artka's blog: "China gadgets"

The Mi Band is an extremely simple and no frills fitness tracker, it doesn’t have a heart rate sensor or UV sensor, it simply is a rectangular oval shaped thing similarly sized to an eraser, it has a built-in pedometer, vibrator and 3 LED lights that shows the device’s battery status or any incoming notifications. The Mi Band Bracelet is also IP67 certified water resistant so you shouldn’t have problems wearing it in the pool or shower.
The Mi Band app is very MIUI themed and that’s a good thing for Xiaomi users, it offers a dashboard for showing your steps, sleeping hours and a list of achievements you’ve done for the day and past week. The Mi Band is easy to use in most ways and it certainly won’t confuse you, the only problem that we had encountered was localization issues.
If you head on to the activities page, you’ll find weird direct translations such as ‘Running help’ a.k.a Running Tracker, and there are ome Chinese characters down below which will cause difficulties to the user, not to forget to mention that there’s only social integration with WeChat at this point of time.
While most people would buy a fitness tracker for running purposes, the ‘Running help’ feature in the Mi Band app unfortunately only supports Gao De Maps instead of our commonly used Google Maps, lets face it, the Mi Band has been out in the market for a while and it isn’t really difficult for developers to implement an international version of the app. I personally know Chinese and won’t have much problems with the software, but if you’re familiar with how a real fitness tracker should work, you will be disappointed with the Mi Band as it totally fails to track your walking steps properly and sleep pattern even though I wear it to sleep at night.
The only thing that works really well is how the Xiaomi Mi Band is able to act as a security device for your Xiaomi smartphone and its by far the best security implementation that we’ve seen on a smartphone which doesn’t require you to save your fingerprints.