The case for the Xiaomi Smart Band 8

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The more you read about gadgets and the more you read about devices that cost from 300 to 1200 CHF or more. I encourage you to look in the opposite direction, at the devices that cost 38 CHF. Within the last day the Xiaomi Smart Band 8 came out in the Swiss market.

With the Xiaomi Fit app you can track Sleep, heart rate, steps, kcal, moving time, standing, blood oxygen, stress, weight, PAI (more on this soon), Vo2 max, and training load. I skipped blood pressure and sugar because I haven’t figured these out yet.

You get the same functionality, for 38 CHF as you do for 200 CHF with an Apple Watch, excluding GPS access. You can get the same features as apple provides, at a fraction of the price.

The niche feature I spotted on the Xiaomi Smart Band 7 is the Personal Activity Intelligence reading.

PAI may have a huge potential to motivate people to become and stay physically active, as it is an easily understandable and scientifically proven metric that could inform potential users of how much physical activity is needed to reduce the risk of premature cardiovascular disease death.
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In brief: PAI looks at heart rate and effort. When we exert ourselves, by sprinting up the stairs rather than taking a lift, or walking from A to B instead of taking a bus our PAI score increases. The more we make an effort that increases our heart rate, the faster the PAI score increases. The aim is to have a PAI of 100 or more to live a longer and healthier life.

Versatile

One of my biggest frustration with fitness trackers like the apple watch is that you can’t count your steps while the watch is in your pocket. If you try it you will get zero steps counted. With the Xiaomi Smart band devices you can turn off hr monitoring, and track steps wearing it as a pendant, or in your pocket, or a 3d printed carrier.

Pebble

If you’re a runner you can even use it in “pebble mode” With pebble mode you put it in a specialised carrier and fix it to your shoe to track your running that way. I am not clear whether you would need one clip and tracker per shoe, or if one tracker is enough. The same would cost 79 CHF with Garmin. With other brands that specialise in this tracking it can be hundreds of francs.

Plenty of devices come with a GPS that is built in. In theory we can leave the phone at home, as we run, but how often do we leave the home without our phone? In my case, never.

The GPS is Delegated to the phone

Some devices, such as the Garmin 45S, suunto peak 5 and others have GPS that may be slower to detect where they are, or be less accurate due to cheaper components.

With the Xiaomi Smart Band series they get around this limitation by tracking heart rate and steps whilst the phone takes care of mapping.

Another brand that does this is Casio. Plenty of their steptracker watches track steps and time an activity, but rely on the phone to track location, speed and more. This reduces the load on the watch. With Casio watches you have a life expectancy of two years.

Long Battery Life

From what I read the Xiaomi Smart band devices have a life span of from 7 days to 14 days without needing to be charged. This isn’t as good as the Garmin Instinct but it’s better than the daily charge for the iphone, and the charge every three to four days that the Garmin 45s requires.

Devices Get Old and Have Niche Uses

I have more than one Garmin device, because I want one for hiking and climbing, and another for running. I have three Suunto. One of these I used for climbing, cycling, via ferrata and more for years before replacing it when the battery got low. The same is true of a second Suunto device. The third one replaced the failing battery of the second device.

With Garmin I often want to wear the Instinct during the day, and the 45s when running. If I swap between watches the app will keep up, but the track from that day does not synchronise from the app to the other device and vice versa.

Two Way Synching

With Xiaomi you have two way synching. If you use device A and swap to device B, half way through the day, the data will sync automatically. If you had 3000 steps from going shopping for food on one device, you will have the same count on the second device. Synchronisation is seamless, and practical.

At the moment it connects to Apple Health and Strava natively. I suspect that it could be worn and replace the apple watch, if so desired but I haven’t proved this yet.

And Finally

Our natural instinct is to look at the most expensive, most advanced, and most aspirational product. With this blog post I encourage us to look in the opposite direction.

It is easy for us to assume that cheap devices are worthless crap, and in plenty of cases, we’re right, but in this case I think we have a gem. We can remove it from the watch band and use it as a step, stand and more tracker, or we can put it in a pendant, and track everything except heart rate, stress and blood oxygen levels. We can buy an adaptor for our shoes and it becomes a running tracker.

I like playing with Suunto, Apple and Garmin trackers but my biggest frustration is that unless we want to manually enter data we will have an incomplete log, if we don’t wear three devices despite having just two arms. With this device, if we’re not interested in PAI data, we can put it in our pocket, or pendant, and track our activities anyway.

Every article I skimmed about various Xiaomi smart bands says the same. It’s the best budget tracker on the market.

The goal of this blog post is to encourage us to look at what the cheaper devices are capable of. Some people want to track their activities but without the nuissance of a smart watch. Others want to track their activities, but without having to wear a watch on their wrist. This is a cheap, versatile device.