Xiaomi's cheapest fitness tracker keeps things not too basic
Given the progress Xiaomi has made with the Mi Band, there's a bit of a feeling that the Active takes is a bit of a back step. To a time of those early generation Mi Band days where it sought to push the boundaries of what a cheap fitness tracker can be. The display and design downgrade and some indifferences with the tracking and even one of its core smartwatch features makes us feel that spending that little bit extra on the albeit slimmer Smart Band 9, will get you a nicer and still very affordable tracker.
Pros
- Removable frames offer some nice customisation
- Easy to use software
- Generally good sleep tracking support
Cons
- Downgrade in display quality from Smart Band 9
- Some activity tracking accuracy issues
- Music playback controls didn't work in testing
If you thought the Xiaomi Smart Band 9 was the cheapest Xiaomi fitness tracker going, then you’d be wrong. Step forward the Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Active — a super cheap fitness tracker that shows just how commoditized activity bands have become.
It makes me feel old to remember how exciting and premium fitness trackers once were — so for Xiaomi to offer a band this cheap is pretty crazy.
Yes, you’ll make some compromises on the Active compared to the Smart Band 9 and Band 9 Pro, but Xiaomi aims to make sure it’s not too many and still leaves a very capable fitness tracker that can also double as a smartwatch and offers some sports tracking too.
So is this a cheap tracker to grab or avoid? Has Xiaomi come up with another budget great? Here’s our full verdict on the Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Active.
Price and competition
The Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Active costs £19.99, which means it’s sticking to the same launch price attached to the Band 8 Active. It’s a tad more expensive in the US right now, check our real-time pricing below.
To put that into context with Xiaomi’s other very affordable fitness trackers, next up in price is the Xiaomi Smart Band 9 at $50/£34.99, then it’s the Band 9 Pro at $89.99/£62.99. It puts the Active back down to the price of what you’d pay to pick up the early versions of the Xiaomi Mi Band, which has now become the renamed Smart Band. So while the price of the Smart Band creeps up, you still have a very cheap option in Xiaomi’s collection.
You’d be hard-pressed to find another tracker worthy of your attention. It would mean venturing into a world of lesser-known fitness tracker brands that might give you some good hardware, but will likely let you down on software and performance departments.
You’d have to pay closer to $50/£40 for an alternative fitness tracker from Huawei and Honor and more for one from Samsung and Fitbit.
Design, display and comfort
Xiaomi’s first big challenge is to make a cheap fitness tracker not feel cheap and does that to a degree. You’re getting three color options (black, white, and pink) and now a larger 45mm case (up from 42mm) that measures the same 9.9mm thickness as the Band 8 Active.
The TPU frame and strap that sit around the screen are removable to give you scope to change the look. We had an additional sport strap to switch out for the white one, with both using the kind of pin clasp mechanism we didn’t love on the Band 9 Pro. It’s a nice enough matte look, though doesn’t feel as sleek as the mix of metal and a nicer array of straps on offer on the Smart Band 9.
Because that frame is all-encompassing you don’t get any buttons, so all of your interactions are with a same-sized, 1.47-inch, 172x 360 TFT display used on the Band 8 Active.
Screen quality is one of those areas where you’re going to make compromises. It’s a little dull in comparison to the AMOLED panels on the Band 9 and 9 Pro for starters.
There’s a big black bezel surrounding it and there’s just a little bit more lag in play and occasionally takes a few more swipes to navigate the software. For the price, it’s not terrible, but given a little extra money that gets you an AMOLED on the Smart Band 9, it would’ve been a nice win to get one on the Active too.
Around the back of the Active lies a 3-LED array optical sensor to cover heart rate, SpO2, and stress tracking.
Below that is your spot to plug in the supplied proprietary charger, which is similar to the one used on the Band 9 Pro that clings rather than satisfyingly locks into place on the back of the Active’s case.
The level of waterproofing remains the same as the previous Band Active, giving you something with a 5 ATM rating that deems it safe for showering and swimming and being submerged in water up to 50 meters depth, despite lacking any form of swim tracking support like Xiaomi’s other Bands.
Smart features and ecosystem
For starters, you’re getting a fitness tracker that works with Android and iOS devices and upgrades from Bluetooth 5.1 to version 5.3 to give you a more up-to-date connectivity method to pairing the tracker to a phone. We were testing with an iPhone and had no problems during setup, syncing, and pairing the Active.
Xiaomi unsurprisingly keeps things to the basics with the smartwatch features that are available to you. There are notifications, which have to be enabled first for individual apps from the Mi Fitness companion smartphone app. You’ve got music playback controls, though these didn’t work at all during our testing using them with both native and third-party music streaming services.
In addition to that you can view weather forecasts minus the richer visuals you’ll get on pricier Xiaomi Smart Bands. You can create events as reminders of key things in your calendar, set up timers and alarms and there’s also a find my phone mode that sends a vibrating alert to your phone to help locate it.
The notification support is basic and you can’t respond to them, yet there is a good amount of screen to make sure things don’t feel too cramped or awkward.
There’s room to store a maximum of two band faces, with additional faces available via the companion app and there are some that don’t look as dull on that screen as some of the pre-loaded ones. It’s a shame there isn’t just a bit less screen bezel to make them fill that case a little more.
Music playback control issues aside, everything here seems in good working order. We were expecting to see or have access to bigger features like payments, apps or richer music and the feature set is not that too dissimilar to what you’ll find on the Xiaomi Smart Band 9.
Fitness tracking
The Band 9 Active is very much a fitness tracker first that also promises to offer to track your exercise time too. There’s an accelerometer sensor to track motion and it leans on your phone’s GPS and keeps the Mi Fitness app open to improve outdoor workout tracking.
There’s Xiaomi’s stats screen to view daily step counts, calorie burn estimates and moving time with the ability to see when those stats spike over the day. You’ll get reminders when you hit your goals and can adjust goals for each of those metrics.
Using it alongside two other step trackers, daily totals were quite different from other trackers. On most days, step totals were 1-2,000 steps out from the two other trackers and that’s a lot. Calorie burn totals were surprisingly low as well.
Xiaomi cuts the number of available sports modes by half compared to other Xiaomi trackers and loses out on additional training insights. There are modes for runs and rides and indoor workouts like rowing are covered, but as mentioned, it’s not going to track your swims.
During indoor rows, it captured a similar number of strokes, offered similar calorie burn totals and offered similar average strokes per minute data as the rower. For outdoor runs, the tracking always came up short by roughly the same. A 5km run captured on a running watch was a 4.70km on the Active. It also meant aspects like pacing were off too.
Heart rate during exercise wasn’t a horror show, but did inevitably come up short against a dedicated heart rate monitor at times. For easy paced workouts, average and maximum totals weren’t far off the monitor. When upping the intensity and the maximum readings were at time 8-9 bpm higher than a chest strap monitor.
Health, sleep and stress tracking
The Band 9 Active has sensors on board to monitor heart rate, blood oxygen, and stress. It will also track your sleep and Xiaomi does offer some women’s health health tracking features.
Daily heart rate stats are displayed on the Active’s screen where you can also capture on-the-spot measurements that are typically in line with the reliable continuous monitoring on a Garmin watch. From the app ,you alter the frequency of the monitoring and set up high or low heart rate alerts. When you look deeper into the trends in the app, resting heart rate data stats were pretty in tune with rival devices with graphs telling a similar story about heart rate trends during the day.
Blood oxygen tracking also supports on-the-spot measurements and when enabled, can be monitored day and night. Just be prepared to sacrifice more battery to do it when you drop monitoring down to every 10 minutes. Data didn’t drop below 95% in our testing, which would deem levels to be normal. Given these aren’t clinical grade readings, this data acts as prompts or guidance as opposed to anything else.
There’s stress tracking here, but not the all-day tracking available on other Smart Bands. Measurements take roughly a minute and will generate a score and smiley icon to indicate clearly whether you’re relaxed or going through a stressful period in your day.
Taking the Active to bed will monitor your sleep duration, break down sleep stages, and monitor heart rate and blood oxygen levels if that tracking has been enabled. You’ll be assigned a sleep animal once you’ve tracked enough nights of sleep and get a sleep score to give you a quick indicator of how good or bad your sleep was. We’ve been using it alongside two other sleep trackers and the core sleep data on the Active has been pretty solid. Sleep duration stats were similar as were light, deep, and REM sleep stats. Heart rate data wasn’t wildly off either.
There is some sleep analysis and recommendations on offer, though the presentation isn’t the cleanest with suggestions on offer like using relaxation techniques or reducing stress before you go to bed.
Battery life and charging
Xiaomi has both beefed up the battery size and the level of battery you should be able to enjoy compared to the Band 8 Active. There’s now a larger 300mAh battery (up from 210mAh), giving you 18 days of battery life instead of 14 days.
Like other Xiaomi trackers, if you plan to use features like continuous blood oxygen monitoring, track heart rate with the most accurate setting available, and use the most advanced sleep monitoring, these will hamper the battery performance.
We found on lighter days, the battery dropped by less than 10% and more than 10% when we tracked activities. Tracking a workout for 30 minutes to an hour saw battery drop by 1-2% while battery drop overnight without all monitoring features in place was 1-2%. It can double that with more advanced tracking and you will see a higher drain with the most accurate monitoring support available.
18 days seems optimistic to us, but this won’t be a fitness tracker you’ll be charging every week with light to medium usage. It can go for longer than a week, but going longer than that will require restricting some of the features in use.
