The Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Pro packs a bigger AMOLED display and GPS that aims to be a true fitness tracker and smartwatch hybrid.
The Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Pro might not necessarily deliver a vastly better experience to the Smart Band 8 Pro, but remains a great budget fitness tracker and smartwatch hybrid with a likeable design and software that feels a little better sewn up than the competition. If you like the idea of a fitness tracker with a big, bright screen that offers mostly slick software, good battery life and can handle some workout tracking sans smartphone too, this is still one of the best budget options to grab.
Pros
- Smart, minimalist design with optional straps
- Still solid battery life performance
- Solid all-round tracking for the price
Cons
- Could do with at least one button
- Heart rate tracking accuracy in some scenarios
- More advanced tracking modes not enabled as default
The Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Pro is the follow-up to the Band 8 Pro, a fitness tracker and smartwatch hybrid that goes big on advanced features.
Bigger screen aside, it also adds built-in GPS to make it a better fit for tracking outdoor workouts and for the Band 9 Pro, Xiaomi’s also promising improvements to tracking accuracy across the board, including when it’s monitoring your heart.
That’s all while keeping its price well below the £100/£100 mark. We liked what the Xiaomi Smart Band 8 Pro had to offer so is it more of the same with the Band 9 Pro? Here’s our full verdict on the Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Pro.
Price and competition
The Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Pro is priced at $79/£62, so that’s a slight bump up in price from the Smart Band 8 Pro. The slimmer Xiaomi Smart Band 9 is a truly budget option and sits at $44/£34.99.
It goes up against the likes of the Honor Band 9 (£49.99), and the Huawei Band 9 (also £49.99), which do come in cheaper but lacks onboard GPS.
The cheapest Fitbit – the Fitbit Inspire 3 comes in significantly more while the Samsung Galaxy Fit 3 retails at $40.
Design, display and comfort
The Smart Band 9 Pro sits pretty sleek and minimalist and is very much in keeping with other bands from Huawei, Honor, and Oppo that have opted for this hybrid smartwatch and fitness tracker look.
Xiaomi now offers it in three case colors as opposed to two on the Band 8 Pro, with your pick of silver (pictured), black, or rose gold case shades. It’s an aluminium alloy case so doesn’t look or feel cheap with that case now a smaller 43mm one albeit a touch thicker compared to the larger 46mm case on the 8 Pro. That means you’re getting something that is notably smaller to wear and a better fit for skinnier wrists.
Xiaomi pairs that up with a TPU strap, which is pretty standard fare if not a little awkward to strap on with its part pin-style clasp. It is possible to remove the strap and it’s easy to do that and swap in one of its optional leather or magnetic straps. We did have the latter to try and offer a simple way to give the Pro a slightly more formal-friendly look.
Interacting with the Band 9 Pro is all done from the same-sized 1.74-inch, 336 x 480 resolution AMOLED touchscreen included on the 8 Pro that now comes with 2.5D-shaped glass. This time, it’s brighter, with Xiaomi doubling the maximum brightness from 600 to 1,200 nits. The vibrancy of the screen, even when not at full brightness, is good.
The screen responds well to swipes and taps, though there have been countless times when we wanted to be able to reach for a button — which the Band Pro once again lacks.
It sticks to the same 5ATM level of waterproofing so it’s suitable to use underwater up to 50 metres depth with both pool and open water swimming modes available to get this tracker wet. We’ve used it in the pool and kept it on for showers and it’s survived the soaking with no issue.
Smart features and ecosystem
The Band 9 Pro works with both iOS and Android and the support for modes and features across those platforms is nearly identical. It’s also upgraded the Bluetooth version from 5.3 to 5.4 to give you the most up-to-date connectivity to pair the band to your phone. Some Android users might find varied support for some features like Xiaomi’s events or remote smartphone camera modes, but aside from that it’s going to feel like a familiar experience.
As mentioned, without a button in play Xiaomi’s software is built for touchscreen interactions. From the main watch face, you can swipe down to see your notification stream, swipe right for quick settings, and left for your widgets. Swiping u[ will get you to the app tray. This is all pretty standard gesture-based OS stuff and it doesn’t take long to get to grips with where everything lives. Performance-wise, there’s just the odd small stutter moving between screens but overall using it is pretty much a breeze.
For core smartwatch features, you’ll need to enable the ability to display third-party notifications from the Mi Fitness companion app before they start popping up on screen, and that wider screen compared to the Smart Band 9 gives notifications a bit more room to spread out on. There’s a nice weather forecast widget you can expand to show the day’s weather as well as nicely optimized music playback controls that work fine with streaming services like Spotify.
Given the price, there’s enough here that does make it useful for non-tracking scenarios. You’re not getting apps, payments, or a music player, though given how much it costs that’s not surprising. It’s matching what rival bands can offer and that’s really what you want to see.
Fitness tracking
The big gain from the Band 9 to the Band 9 Pro is the inclusion of built-in GPS, so you don’t have to rely on powering up the Mi Fitness smartphone app to reliably track your outdoor exercise time. Xiaomi is also promising a boost in accuracy on the Band 8 Pro, not only in positioning tracking but also by adding a new chip and dual LED optical sensor setup to boost heart rate monitoring accuracy by 15% compared to the Band 8 Pro. It’s also now added in a compass for additional outdoor metrics.
In true Xiaomi fashion, it throws a lot at you here in terms of what it promises to be able to do. You’ve got over 150 available sports modes with six of those offering richer levels of tracking data and pre-workout warm-up programmes. It’s also promising training insights like training load and VO2 Max estimates, though the latter was somewhat lower than reported by a dedicated sports watch.
Looking at the GPS performance first the good news is that it doesn’t hang around too long to grab onto a signal. We’ve been using it up against a Garmin watch with the latest dual-band GPS technology, which the Band 9 Pro does lack. So It wasn’t all that surprising to see that against one of the very best, it comes up a little short in places.
On our first run, which was a track run, it measured 8.01km compared to 8.6km on the Garmin. For another run (screens above), it measured 8.21km compared to 8.15km, so it did have a habit of slightly over or under-reporting distance up against a dedicated sports watch. A closer look at the mapped routes does show that Xiaomi tends to smooth out some corners.
Our view would be if you were a casual runner using it for maybe 20, 30 minutes of outdoor running and cycling, that tracking is going to be fine. We just wouldn’t be treating as a serious replacement for a dedicated sports watch. Looking at related metrics like pace and while average paces for easier runs seemed generally good, fastest pace data always seemed off for us.
Digging into the heart rate tracking performance and during workouts like outdoor and indoor runs, indoor rows, and bike rides, the average and max heart rate readings typically were higher than the same data from a Polar heart rate monitor chest strap. Even on steadier-paced workouts like the one above. We had the Band 9 Pro sat pretty snug on our wrists, so we’re not sure we can blame that for the spotty data.
Things do seem to fare slightly better with continuous monitoring outside of exercise where resting heart rate data was usually 2-3bpm out from another reliable continuously monitoring watch. It feels like Xiaomi’s slimmer Smart Band 9 does seem to churn out more reliable heart rate data in comparison.
Outside of dedicated exercise tracking, it will track your steps, estimate calorie burn and track how active you’ve been on an hourly basis. There’s a very glanceable rainbow widget to monitor your progress and we found daily step counts pretty nicely in line with other watches on most days if a little low or high on some days. Calorie burn estimates also seemed to track a lot lower than other devices we used it against.
There have been some workouts where the Smart Band 9 Pro has been up to the task and others where it fell a little bit short. It’s not going to rival a sports watch, but also doesn’t do a terrible job of tracking activities like runs, rides, pool swims, and other indoor workouts.
Health, sleep, and stress tracking
On the health and general wellness tracking front, the Smart Band 9 Pro will monitor your sleep time, heart rate, and blood oxygen levels and will track your sleep too.
As a sleep tracker it gives you those metrics staples including assessing sleep quality, giving you a breakdown of sleep stages and offering some insights into your sleep data. Sleep duration data in general looked good and picked up similar times that we’d fallen asleep and woken up the next day against other sleep trackers. Metrics like average heart rate were similar and not wildly high. Core sleep data here feels good on the whole, while the sleep interpretation and suggestions on offer are pretty basic but also pretty clunky in presentation on the app.
It will track your stress, whether that’s with on-the-spot readings or continuously once you’ve enabled it as a feature, which is a key theme with most of Xiaomi’s more advanced monitoring features and also applies to blood oxygen tracking. You can also turn on relax reminders to remind you to take a moment when those more stressful moments hit.
This is the same story with the Vitality scores, which generate a score when you’ve hit a certain amount of physical activity. The goal is to aim for 100 scores or as close to that 100 number to show that you’re exercising at a level that will have genuine health benefits. Like the very similar PAI Health scores, which seem to be getting edged out by Vitality scores, it really needs to feel more a part of the day-to-day tracking process. Especially on the Band where most of the Vitality data is reserved for inside of the app.
Battery life and charging
Despite shrinking the case size, Xiaomi actually adds in a bigger 350mAh capacity battery compared to the smaller 289mAh one on the Band 8 Pro, and that brings promised improvements on the battery front.
Xiaomi says the Band 9 Pro can go for up to 21 days in typical usage, which is up from 14 days on the 8 Pro. In heavier usage, that drops to 10 days (up from 6 days) with the screen set to always-on and 8 days with heavy usage.
As these numbers suggest, what you get in terms of battery entirely depends on what you’re using on a regular basis. Features like GPS, keeping the screen on, and monitoring blood oxygen levels day in and day out will see that battery drain quicker. Turning on more advanced sleep tracking noticeably adds more drain as does turning on the all-day stress tracking.
We used the Band 9 Pro with a mixture of leaving the display on and turning that mode off. On days with the display turned off and using it mainly for things like checking notifications, music controls and keeping an eye on activity tracking progress, the daily battery drop was around 5%. Add the always-on display mode into the equation and it was 10-15%. Using the GPS for an hour saw the battery drop by 5%, which isn’t a bad showing at all.
There’s every possibility the Band 9 will keep you from charging for a couple of weeks and it does seem to preserve battery in a pretty efficient manner. When it does come to charging, you’re met with a proprietary charger that’s a bit flimsy and one that takes just over an hour to charge from flat back up to 100%. So there’s some slightly quicker charging to enjoy over the Band 8 Pro.
