For sports and everyday, it’s easy to fall in love with Xiaomi’s smartwatch

Nowadays, smart watches are becoming more and more popular. There has been a bit of a cane run for wearable companies because for a long time, customers didn’t want to accept that they really needed such gadgets. No wonder the classes carried a lot of childhood illnesses, so it took years to get to the expected level in both knowledge and price, and not be toys for a tight-money elite, but useful accessories available to the general public.

There are many varieties of smartwatches, but that’s just the appearance. Basically, you all know the same thing, with minor differences, of course, and sometimes smaller, sometimes larger differences in quality. What we find is the difference is the direction from which the watch approaches everyday use. Some of them are in terms of average use and another larger group in terms of sporting use. Regardless, both types know what the other, just now, for example, in sports classes, we can choose from not 100 but only 30 different dials.

Xiaomi has grown into one of the most significant Chinese manufacturers today. And the start-up wasn’t so long ago, it’s not been eight years since the company was announced. Elapsed time, the Xiaomi is also among the largest among the phones, with different rankings by country. In India, for example, they were first in the fall, but are likely to fit into the top 10 everywhere. In the field of wearable smart devices, however, they are clearly among the largest, they have been in the top three for years, there was a year when they sold most of the devices.

The Xiaomi Huami AMAZFIT smartwatch is the company’s most advanced wearable smart device, though not for long, because the successor is already available in pre-order. Sure, its price is still licking the legs of the stars right now, but that’s understandable. On the other hand, the price of the first generation has been falling for months, and now we can buy it for under $ 90 in some promotions. And this is a very low price for the knowledge, the skills with which this watch was equipped. As you may have read above, the manufacturers approach the smartwatch issue from two directions. Xiaomi chose the sporty line.

Design and appearance

Design is what gives an hour individuality. At Xiaomin, we have become accustomed to striving for a clean, simple yet premium exterior. They don’t use unnecessary decorative elements, and luckily we don’t come across the horrible motifs that have been found on almost every Chinese product for 5-10 years. The case of the watch is made of ceramic, just like the back of the Xiaomi MIX and MIX 2 of their phones. This ceramic is the third hardest material on earth, surpassing only sapphires and diamonds, so it can only be scratched with these two materials. Anyone who does not have a diamond ring is sure not to damage the surface of the watch bezel. Of course, the glass can be scratched above the display, but if we put a glass foil on it, we will have an almost inviolable watch.

Wearing the Xiaomi Huami AMAZFIT smartwatch for the first time will make the strap material stand out. The strap is made of silicone, which makes it feel really soft and silky. Of course, it’s important to make the strap feel comfortable, but more importantly, it doesn’t even sweat under our skin. This is first and foremost while playing sports! No controls are found in the watch. There is a single button on the frame that allows you to turn it on or off. The rest of the control and adjustment is done via the touch screen and the telephone application. On the outside, we also need to talk about the size and weight of the watch. The housing is 4,5 x 4,5 x 1,2 centimeters, of course, as it seems, it is not square, but circular, and its weight is only 54 grams, which we do not even feel during use.

Display

Xiaomi Huami AMAZFIT uses a touch-sensitive IPS display to display data. The display has a circular diameter of 1,34 inches and a resolution of 320 x 300 pixels. Unfortunately, the genius of the panel is not visible in the pictures. Surprisingly, the watch is great for use in the sun, and in many cases, the higher the light, the better the image on it, even when not using the backlight. I don’t know how this was achieved, maybe there’s something behind the panel that reflects light, but the fact is that in most cases, there is no need to turn on the backlight. On the one hand, this makes the watch more comfortable to use, and on the other hand, it also increases the operating time. The display on the watch is perfect anyway, but no one should expect to see the sharp colors seen in the promo images on it. This is true for all smartwatches anyway, the images are very deceptive.

Hardware and performance

One of the very important metrics of today’s smartwatches has been the amount of built-in memory, RAM. It is important to have as many as possible because this is necessary for multiple programs to run in parallel without running smoothly. The Xiaomi Huami AMAZFIT smartwatch, on the other hand, has only 1,2 MB of RAM in addition to the 128 GHz processor, and the built-in storage is only 512 MB. Still, this amount is enough to make the watch work quickly and smoothly. How is this possible? So that it is not Android Wear, but a unique system running on it. Anyway, woodpeckers consider this to be the biggest mistake of the watch.

Android Wear gives you a lot of freedom, there are plenty of almost all Android apps that can be installed on your watches. This, in turn, requires a lot of resources in terms of both processor, memory, and storage. I would add that most of the apps are completely useless for an hour anyway, because although Google maps looks good on the pictures on the dial, in practice it is unmanageable, I would only like to navigate with it when I need it most. The Xiaomi Huami AMAZFIT is closed thanks to the unique system, but in my opinion it still knows everything a modern smartwatch needs to know. It also has GPS, for example. With the help of this, it accurately measures the distance traveled, and together with the well-functioning pedometer, it also burns calories, provides professional data during sports, so that we can analyze and improve our performance. 

Battery and connectivity

For wearable smart devices, it’s important to pay attention to how long they can operate on a single charge. We want to wear a watch or a bracelet instead of constantly filling it. If we want to log our sleep cycles we need to be on our wrists. The Xiaomi Huami AMAZFIT smartwatch has a 280 mAh lithium polymer battery. This is a seemingly small capacity compared to a phone axle, but here you have to drive a small display on the one hand, and we’re not talking about a standard Android system on the other. How long you can use the watch on a single charge has a big impact on what you use it for. If we just look at the standby time, it can be up to 11 days. It’s interesting, but even this can be done with this watch, since as we wrote, we see the display during the day without backlighting. In normal use, which has a bit of a sport, a little GPS use, but it works like a watch most of the time, but with Bluetooth turned on to see when our message has arrived, so with such average usage, we can expect 5 days according to factory data, and my own experience also shows that it needs to be charged every 5-6 days. If we turn on the continuous heart monitor and GPS, we get 35 hours of operation. Luckily, this pair is only worth it while playing sports and we used to use it.

In addition to GPS, we find two radios in the watch. We get WiFi and Bluetooth connection. The former is not a phone quality thing, it has a range of 5-10 meters, but the latter, i.e. Bluetooth can stay connected over 10 meters. True, this is essentially superfluous because we use Wi-Fi mostly just to update the software - we get patches and other little things often - while copying music or listening to it with a Bluetooth tab while running. Again, referring to the factory data, we write that we can copy 500 songs to the watch, it handles that much. We could not verify this because we could not copy that many numbers to the 512 MB area. There is enough space for a few hours of sports. This, in turn, is very useful, as you don’t have to take your phone with you to run. The GPS records the route, the music plays from the clock. Perfect!

Water resistance

Well, when it comes to water resistance, many people can’t interpret what a given value means. IPxx values ​​indicate standardized resistance to water and dust. In the case of dust, the scale is 6, while in the case of water it is 7. In English, if the IP67 mark is written on a watch or telephone, it indicates the highest grade in both cases. This is not to say that all devices have the same capabilities when IP67, but there is a minimum value they must achieve. We are more interested in water resistance in an hour. The question is, for example, whether it is possible to shower or swim in them. According to the minimum definition, the water resistance must last for a minimum of half an hour and a maximum depth of 1 meter. That is, the answer, yes, we can even swim in Xiaomi’s smartwatch. 

Fitness skills

As indicated several times, this watch was designed to meet the needs of athletes. This is not to say that it would be useless on a day-to-day basis, but rather that at least half of the dials should be designed to be easy to read during sports, showing calories burned, distance traveled, and the like. When we first set up the watch, we need to enter our data and also what we want, how many pounds we want to weigh. To achieve this we get a workout plan. Don’t think here about telling the clock how many recliners to do or how much to walk. It tells us how many calories we need to burn in order to lower the plan. On the dial we can also see where we stand compared to the daily plan.

The watch is familiar with the sports of walking, running, cycling and hiking anyway, and indoors the treadmill and elliptical trainer can be used in a measurable way. For outdoor sports, it logs essentially all data, including the route taken, not just in terms of length. When we get home, we can see where we went on a map in sync with our phone. We can log our heartbeats, watching at what load fat burning starts, we can see how fast we’ve run in the meantime, what steps, so we’re really getting all the data to make our workouts more effective. In order to monitor the effectiveness of your workout, you don't need anything other than one Xiaomi smart balance, and we have arrived in the world of professional sports.

Xiaomi Huami AMAZFIT smart watch - the companion of the day

Xiaomi's smartwatch will be our faithful companion in everyday life as well. We don’t have to train all the time to enjoy the benefits. We can also pair it with iPhone or Android devices, so it is able to vibrate when you receive a message, be it an email, an SMS or a Facebook message. I’ve used some similar structures before, but maybe this feature is what I like best about them. I don’t have to dig up the phone when I get a message, it’s enough to look at the watch and I know the thing is important and I have to respond or get to it later.

The display shows the following functions in order:

• Select sports activity and related settings, such as high heart rate alarm
• Clock, depending on the dial, with many types of data display
• Weather forecast
• Daily goal and where we are compared to it
• Heart monitor
• Music Playback
• Alarm clock
• Compass
• Stopper
• Sleep monitor
• Training center- Our progress in fitness, different plans, half marathon, marathon, etc.

Phone App

As you can read, for Android and iPhone, you can download the appropriate program from the current store. We can set up almost anything over the phone, and there’s something we can only set up from here. Such is the case with WiFi, the details of which we can enter in the app, after which the watch will connect to the home network. We can't complain, we can make essentially all the settings on the clock display, but it's still more convenient to do them from the phone. So, for example, we can choose the dial from here, and then the base changes nicely in the clock. The manufacturer offers different dials for different sports, which can be seen from the names of the dials.

The telephone program is able to monitor our performance, it is worth synchronizing the data after the end of the run or hiking. It is important to note, for example, that the message display on the clock only works if the phone is running Amazfit in the background. If we stop it the weather will not update and it will not vibrate even if we receive a message. Many times everything recovers after reconnection, and then we can delete it from the watch. It's not like it's that complicated, it's good to know about it.

The program is very transparent and easy to use anyway. He doesn't know Hungarian, but he can get along perfectly with even minimal English, because he helps us to find our way with pictures.

Important things about the watch:

• Compatibility: Android (OS 4.4 or later); iPhone (iOS 8.0 or later)
• Water resistance: IP67 water resistant means that the depth should not exceed one meter and the service life should be 30 minutes
• The watch is available in two versions: English and Chinese. The only difference between the two versions is the display and language of the user manual interface
• The full charge of the watch is approx. It takes 3 hours
• The WiFi distance is approx. 5 to 10 meters, while Bluetooth operates within a range of about 10 meters
• The watch has a resolution of 1,34 inches, 320 x 300 pixels and a thickness of 12 mm
• The watch does not require a SIM card, you just need to connect to your mobile phone via Bluetooth
• Clock standby time up to 11 days, 5 days under normal use, 35 hours with continuous GPS tracking
• The watch can only be connected to one phone at a time
• The phone app does not display all data on the fly, even the number of steps only after synchronization with the clock
• The clock and calendar are shown after the synchronization with the phone, they do not need to be set separately and cannot be set separately.

I tried to cover everything in the article, but after reading it afterwards, I still remembered a lot of things. It’s not a novel, it’s just a single test or tutorial, so I don’t want to give it any further, but if anyone has any questions about the class, you can ask it in the comments, I’ll try to answer it. I’ve been using the lesson for about a month and a half at the time of writing this article, so I have accumulated some experiences and experiences that I would love to share with anyone!

I ordered from here: Xiaomi Huami Amazfit smart watch