The Mibro GS Explorer comes with an astounding price tag — but some bugs and accuracy issues mean that it's a little too good to be true.
The Mibro GS Explorer doesn't give you everything a Fenix or Apple Watch Ultra 2 can, but has enough about it to make it handy on outdoor adventures. But there are software bugs in some pretty important departments and plentiful accuracy issues too. Right now, we'd be spending a bit more on something like the Amazfit T-Rex 3 or even the older (and cheaper) T-Rex 2 to get an outdoor smartwatch that gets the basics right.
Pros
- Strong array of activity tracking features
- Good overall battery life
- Straightforward to upload routes and works with Strava
Cons
- Buggy performance in a few key areas
- Some oddly stiff physical buttons
- Accuracy issues for HR and GPS
Spoiler alert: AMOLED outdoor smartwatches are expensive. The latest Garmin Fenix 8 or Apple Watch Ultra 2 will both burn sizeable holes in your bank balance. What if you don’t have that kind of money to spare for a new trekking companion?
Step forward the Mibro GS Explorer, a rugged adventure smartwatch from the China-based company that counts Xiaomi as one of its investors. For under $150, the Explorer gets you that AMOLED screen along with the ability to upload and follow routes, use dual-frequency GPS to better track your expeditions and promises up to 60 days of battery life.
Is this Android and iOS-friendly budget outdoor watch too good to be true and could this be a genuine cut-price alternative to the Fenix and the Ultra watches from Apple and Samsung? This is our comprehensive review of the Mibro GS Watch Explorer.
Price and competition
We’ve already mentioned the GS Watch Explorer’s excellent price, which sits at $150/£119. Since launch it’s dropped even lower to $117/£93. That’s insanely cheap for an outdoor smartwatch that promises a lot of premium features.
The cheapest AMOLED Garmin Fenix 8 costs £949/$999, while the Apple Watch Ultra 2 sits at $799/£799. There are more affordable options out there, most notably the Amazfit T-Rex 3, which is priced at £279/$279. The Explorer though still falls well below the price of Zepp Health’s own impressive outdoor smartwatch.
Design and display

Like many outdoor smartwatches, the GS Explorer is bezel-heavy and that bezel slightly laps over a display that has Corning Gorilla Glass to guard it against scratches. It’s not the tougher sapphire glass used on more expensive watches, but extra protection is better than none and we’ve seen no signs of scratches so far.
There’s a 47.8mm-sized stainless steel case to give it a similar stature to Garmin’s 47mm variant of the Fenix 8 or its more affordable Fenix E. Whether you’d mistake it for Garmin’s watch is another matter however, though it does at least scream tough. That robustness is boosted by Mibro putting the Explorer through 15 military-grade tests for ruggedness.
A 10 ATM waterproof rating means it can survive being submerged in water up to 100 meters depth and it comfortably survived our swimming time. In addition to that, it’s also safe for recreational diving up to 30 metres depth. We haven’t gone diving with it, but given that’s a level of durability that has so far featured on more expensive smartwatches, that’s a nice win for the Explorer.

In the strap department, Mibro pairs the case up with either a liquid silicone or woven one. We had the former, which feels pretty standard fare in sports watch strap terms. It’s a secure strap that hasn’t been uncomfortable to wear and you can remove it with a simple pin mechanism used to easily clip each end of the 22mm band away from the case.
To navigate the watch software there are three physical buttons on the right side of the case. The top button lets you skip through full-screen data widgets like the weather or heart rate and the bottom one is your shortcut to the workout tracking screen. The middle one is a twisting crown-style button that emits a haptic vibration when scrolling through menu screens. The buttons weirdly are quite stiff, which continually caused problems for us when trying to end a workout. It often took an extra few minutes before it worked, which inevitably had an impact on the tracked session.
AMOLED screen-wise, you’re getting a pretty good one here. It’s a 1.32-inch, 466 x 466 resolution one, that can be kept on at all times and has a maximum brightness of 1,500 nits.
To put that maximum level of brightness into perspective, the Apple Watch Ultra 2 promises up to 3,000 nits. It’s a vibrant screen overall where colors are maybe a touch oversaturated and it lacks those really deep blacks you get on pricier AMOLED displays. It’s been up to the task in most scenarios including brighter outdoor ones where you will need to crank up that screen brightness.
Battery life

The mark of a good outdoor watch is that you don’t have to charge it every few days. On paper, Mibro claims the Explorer can last for weeks making it fit for multi-day outings.
The Explorer can apparently last up to 60 days but that’s when you’re just using it in its more restrictive watch mode. That drops to 20 days in what Mibro refers to as ‘daily mode’ and then that falls to 10 days in performance mode, which we assume factors in tracking activities and putting the GPS to use. When you are using GPS battery life is up to 15 hours.
We’d say those numbers pretty much match up to our time with it. On days without any tracking, the battery drop was 7%. That increased to over 10% when the screen was set to the always-on mode and you were using the most accurate heart rate and blood oxygen monitoring.

When using the GPS, just over an hour of use saw the battery drop by 7%. When we added navigation into the tracking mix, the battery drop was over 10%.
We don’t have concerns that this is an outdoor watch that can comfortably last a week and can go longer. Unsurprisingly, keeping the screen on at all times generates the most noticeable drain on battery so if you can live without that AOD mode, you’ll get significantly more battery in return.
When it’s time to charge we’re disappointed to find a pretty flimsy, proprietary magnetic charging cable that can be quite easy to knock out of place like so many other chargers we seem to find bundled on budget smartwatches.
Mapping and navigation

We’ll start by saying that if you’re hoping you’ll be able to view rich, detailed maps on the Explorer, that is sadly not the case. Instead, you can enjoy the ability to upload routes in GPX, KML and TCX file formats to the Mibro Fit app, quickly sync them to the watch, and enjoy breadcrumb navigation to help guide you to your finish point. You can also save the routes from tracked activities if you want to tackle it again with added navigation support.
Uploading routes is pretty straightforward. We created some routes via Strava’s route creation feature and were able to upload them to the companion app with no problem. When you’re ready to use the route, it’s selectable from the menu screen for your chosen activity.

The navigation experience is reminiscent of our time using similar support on Huawei and Honor watches. This seemed to be a theme with the user interface in general when tracking and activity.
On-screen, you’ll see a red line on a black screen to point you in the right direction. It’ll display when you’ve gone off course or you’ve covered more ground, which it refers to as ‘surplus’. Translation of some navigation terms along with the size of the text displaying when you’re off course could be better. The breadcrumb navigation does the job, but as far as offering the best of this type of navigation, it’s been better executed elsewhere.
GPS and heart rate accuracy

Like most sports-focused smartwatches, Mibro promises to track hundreds of sports, including running, cycling, pool and open water swimming as well as indoor activities like rowing and the stepper machine. As mentioned, it does support the ability to track recreational diving. This data live inside of the Mibro Fit app and can be shared to Apple Health, Google Health and Strava. The latter worked with no issues once we’d simply linked the two platforms together.
It’s surprising to find Mibro has included dual-frequency GNSS or dual-band GPS as it’s more commonly known. This is the latest positioning technology innovation that means the watch can communicate to major satellite positioning systems over multiple frequency bands to boost accuracy.
We’ve been using the Explorer alongside a Garmin watch that also offers dual-band and our tests show that this isn’t the best dual-band GPS watch we’ve used. There were more occasions where distance tracking diverged from the Garmin which meant that metrics like pacing were typically a bit off.


A closer look at GPS tracks shows that there are few more wobbly lines and tracks going through houses than the Garmin. It proves that now all dual-band GPS-packing watches are equal and we’d say that some watches without that latest positioning advancement have fared better in this department.
Our issues with the sports tracking didn’t end there. In the water, the swim tracking failed us and ended up not recording any distance data. That meant by the end of the swim the watch considered the distance covered too short to save the session and the session was lost. For other workouts like indoor rowing, metrics like stroke rate didn’t seem quite right.

Things don’t get much better for heart rate during exercise. There isn’t support to pair it with external heart rate sensors so it’s up to the optical PPG sensor to take care of monitoring matters. For some steady-paced workouts, heart rate graphs and average and maximum heart rate readings were not far off from a heart rate monitor.

There were also sessions at similar intensity or even slower where maximum heart rate readings were as much as 10 bpm out from a chest strap monitor. We see this a lot with optical sensors and while this isn’t the worst we’ve tested, it did have problems.
Mibro does serve up some additional training stats and insights here too. For runs, you’ll see a list of advanced running dynamics like vertical oscillation and ground contact time, which largely told a similar story to the same metrics recorded by Garmin. Like Garmin and other smartwatches that now offer these advanced running metrics, that data is left for the user to interpret. if you don’t know what exactly to do with the data, it’s not going to be very useful.
VO2 Max estimates seemed fine in general and not too low or high, while recommended recovery time at times feels a tad over cautious but this is something we see on other smartwatches that try to assess what that recovery time should be.
Activity and general well-being tracking

Day to day you can also choose to keep an eye on your heart rate, blood oxygen levels, measure stress levels and there are some women’s health features also available within the app. There’s also automatic sleep monitoring and daily activity tracking to take care of tracking those daily steps.
Daily step counts matched up pretty well with a Garmin and the Oura Ring while there’s a very Apple-inspired Ring widget to glance at to keep an eye on your step count progress alongside seeing the exercise time logged for the day and noting hours for the day you’ve been most active.

For sleep tracking, Mibro breaks down sleep stages alongside capturing sleep duration and the time you fell asleep and woke up in the morning. When it decided to work, metrics like sleep duration and sleep stages were similar to Oura’s sleep data. There were more days when the Explorer didn’t track our sleep at all compared to nights that it did.

Continuous heart rate monitoring is much like workout heart rate tracking, and recorded higher heart rate than other devices we tested it against. Resting heart rate data typically trended as much as 10 bpm higher. We often find that bigger, bulkier watches in general struggle most with heart rate monitoring and that definitely feels like the case here.
Blood oxygen saturation data ranged from 96-99% on most days, which would suggest things were normal. Stress tracking is nicely presented in the app, where you can clearly see the more relaxed and slightly more stressful periods of your day, making it straightforward to correlate with events that have happened in your day that might have caused that spike in stress.
Smartwatch features

Mibro promises a good amount of smartwatch functionality on the Explorer. It will display your phone notifications, let you view weather forecasts, add watch faces, notify you of incoming calls, let you shake your watch to remotely take a smartphone picture, control music playback and for some reason there’s a dice mode.

We had a bit of mixed experience with how well those smartwatch features actually worked. The notification support never worked despite enabling it in the MibroFit app.
It was a similar story with the music playback controls whether we were streaming from native or third party music services. Weather forecasts displayed fine, there’s a nice collection of watch faces to pick from, while the remote smartphone camera shutter worked without issue. It was just disappointing that the core smartwatch functions didn’t play ball.