Xiaomi Smart Band 7 Review: King budget fitness tracker starting at $35

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Xiaomi Smart Band 7 Review, Specs, Features, and Price.

Xiaomi Mi Band 7 Strap Colors — *Xiaomi Mi Band 7 Colourful Straps*

Xiaomi Smart Band 7: What’s New?

Xiaomi’s smart band seven was launched on July 4, 2022. The smart band features a 1.62″ AMOLED display, up from 1.56″ from last year’s Mi Band 6 model. Now it comes with a more prominent display, with increased visible area by %25, which means a better user experience since you pack more User Interface elements without overfilling the screen display area, making it more user-friendly and readable.

Xiaomi Smart Band 7 Main Highlights

Amoled, 192 x 490, 1.62 Inch Display
Continuous blood oxygen saturation monitoring.
A more powerful CPU – Dialog 14706
Battery Capacity – 180mAh battery (lasts 14 days on a full charge).
Equipped with 120 sports modes
Records your workload, recovery, oxygen time, and calories burned
Monitors your heart rate, blood oxygen, and sleep rhythm
Waterproof up to 50 meters deep
Interchangeable Colorful Straps.
Prices: Chinese model: (~$35) / Global model: (~$42)

Main Features List

Package

Xiaomi Mi Band 7 Package - PIC 1 of 5
Xiaomi Mi Band 7 Package - PIC 2 of 5
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Unboxing (Package Contents)

x1 Band body
x1 Band strap
x1 Dedicated charging cable ×1
x1 User manual

Design

The Xiaomi Smart Band 7 is composed of two elements or components. You got your Band body or core unit, as we call it, and the band strap. The Core unit is easy to pull out and can be used with different strap designs according to the user’s fashional style and taste. Xiaomi includes a default silicon rubber-made strap in the package. The downside is that a screen protector film is not inside the box and is necessary to protect the display from scratches.

Xiaomi Smart Band 7 with Strap

Heart Monitoring

We wanted to compare the performance of the Smart band seven sensors to those of a medical-grade device. For our test, we used a Sanitas SBM 07 Blood Pressure monitor device. Surprisingly, our measurements were close to those of the Smart band, indicating that the level of accuracy is above average.

It’s also important to mention that Both tests were taken by measuring the heartbeat per minute through the wrist and done in resting mode. Also, the results ranged from 73-80 BPM. Xiaomi designed a good Mobile App called Mi Fitness to track and monitor user activities.

Heart rate Monitoring Modes

The monitoring function offers two modes: Continuous real-time monitoring (Auto), which most likely consumes battery power, and a manual setting to set it to work every 1, 10, or 30 mins.

There is also an option to specify specific high or low rate values. Once preferred values are selected, according to the user’s physical condition, you can receive automatic notifications. Those notifications can be very helpful in preventing future injuries and medical conditions, especially during sports activities, in providing self-awareness and basic physiological vital signs information through the Smartband GUI.

Blood Oxygen Levels

The vo2 values are a derivative of the heart rate measurement. If you Divide your maximum heart rate by your resting heart rate, then multiply the result by 15.3 to get your VO2 max (Source: Wikipedia).

Display

The Xiaomi smart band 7 Display provides an excellent sharp picture. With 1.62 inches AMOLED high-resolution display. It felt very responsive when we switched between different functions. Still, we recommend leaving it on the default levels to preserve battery power conservatively. Brightness levels can also be adjusted manually according to weather conditions.

Display readability under direct sunlight

Depending on the sunlight intensity during the daytime. Sunlight levels can significantly affect the readability of the Smart band display. In our experience playing with the product, the AMOLED display was visible under intensive sunlight. We can’t promise it will be evident in countries such as Egypt and the United Arab Emirates during summertime. Still, it’s visual under direct sunlight, and in a worst-case scenario, you can always read the display in a more shaded environment.

Automatic Brightness Adjustment?

Probably due to cost considerations, the Smart band seven doesn’t have a built-in Ambient Light Sensor (ALS) that adjusts the display brightness levels according to light environmental conditions.

To adjust the brightness level, you must set it manually through the watch settings or use Zepp Life App, which supports this function. Shortly, Xiaomi will add this option inside Mi Fitness App too.

Battery power tweaking tips!

Tweaking and squeezing extra battery power to extend operation time is relatively easy. The smart band 7 offers a few basic display settings related to the display functionality users should know they exist under Display settings inside Zepp Life App Band settings.

Option	Suggestion
Brightness	Adjusted manually, and we recommend lowering it to the minimum value possible.
Screen-on duration	Like smartphones, you can set the time in seconds until the display turns off. It’s best to keep It on the default 5-sec value.
Always On Display	We recommend keeping it disabled.
Screen upon notification	Disable it if you don’t need it.
Lift your wrist to view the info	We recommend enabling it. The smart band will turn the display on and off based on a wrist rotation gesture.

Adjusting the display settings via Zepp App vs. Manulay in the Smart band

Battery life

Xiaomi has also increased the battery capacity of the Mi Band 7 from 125mAh from last year’s model to 180mAh. However, despite the large battery capacity, it may still have the same 7-14 days battery life as last year’s model.

Battery Charging Method

Xiaomi provided a USB charging cable with a magnetic head that connects to the Smartband charging contacts and a standard 5V USB Host Port on the other side.

Charging the Xiaomi Smart band 7

Charging the Smart band 7 from a completely drained battery up to 100% took about ~1:40 min. Once again, Xiaomi did an excellent job with GUI design. When you plug the USB charging cable, the display shows a perfect graphical representation of the charging progress using a rectangle shape with a progress bar that advances clockwise as the battery is being charged.

The rectangle colors change from brown to green, indicating the lower limit and upper charging ranges from minimum battery power. Overall, you get an excellent visual experience viewing the charging progress.

A tip for maximizing/Extending battery life

Select a minimalist face design that will admit minimum light. According to common logic, The power consumption will increase if you use a more graphical design face, emitting more light. Keeping it simple by selecting a minimalistic design can be a good step in conserving battery power and extending the Smart band battery life.

More informative face design vs. more graphical face

Other methods to squeeze more battery power

Disabling vibration upon message notifications or setting it only to specific IM apps.
Enabling Battery saver mode: only record steps with basic sleep information in this mode.

Enabling Battery saver mode

Improved Hardware

Mi Band 7 also seems a little heavy. The Band 7 weighs 13.5g compared to last year’s 12.8g model, but the extra 0.7g is less noticeable on the arms and wrists. Xiaomi has also improved the CPU of Mi Band 7. Compared to the Mi Band 6 Dialog 14697, the Dialog 14706 now supports the latest Bluetooth® LE 5.2. This makes UI transitions and animations much smoother.

Software Support

Xiaomi Smart Band 7 Supported Software
	App Name	Catagory
	Mi Fitness	Managing all of the Mi Band 7 functions.
	Zeep Life	Heath monitoring, Notifications, calories counting, Steps, etc.
	Mi Band 7 Watch Faces	Changing the Smart band GUI Appearance.

Mi Fitness (Android & iOS)

In the UX (User experience) arena, Xiaomi invested highly in crafting a very intuitive mobile app. You get tons of sports, health, and physiologic monitoring functions that most users will probably love to use. Inside Mi Fitness, we found a few useful but practical functions. For example, the Xiaomi Smart band seven can be used for a few health-related activities such as practicing breathing; for example, you can use it during yoga class. For this specific function, you can set a particular interval for Inhaling following a vibration notification when exhaling.

Mi Fitness (Screenshots)

Zeep-Life (Android & iOS)

If you are asking yourself, what are the differences from Mi Fitness? Zeep Life is a second app you can use with the Smart band 7. Zeep Life is more focused on health monitoring and notifications. It has a few essential sports activity functions, such as Calorie counting, distance, and steps, but it doesn’t focus on sports activities on a broader scale compared to what Mi Fitness App offers.

Another useful function we noticed that the Zeep Life App offers is the ability to adjust the Smart band display brightness levels through the App.

Zeep-Life (Formerly MiFit)

Mi Band 7 Watch Faces (Android)

Xiaomi does not officially support this excellent App, but it does the job well. The Watch faces available in Mi Fitness App are somewhat limited. To solve this problem few independent developers got around the issue and created a few apps, and this is one of them. The beauty of having an open community is that Xiaomi users can also re-design and customize their watch face templates according to different styles and personal preferences.

To use this app and sync (download) the face designs to the Smart band, you will have to run Zepp Life or Mi Fitness in the background. On top of that, If you pay for the App, it’s also possible to design personal watch face templates.

Mi Band 7 Watch Faces

Monitoring

Health, activity, and fitness

In addition to screen-side updates, the Mi Band 7 Fitness Strip offers the possibility to track 110+ different sports activities, four times more than the previous generation, with four professional sports activities and automatic detection of sports and water activities. Plus, it’s also in compliance with the 5ATM water submerging standard.

In the field of health monitoring, the functions remain the same. The Mi Band 7 now allows continuous monitoring of blood oxygen saturation. Last year’s model had blood oxygen saturation or SpO2 monitoring, but only if you wanted to know SpO2 levels. It’s now possible to set the fitness band to measure SpO2 after a set time interval. You can also get the AliPay and Mi AI apps to support that work with the Chinese version and Amazon’s intelligent voice assistant Alexa for the global version of Mi Band 7.

Final verdict

A fantastic Smart band packed with tons of sports and health-related functions. The 1.64-inch AMOLED display is visible and sharp and can also be used outdoors under intensive sunlight. Xiaomi did an excellent job in improving UX by designing an intuitive GUI. Overall, another cheap and great product we liked to test.

Xiaomi Smart Band 7: Price & Availablity

Mi Band 7 price in China is around RMB 239 ($35). It’s about the same price as the model released last year. The NFC model that supports payments to AliPay costs more than 279 RMB.

The Mi Smart Band 7 aspires to be the new flagship in a line of mature bands. You can find the international edition on AliExpress for as low as $39.00. UK-based residents can also grab it for £49.99 with free shipping on Xiaomi Offical Mi UK Store.