Bracelet Xiaomi Mi Band 2 - review and instructions from the owner

If you have Xiaomi Mi Band 1 or Xiaomi Mi Band 1S, feel free to throw them out the windows right now. With my Mi Band 1S, I did just that, and I don’t regret it a bit. But first things first.

Before that, I used the Mi Band 1S, which has exactly the same functions as the Mi Band 2, only it has a slightly smaller battery, but it lives much longer, and there is no screen. And it seemed to me that the screen in Mi Band, in principle, is not needed. But, as it turned out, not that it is needed, but it reveals the full potential of the device as such. How did I use Mi Band 1S? The fact is that I lead, in fact, not a very active lifestyle, but what I liked about 1S was that it was really an indestructible thing. I swam with her, and beat her hand against the walls, of course, by accident, and rubbed her against the asphalt, and swam in the river, and at the same time in six months I charged it only about 5 times. I kinda liked it.

Therefore, I have the 1S on my arm, the smartphone is somewhere in my pocket or backpack, I walk calmly, if someone calls me, then I hear the Band vibrate, and I take out my smartphone, answer the call, and continue to do my work which I did before. But at the same time, everyone had a minus - I could not determine why the Band was buzzing to me: it was a letter or SMS, or it was just a notification that I had reached my daily goal and walked, there, 2-3000 steps. Therefore, I constantly had to get my smartphone out of my pocket. Here, thanks to the built-in screen, there is no such problem - the screen shows exactly where the notification came from.

If this notification comes from some application, then the application icon is shown on the screen and app is written. If this is an incoming call, then a handset appears on the screen, if this is a message from the Xiaomi Mi Band itself about the steps taken, about the goal achieved, then he greets me with a flag with an asterisk.

Big changes have also affected the strap of the smart bracelet. You can insert it, in principle, on any side, but you cannot pull it out of here, you need to make great efforts, it is pulled out only from this side. It's cool, i.e. you won’t lose it for sure, as it was on the first versions of this fitness tracker.

What is smart about Xiaomi Mi Band 2? He can track your steps, heart rate, distance traveled, display this whole thing on the display, of course, track the quality and duration of sleep, receive incoming notifications and vibrate, and also serve as an alarm clock. At the same time, you can set Xiaomi Mi Band to vibrate every 30, 60, 90 or 120 minutes while you are not active, and remind you to do, for example, exercises if you lead a not very active lifestyle.

In addition, if you use a smartphone with a fingerprint scanner or use a PIN code on your smartphone, you can set the bracelet to unlock your phone without entering a password. Well, such a seemingly poor functionality is complemented by the entire screen. Well, let's start, perhaps, in order.

How he counts steps. I won’t say that it’s super accurate, but the distance determines approximately correctly. The error in counting steps is about 10-15%. But this is quite normal, Mi Band 1S counted the steps in exactly the same way. At the same time, sometimes he can simply count your hand movements as steps, if you do not even step, but this does not go into distance. And he cannot count steps if, for example, you are walking through a supermarket, your hands are on the cart, you are walking with your feet, but your hands do not move at all. Then the Mi Band cannot determine and count your steps in any way, because, after all, it is not a psychic, but just a smart bracelet.

How exactly he counts calories, I honestly do not know for sure, but most likely he does this based on your geometric data. First, as soon as you connect the Mi Band to your smartphone, you enter your data: height, weight, age and gender, as well as the hand on which you wear this same Mi Band. After that, it calculates your activity, most likely, somehow calculates the length of your step on average, based on this it calculates the distance traveled and calories burned.

As for the lifetime from a single charge, here it is a little worse than that of the Mi Band 1S, because here part of the OLED screen eats away. According to my calculations, one charge of Mi Band 2 is enough for me for about 2 weeks. Mi Band 1S lived with me for 30-40 days, and for him it was the norm. But if we take for comparison the same smart watch that I had before, Moto 360, which I charged 4 times a day, then this is, directly, heaven and earth, all the same. Yes, less than the Mi Band 1S, but still it's a lot, charging once every two weeks is quite acceptable.

Mi Band has a Smart Wake feature. For example, you are sitting, doing something, walking, you want to see the time - you can press the button on the display and see the time, or make a simple movement with your hand - bring it to your face. Among other things, Mi Band 2 is protected according to the IP67 standard, protected from water and moisture, and from shock. On the first day, as soon as I unpacked it, as soon as I tried to put it on, it fell off me 2 times in a row. In addition, I accidentally applied it several times against the corner of the door and against the wall once. At the same time, the screen was not scratched by everyone, although on the Internet I often met comments before that the screen was very scratched. Then I decided to scratch him. Stupidly he took the capsule out of his bracelet and rubbed it on the table. Naturally, there is abrasion, but somehow definitely scratching me in a random way, not on purpose, did not work out. Regarding the screen cover, I have not been able to find out whether it is glass or plastic, so I will most likely lean towards plastic.

But, returning to the topic of moisture protection - it is here, and it is really good here, no worse, no better than on the first Mi Band. I showered with him, and took a bath with him, and washed my hair, and completely dipped my hands in water with him, partially dipped them in water, just sprinkled water on him - nothing got through him, the Xiaomi Mi Band 2 bracelet works exactly the same , as it usually works. The only negative is when, for example, you are dealing with shampoo, then soap can accumulate in this cell for the capsule itself and you need to clean it out at least once a day.

The design of the bracelet, among other things, includes a button. What is it for? With a single press, it turns on the screen, with subsequent presses, it switches to other functions that you can configure in the application settings, such as displaying the heart rate, steps taken, calories burned, or the remaining charge of the Mi Band.

Mi Band 1S has become a rather innovative product, because for its price segment it had a unique technical bonus - it could measure the pulse. Mi Band 2, of course, can do this too, but everything is implemented here much more logically and much more conveniently, and therefore I began to check my pulse more often. I never needed this information, but suddenly I needed it.

How we measured the pulse on Mi Band 1S. We had to take our smartphone out of our pocket, launch the application on it, find the heart rate measurement point, then click on Measure and sit, wait 10-15 seconds until the pulse is measured. Here, you don’t need to do anything like that: just press one button, find an item in the menu of the Mi Band itself with a pulse measurement and sit for 10 seconds, don’t move anywhere, wait until the pulse is measured. You don’t need to constantly monitor with a smartphone, you just need to have a Mi Band and be able to press one button with one finger and be silent for 10 seconds - for many, this is probably a fundamental problem.

Among other things, Mi Band tracks sleep. He determines the phases of sleep, apparently, by your movements, and divides your entire sleep into two phases: REM and non-REM sleep.

Well, a few words should be said about the application. So you bought a Mi Band, took it out of the box, put it on your hand, what's next? What do you need to do to start the magic? It's simple, go to the Google Play Market, where you download the application, it's called Mi Fit, it's completely free, it supports Android versions 4.4 or higher. If your Android smartphone is lower than version 4.4 and Bluetooth is not 4.0 Low Energy, then think twice before buying whether you should buy Mi Band at all or not.

We downloaded the application, installed it on a smartphone, logged in to our Xiaomi account, if you suddenly don’t have it, then create it, it’s quite simple. But Mi Band can work without an application, it is an absolutely self-sufficient device, it doesn’t matter if you have a permanent connection with your smartphone or not, it can independently count steps, calories, count your heart rate, distance traveled and constantly show time. At the same time, it has some kind of internal memory, and, if I'm not mistaken, for about 3 days, depending on your activity, it can write to the internal memory. And if you need to constantly know your activity, and track precisely the statistical data, then you will need to connect to your smartphone at least once every 3-4 days and synchronize all your data. But if you do not need accurate statistics, then you can do without it.

What can I say about Mi Band, what features do I use every day. Now I measure the pulse, I used to be uncomfortable, now it's convenient. I went to the gym, you do some exercises there, some kind of warm-up, it became stupidly ill, somehow uncomfortable, measured the pulse, looked - it’s comfortable. Now I constantly know the time, I don’t need to constantly reach into my pocket for my smartphone, to see what is happening there. And, most importantly, I know who sends me what notifications. Now this is just awesome.

Mi Band 2 for me is really love at first sight. I fell in love with this device, now I can not imagine my life without it. The only thing I promised you was to find a minus for this device. And I found it. This is not a price, this is a life time from a single charge - 2 weeks. Imagine a device whose main disadvantage is that it lives on a single charge for only 2 weeks, and frankly, I don’t understand all the high that has been played out around this device. Many write that nothing is visible in the sun when you bring the screen to your nose. I don't know, I can see everything perfectly. Many wrote that it is too expensive. Don't buy if it's expensive for you. Why get angry? If you do not see scenarios for using this gadget, this does not mean that it is bad. And if you don’t need Mi Band 2, you don’t see the point in it, then just don’t buy it, imagine, it’s possible.

(1 ratings, average: 5,00 out of 5)