Xiaomi Smart Band 9 review

Another year, another Smart Band. The undisputed budget fitness tracker champion is back for its ninth iteration, and this time Xiaomi is promising improved battery life and accuracy.

The price remains comically low for a tracker this competent, though the major caveats—a lack of GPS, missing features from the China-only version, and relatively bare insights—remain for the Smart Band 9.

Yet, strides have certainly been made in staying power (not that it was required), and the sensor adaptations go some way to helping the tracking performance once again punch above its weight.

The Smart Band 9 is one of the top affordable wearables we’ve tested this year – again. But it’s not for everyone. So, let’s explore how it’s performed over the last couple of weeks.

Price and competition

The Smart Band 9 faces a formidable field of ever-improving trackers and strong internal competition. Its Pro sibling is expected before the year is done, adding a more vogue, smartwatch shape and built-in GPS.

At £34.99 (roughly $45-55, though there is no official US pricing), it still undercuts top-performing (in most respects, at least) fitness bands like the Fitbit Charge 6 ($159.95/£139.99) by a wild amount, and offers some capabilities that outstrip ultra-cheap wearables like the CMF by Nothing Watch Pro 2 ($69/£69).

Interestingly, it also arrives with a cheaper tag than the Smart Band 8. The low price means this doesn’t change much, though, given I wouldn’t recommend picking up last year’s model even if the price equation was the other way around.

• Xiaomi Smart Band 9 vs. Smart Band 8

Design, display, and comfort

After introducing Pebble Mode (where you detach the band and use the Smart Band as a tracking pod) in the last generation, I wasn’t expecting any major design changes for this ninth-gen model.

Xiaomi has gone one better, delivering virtually zero aesthetic changes for the Band 9. Having nothing new to assess makes my job as a reviewer pretty painful, but, if I’m honest, I’m not sure there’s much room for Xiaomi to move here.

It’s effectively completed the basic fitness tracker style – and covers the fitness tracker-smartwatch hybrid design through the slightly more expensive Pro edition.

The Band 9’s 15.8g weight is as light and comfortable as wearables on the wrist get, and the 1.62-inch display is as big as you want it on a device with such a small form factor.

Here are two new things, actually: the 192 x 490-pixel AMOLED panel is now twice as bright as last year’s model, with peak brightness reaching 1,200 nits, and the case is now a brushed aluminum instead of a shiny finish.

I don’t care much about the latter change, but the brightness bump is a helpful upgrade.

It’s impressive when manually pumped to the max, and the 60Hz refresh rate introduced last year ensures screen swipes and menus remain smooth. You’ll spend lots of time in the menus, too – like last year (and with other Xiaomi wearables), you’ll have to adjust tons of nerfed default settings if you want actual data and features. This is as choresome as ever.

I still don’t love the barebones and dim always-on-display for occasions like nighttime workouts, and the Band 9 is no competition for ‘proper’ trackers in screen durability. Yet, it’s difficult to argue with the display you get here; it’s clear, bright, and functions like auto-brightness and raise-to-wake work without issue.

The overall look is still pretty early-wearables – and could probably do with a bigger tweak for the 10th edition – but it’s still a design that’s remarkable considering the asking price.

Smart features and ecosystem

Like the design, the smart experience is fairly unchanged here. That means you’re getting the pure basics – notification mirroring, alarms, and vibrations for finding your phone – but not anything advanced such as contactless payments (still reserved for the China edition), apps, smart assistants, music playback, and cellular support.

As with most shortcomings with the Band 9, it’s difficult to complain too much about the lack of exciting smarts. You can’t have it all at this price point, and what is there – like notifications – can be customized both on the device and in the Mi Fitness app.

The same is true for widgets and watch faces, which do a solid job of cramping so much information into a small space. You can swipe and quickly get an insight into sleep hours, the weather, or any other mild smart functions you prioritize.

There’s still a lack of polish in some areas, with some faces (like the football one shown above) completely unresponsive and even basic features like weather syncing turned off by default.

Mi Fitness is still slightly baffling in parts, too – more on this below – but we suspect most will be able to look past the rough edges of the Band 9 smart experience due to the price tag. And if you can’t, well, consider upping your budget.

Activity tracking

While the lack of GPS continues to be the biggest drawback of the Smart Band line, Xiaomi has worked to improve the heart rate sensor here.

It claims a 16% accuracy improvement from last year in heart rate monitoring (and blood oxygen sensing, which I’ll discuss below), and my tests support a slight improvement in the data.

As I found with Xiaomi’s Band 8, there were no major drop-outs or hiccups characteristic of early-era budget trackers in this year’s edition. It was able to stick particularly close to the Garmin HRM-Pro Plus chest strap on indoor rides.

In the example below, the Smart Band 9 stays within 1-2BPM of the external HRM throughout the 40-minute sessions even with multiple intervals. On a few occasions in the same indoor setup, max figures were typically overreported by a few BPM but averages always remained very in range.

The lack of arm movement on the indoor bike makes this the easiest test for an optical sensor to pass, and, as you would expect, things begin to fall apart a bit more when lifting weights, outdoor rides, or running.

That discrepancy opens up considerably more with something like cycling outdoors (with the bumps, shakes, and hand movement from turning), but the Smart Band 9 still manages to capture the core effort of a session. If you want optimal performance, we always recommend investing in an external strap – but, for a $45 tracker, it’s hard to imagine things being much better.

Perhaps even more encouraging than this is that Xiaomi has fixed some of the data issues in Mi Fitness. Previously, training insights heavily inspired by Garmin (like training effect and recovery hours) were laughably unusable. A basic run would see the Band 8 advise taking the next few days off, but this has been refined.

Using that same spinning session as an example, the training effect (3.4/5 for aerobic gain vs. Garmin’s 3.1), load (62 vs. 71), and recovery hours (21 vs. 17) are all in a very comparable range.

It’s a similar story when using Pebble Mode. While last year was very hit and miss – sometimes draining the battery of our phone a huge amount, and delivering bugged data on other occasions – the experience has been refined and can now produce those deeper insights into running with consistency.

It’s still not worth choosing it as an alternative to something like the Garmin Running Dynamics Pod, but, still, it’s neat.

Health, sleep, and stress tracking

As with heart rate tracking, Xiaomi boasts notable improvements in sleep tracking for the Band 9. Compared to last year’s model, the company says sleep stage accuracy has been improved by 7.9%.

We never pay too much attention to sleep stages in our reviews, with even the top wearable sleep trackers only able to match the gold-standard, polysomnography, to around 75-80% accuracy.

Plus, though Xiaomi claims improvements here, sleep stages still only comprise breakdowns for deep, light, and REM sleep – nothing for awake time. Given all our other test devices (Whoop 4.0; Oura Ring Gen 3; Garmin Fenix 8) typically report around 30-60 minutes of awake time per night, it’s hard to take sleep insights seriously.

That said, if you need a tracker that accurately spots when you fall asleep and wake up, the Band 9 is a solid performer. Just don’t pay too much attention to the stages or scores. Since they’re also likely to be skewed by the dodgy stage analysis, I suggest ignoring sleep interpretations/suggestions as well.

Sadly, the same is true for blood oxygen data – another feature turned off by default that cost me a day or two of insights before I realized it was missing. Though Xiaomi touts improvements here, I’ve still experienced plenty of sub-95% readings in overnight tracking and throughout the day.

This is either down to the fit or the algorithms, but I can’t say with great confidence this is a robust SpO2 tracker.

Other health data is similarly uninspiring. Elements like skin temperature still live in isolation from everything in Mi Fitness, and virtually no trends or insights are pulled from sleep or stress tracking that helps you make sense of the data.

The chicken leg/calorie screen shown above – something you can access via the inexplicable chicken leg icon on the main dashboard – is the extent of things, really.

If you just like seeing all this logged – spreadsheet-style – and don’t mind that it’s more of an overview than an accurate tracking experience, you’ll get on fine with the Band 9.

Just don’t expect any advanced features, metrics, or presentation.

Battery life and charging

With its 233mAh battery, Xiaomi has bumped the estimation to 21 days for the Band 9 – up from 16 days in the previous generation – and up to nine days of use with the AOD enabled.

I don’t doubt that the former is possible based on my testing, but, as I’ve littered throughout this review, you’ll have to live with almost every setting disabled if you want to get anywhere close.

This is already a super-basic tracking experience, so I’m not sure why you would want to do this to squeeze out another few days of life rather than just charging it up (which takes an hour-ish).

In my chosen setup, which included turning on every 24/7 tracking setting I could find and tracking around 1-3 hours of exercise per day, the Band 9 lasted roughly a full week before needing a top-up.

There’s a question of how much Xiaomi needed to build on this strength (for reference, I got around five days with similar usage on last year’s model), but it’s still an impressive bump in what’s virtually the same design.

Next year, though, I wouldn’t mind more feature progression – and enabled settings by default – at the expense of some battery life.

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