Michael William Paul Reviews on MI Smart Band 4
If you’re in the market for a fitness tracker, you’re more than likely hoping to modify your health behavior — whether it’s remembering to walk more, tracking how often you work out, or making sure you’re working out appropriately hard when you do. The wearables market is saturated with options, but you won’t find one that’s much more affordable than Xiaomi’s latest Mi Band 4. It’s packed with features for half the price of counterparts from Fitbit and Garmin.
There’s a lot to like about the Mi Band 4. For $40, you get a fitness tracker that has waterproofing, a heart rate monitor, workout tracking, text and call notifications, sleep tracking, and an impressive battery life of up to three full weeks, depending on usage. Compared to the monochrome Mi Band 3, version 4 has a 0.95-inch full-color OLED touchscreen with a 400-nit peak brightness. The screen is colorful and vivid, responding quickly to up and down swipes to browse through menu options for music control, alarms, workout tracking modes, or settings. The raise to wake the screen option wasn’t always successful, but I do like that it allows you to only turn this feature on between certain hours of the day so it doesn’t suddenly turn on while you’re tossing and turning in bed.
One of the best features of the Mi Band 4, by far, is its battery life. I wore the band for two weeks and only needed to charge it on the 13th day. (By that point, it was at 15 percent and probably could have lasted another night.) Of those 13 days, I used it to track 10 days of 35-minute workouts. Compared to my chest-strapped heart rate monitor that I wore while exercising on a Peloton bike, the output numbers didn’t vary too much. The heart rate numbers were nearly identical, and calorie burn calculations were off by an indiscernible amount.
To get the Mi Band 4 to track your workouts, however, you do have to manually tap it to begin; the band does not automatically detect sudden spikes in heart rates as a potential start to an exercise. You also have to manually stop it when you’re done, which can be annoying to remember to do if you’re like me and you hop right into the shower after you’re done with a workout.
