magnetic charging
- Charging time: ?2 hours
- Typical use time: ?14 days
- Capacity: 180mAh
- 110+ fitness modes: 5 auto detection modes: outdoor running, walking, treadmill, rowing machine, elliptical
- Other features: VO? max, Training effect, Training load, Recovery duration
- Health: Heart rate monitoring, SpO? tracking, Sleep tracking (deep sleep, light sleep, REM and naps), Sleep breathing quality tracking, Female health tracking, Stress monitoring, breathing exercises PAI (Personal Activity Intelligence
- Rating: 5ATM water resistant
- App: Mi Fitness
- Conectivity: Bluetooth 5.2 BLE
- Operating system: Android 6.0 or higher, iOS 10 or higher
- System language: English, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Russian, Traditional Chinese/Simple Chinese and more.
- Box Contents: Band body, Band strap, Dedicated charging cable, User manual
