The past months I have been training constantly in order to maintain my body, mind and soul in good shape. Also, such training is helping me a lot for all mountaineering expeditions I participate. If one is in good shape, is certain that will enjoy the ascents much more because he will feel less tired during the expedition. I order to monitor a bit better my training sessions, I wanted a wearable device that could track some basic activities. After quite some research and based on the budget I wanted to dedicate to such device, I have decided to give a try to Xiaomi Mi Band 2.

The Xiaomi Mi Band has been an international fitness trackers hit, and for good reason – the range has been so cheap you might as well give them a go, and people have in their millions. And to some extent they do the job of helping you realise of how active (or sedentary) you are, they’re comfortable and the sleep tracking works.

DESIGN

I particularly the industrial design of the Xiaomi Band 2. Behind the perfect look of a band there are hidden the unique innovative technologies, which are ergonomically placed in the panel, created using the ultra-precise injection molding and UV treatment. Thanks to this manufacturing technique the surface of Xiaomi Mi Band 2 is scratch and fingerprint resistant.

On the underside of the Mi Band 2, much like the Mi Band 1S, you find a heart rate monitor. The core of the Mi Band 2 slips into a black Dow Corning TPSiV band, with other colors being made available for purchase separately.

TRACKING

The Mi Band’s sleep tracking is good and accurate – the module automatically detects that you’ve gone to sleep, or woken up, and is a useful guide to how you’re actually sleeping. Xiaomi says it has made both its step counting and heart rate tracking algorithms and tech more accurate. The activity tracking still isn’t quite up to scratch but, interestingly in different ways to previous Mi Bands. Though I am not 100% satisfied with the activity recognition. I think Xiaomi should have to work more on that matter.

Xiaomi Mi Fit App

Xiaomi bigged up a new Mi Fit user interface but not a great deal has changed, at least so far. It’s still more basic than the Fitbit and Jawbone apps. There’s a dashboard showing the day’s activity, last night’s sleep, your most recent heart rate reading and when your last streak (of hitting targets) was. You can also manually track your weight in the app.

From each of these you can access daily, weekly and monthly graphs, apart from heart rate which is still presented as a list of readings with little context – essentially useless. As I said, the Mi Band struggles to auto detect when you start running but the app is designed to break activities up into ‘walk’ or ‘activity’ in a timeline under the graphs. You can view the times, steps, minutes, distance and calories though I couldn’t find a way to edit or group these as you get on other apps.

FEATURES:

• OLED-display
• Touchpad
• New design
• Updated pedometer algorithm
• Time, steps, heart rate
• New pedometer algorithm
• Accurate data step by step
• Accurate heart rate monitoring