Xiaomi Smart Band 8 Pro

May 3, 2024

This review is going to be massive. You thought my Redmi Note 13 Pro+ review was big? That was 2043 words. This is 4326. Double my previous one.

Below are some hyperlinks so you can jump to specific categories if you just want to read about specific parts.

• Display
• Battery
• Design
• Bluetooth Quality
• Health Tracking
• Workout Tracking
• Sleep Tracking
• Training Suggestions
• Hands-off Controls
• UI
• Extra Features
• Summary

Display

The display of the Band 8 Pro is great. A nice, 60hz 1.74" AMOLED is amazing, and I believe it might just be the sweet spot for a fitness tracker with a few more features. I find 6.7" phones average sized and just barely good enough for me, but I never have any issues with this display. The display is big enough to not have issues with fat-fingering, but not big enough to the point where you have a small phone on your wrist. The scaling of the content also fits just right as it ends up not making everything grandma sized but it also allows you to see the content.

I have also had absolutely no issues with the brightness. I don't like the, dare I say it, scummy way that nits are pushed as the best measurement for brightness, so I'll invent my own scale for this review: How good is it to look at the content in direct, harsh sunlight, where 1 is content is not visible at all and 10 is content is too bright and ends up causing light leaks. The Band 8 Pro gets a nice 8. And in my scale, that is perfect. It's not too bright so it doesn't cause light leaks (which is where white content is so bright that it ends up "leaking" out and the areas around said content have a white glow), but it's not too dark and it actually lets you see what is happening when in the sun.

Another nice feature is 60hz. To some this might seem standard, but to me, this is brand new. It's super smooth and results in every action just feeling right. When comparing it to my Band 6, the band 6 feels laggy. This feels great. If you've ever gone from 60hz to 120hz on your phone, it's like that. Exactly like that. It also helps that the display is oleophobic, meaning your finger just slips along it, which leads to a pleasant experience. Not to mention the lack of fingerprints due to said oleophobic coating.

Ultimately, the display is great. For just 70€, it is not in any way a bottleneck.

Battery

The drain stats, with everything maxed out, it lasts me, on average, 5-6 days. That is with every slider cranked as high as it gets and every option pushed to its max and with max brightness. That is pretty good, considering it means that it actually gets to measure my sleep and I don't need to charge it overnight every day.

Charging, however, is a bit bad. To go from 10% to 98%, it took me an hour and 10 minutes. Of course, it's not your phone, so you can leave it there and just go on about your day without issues, but it's still a bit of a nuisance to deal with.

Design

The design is also pretty nice! I have the black variant with the black TPU strap, and it feels great! The strap being TPU helps not trap hairs and then pull them when you even slightly move your arm, and it also collects no sweat! Sometimes it may get a little sticky, but then you just move the band back and forth a little and you're good! However, there is a big issue: Showering with it is terrible because water gets stuck inbetween the straps and you have to take it off to manually clean. So showering, while certainly possible and will cause no immediate problems, will require you to take the band off and dry the strap off.

As I mentioned before, I love the oleophobic coating on the screen. It results in a nice, pleasant surface with little friction. But another good choice is the side rails. I don't know what material they are, most likely just plastic. There seems to be very little information on the materials and Xiaomi's own website is obscure at best. It says fiber polymer and NCVM are the materials for the shell, but that tells me basically nothing. But so far, it seems like it doesn't scratch that much. Which, I guess, is all that matters.

One specific part of the design that might take some getting used to for many is the way the strap works. Instead of the strap with the little pin thing being on the outside facing in, on this strap, it is on the inside facing out. It also has two locks for the straps to not move, which keep the two strap sides firmly locked. This design will feel weird for the first few days or weeks, but once you get enough practice and you get the technique right, you get used to it quick. This design has a huge bonus: It's pretty much impossible for this thing to somehow come loose. Not only is the pin pushed in by your own wrist and it would require only one side to get caught on with immense force, but the locking mechanisms also make it so that even if the pin is not inserted, it continues to hold the band together just fine. So basically, you do not need to fear this thing coming off partway through your usage.

The glass covering the display is, according to Xiaomi, Guerilla Glass 3. In my second week of usage, there is already a scratch on it. It's not particularly noticealbe, but as time goes on, there will be more and more. This is rather disappointing considering this is the device that will hit every corner of every wall when you accidentally hit your hand, so scratch protection should be vital.

And the absolute best part of the design is the comfort aspect. I've said this before in my previous reviews, but one of the best ways to evaluate how well a product does its purpose is how easy it is to forget it even exists. If I can use my phone without any stuttering, and thus forget the SoC, then it did a good job. Likewise, I quite often forget the Band 8 Pro. The design means it's very light and absorbs little sweat, and it's very comfortable, meaning, unless I read notifications or use the Band in any capacity, I don't even know it's there.

Bluetooth Quality

This category may seem a bit weird, but I'm going to be measuring how far you need to be to lose connection to your phone, how stable the connection is, and how stable and accurate GPS is, because, while technically not part of Bluetooth, it is still a highly important feature for those who need to track workouts.

The range, as far as my experience goes, is plenty. I can easily start a run and run around my school's indoor stadium without ever losing connection. That's at least 20m on the far areas, but I've probably gone even further on some days. So overall, the range is of no issue whatsoever since either way most of the time you will use the band with your phone right near you.

It almost never drops your phone. I say almost never, yet I actually mean never. I have yet to have one instance of this thing losing connection and somehow making me try and fix the problem. It is consistent and great.

GPS, though, is a bit of a mixed one. Granted, most of the time it connects almost immediately, but there have been instances where it took so long that I had to manually pull my phone out and turn Mi Fitness on to make it connect. Which is definitely not comfortable. However, once it starts, it has no problems. The one time GPS signal gets worse is when I enter my apartment building, which is cement (It's a commie block). And to be honest, that makes sense. but the rest of the time, it is just fine and works reliably.

Health Tracking

The Band 8 Pro features a fair amount of health tracking features. You obviously have heart rate, but there is also blood oxygen and stress. And if the need is there, it can also track cycles. Being a man, I have no experience with that feature, and it would be very awkward to ask "Hey how accurate is your menstrual cycle tracking?", so I can't comment on that one. However, I can comment about the other ones.

Heart rate tracking is decently accurate compared to manually measuring it. However, it's drastically easier. You just hold your arm out and it does the rest for you. No need to count. I've selected automatic measurement every minute, so whatever it shows when I open the heart rate panel is most likely up to date and matches my current heart rate. However, these numbers are not 100% accurate and shouldn't be used for medical purposes.

Stress is a little worse in terms of convenience. It doesn't get upset over the most minor movements, but it does require that you tighten the band and keep it in a highly precise location. Also, no moving. Which makes it rather inconvenient. It also takes a while, around a minute. Certainly not ideal.

Blood oxygen measurements are arguably the worst in terms of convenience. You have to be perfectly still and not move even a little while keeping your band tightly fastened in a hyperspecific spot that it really doesn't explain well enough, and if you dare retry one too many times it'll just prevent you from doing it for a few minutes as it'll just keep telling you to fasten the band correctly in under a second of you starting the measurement. This makes for a terrible experience. At least it works passively, I guess.

Workout Tracking

The workout tracking, however, is really nice. There's a lot of options, and while I primarly use walking, I have also tested out running. Every time I want to walk somewhere, even if it's for just a few minutes, I start the tracking. It generally tracks my position precisely, the GPS has very good accuracy, even in tougher areas.

A nice-to-have feature is the goals. There's three to choose from: Time, Distance, and Calories. As you near milestones in your goal, you get notifications. It's similar even if you don't explicitly select a goal in the sense that every kilometer you get a notification that tells you how long it took to walk the last 1km. I've used goals in the past for reaching certian progress milestones like running for 10 minutes, and it's a really good feature to have.

Auto detection of workouts seems to be great when it works, but it rarely works. Maybe my walks are just really short (Benefits of proper public transit infrastructure!), but it's basically never detected the fact that I'm walking in the times that I hadn't started an automatic walking activity. But when it does detect it, it does this really cool thing where it doesn't just start it then and there, it gives you the progress from a little more than when you just started. Which is really good, because with my Mi Band 6, it would just start at whenever I started it. Here, it actually tracks more.

Auto pause, however, is terrible. It's tuned to have way more false starts than false pauses, and while that is nice, it's very annoying. It takes a few seconds of not moving my hand to have it stop and it takes one swing of my arm for it to start. Sometimes I don't even need that. I raise my arm to rest it on my camera while waiting at a traffic light and it thinks I'm moving. I get that it's better to have more false starts than false pauses, but come on, at least tune it to be a little less sensitive. I'm hoping in the future, through software updates, this will be fixed.

Sleep Tracking

Sleep tracking tracks 4 primary stages: Deep sleep, Light sleep, REM sleep, and Awake. Awake is moments when you wake up but don't actually get up and go right back to sleep, if you were wondering. What I have found is that the sleep tracking is neither great nor terrible. It's inbetween. There are some features such as sleep breathing scores, blood oxygen scores, recommendations, and so on, but it seems like it still can't differentiate between morning and evening people and thinks everyone is inbetween. I can go to sleep at 23:00 and wake up at 5:00 and after a shower feel just fine and able to do stuff, and, in fact, that is my prime motivation time, but it still continues to tell me that I should get more sleep and wake up later, which, if I actually followed that advice, would result in me oversleeping and feeling worse. And in that case, it tells me I slept well.

Or maybe I'm just terrible at sleeping.

Training Suggestions

This is a new feature that I have not seen before. Essentially, it offers suggestions for running training. You can train for endurance, heart rate, breathing, and so on. The times range anywhere from 8 minutes to an hour.

I did a basic run/walk, consisting of a walk for 2, a jog for 3, then walk, then jog, then walk, then jog, ending with a last walk. Now, I may just be VERY physically unfit, but by the end of it, my heart rate was at 160 and it peaked at 182 during the last jog. However, I know for a fact that it was rather fun! Of course, the experience heavily depends on where you are, but near me is a nice park, so I went there.

How it works is rather good. It acts as a simple workout, but it also has a special panel for the training plan. It shows you the current task, in my case, whether to jog or run, with a timer for how long you have left until it's complete, and every time the timer ends, the band vibrates and starts the next one, meaning you could do this completely hands-off. Another nice feature is showing your current heart rate next to the target heart rate.

At the end, if you haven't returned to where you want to be yet, you can also continue it as a regular workout, which is a nice touch and certainly nice if you want to not start a workout immediately after.

Hands-off Controls

This part will be the longest, as there is a lot to talk about. Hands-off control is anything from media control to answering calls or paying.

The Band 8 Pro has great control over your phone. Assuming it's a Xiaomi, that is.

The best part is the notification control. Not only do they appear immediately, but you can dismiss them to clear them from the phone, too! This helps for people like me who NEED all the notifications to be read/marked as read and would manually click on every email they get just so that their inbox is clean. And for people like me, the notification controls are great. However, there are a few downsides. Unlike what I had with the Band 6, this does not have scrolling titles. This means that if you received a notification called, say, "Liked By Loremipsumdolotsiramet", you would not see "Liked By Loremipsumdolotsiramet", you would see "Liked By ...", which is not very helpful if you want to figure out which one of your twitter followers has chosen to like your post on this fine day. This means you have to manually check your phone. And it's such an easy solution to add considering they had to REMOVE this feature, as it was present on the Mi Band 6. Below you can see an example of how the overflow looks.

And here you can see an example of how it looks if it doesn't overflow.

Another nice feature is the DND sync. It's really nice to be able to lift your wrist up, swipe to the right, press two buttons, and suddenly stop receiving notifications for 4 hours. This is way better than the old version, which separated the phone's DND and the band's DND, and, ironically, even if you turned DND on on your phone, you would have to also turn it on on your band in order to not receive notifications across both. Of course, if you prefer that, then DND sync can be turned off in the Xiaomi Fitness app.

Media controls are pretty nice. I rarely need to use them because my music is already at a perfectly good volume, but there is an easy to use slider for the volume, previous and next track buttons, a pause button, and a nice title + artist section. On top of this, it actually works. It has yet to fail me in detecting what song I am listening to. And here we can see an example of the scrolling title, which is what should have been made for notifications, yet wasn't.

Amazon Alexa is a weird one. I have received the rollout on the watch, but the app still has not been updated to support Amazon Alexa's linking. This means I basically can't use it. I will edit the review once I receive the rollout, but for now, this is just one of the issues I have.

And here's the first big issue: Lack of NFC. It's super cheap to put NFC in, yet they did not. Sure, not everyone needs NFC, and to some it might just be useless, but NFC is huge for many, including me. I pay with NFC everywhere I go, and pulling my phone out just to pay is yet another inconvenience. I have used NFC in a band before and it was great. And while it's not a dealbreaker for me, it certainly could be to someone.

An arguably even larger issue is the lack of ability to accept calls from the phone. I often use earphones in conjunction with the band and I practically never answer calls on my phone. I always use my earphones. This means my phone continues to sit in my pocket. However, now I have to pull my phone out, because despite the MASSIVE screen and the ability to decline calls, you can not answer them. Seems very weird to me. And while it is just two taps on my earphones, that relies on the gestures working and that requires me to effectively hear my finger impacting the earphone, which is an uncomfortable sound to me.

Until I can basically use this as a replacement for a lot of what I would need to pull my phone out for, I will not consider the Xiaomi Smart Band 8 Pro a smartwatch, more just a fancy fitness tracker. And while that is what it is, it still would be nice if it was a budget smartwatch instead of a high end fitness tracker.

Apart from these, there are also a few more hands-off features, including, but not limited to, remotely completing tasks you have saved in your notes, viewing calendar events, checking the weather, timers, alarms, and even controlling the camera app.

UI

The UI can be described as modern. It's similar to Xiaomi's HyperOS in many ways, and I have also felt an almost Apple-like design language, though I might also just be too critical. The UI is, as I mentioned before, well scaled, and overall I like it a lot. A lot of the icons are taken right from HyperOS/MIUI, and that's a good thing. The font is good, not too big, not too small, and all elements in the design just feel... right. It's hard to describe it so I'll just include a few images below for you to see.

Watchfaces are a bit of a weird one for me. With such a big screen, you could have so much info. And yet there are very few watch faces that actually convey a lot of said information. Which is why I settled for a nice, classical watch style. My friends, upon being asked to describe it, called it classy. Not sure if that's good or bad, but I like it. But I do genuinely advise getting a custom watchface, there's TONS of them in the Mi Fitness app and I could easily find a nice one if I wanted to. Anything from modern, to abstract, to classical, to even those digital watch styles. It's amazing how many options you have. All for free.

Extra Features

This will be everything that should be mentioned but has no definitive "home", of sorts.

Up first, the pin system. I honestly don't see much of a point in it unless you regularly lose your stuff because it just works to make your life a little more annoying. As long as the band is on your hand, it's perfectly fine. But if you, say, take a shower and want to clean the band, you will have to enter the pin. Of course, it's just a second or two of your time, but it's still a little annoying. But on the plus side, it actually features a full size numpad, in an actual 3x3+1 grid (1-9 in the 3x3 and 0 in the middle below the grid). This is a great upgrade from my previous Mi Band 6's terrible pin system, which had the numbers arranged in a 2x5 grid (2 columns, 5 rows), and had them numbered in a weird way, so putting in a pin was a pain. At least here it's similar to what I would experience on my phone.

There's a few more features in the software that deserve an honorable mention. First, you can view history of your workouts in the smartband. Second, you can see a calendar and your events (If you have any selected in the Xiaomi Calendar app, but unfortunately it doesn't support external apps like Outlook), but it starts on a Sunday, which is the dumbest idea humanity has had. Third, you can see the weather for the next five days (Including today), shows sunset and sunrise timers, AQI, wind, and so on.

There is also a breathing exercises mode. It's basically what the name implies. Breathing exercises. You get a vibration on when to breathe in or out, and it basically just repeats a loop of around 4 seconds to breathe in, 4 out. Quite handy if you need to relax before a test and want to do it without a lot of thought on your part.

Lastly, there is the Pomodoro timer. It's called Focus, but it's basically that principle. How it works is 25 minutes of pure focus, followed by a 5 minute break, folllowed by another 25 minutes of focus, and a 5 minute break, and afer 4 of these 25-5 runs, you get a 15-20 minute break. Quite a useful feature if you ask me, but I never study as it just makes me miserable, so I never really use it (Don't tell my parents or my school that!).

Summary

And that is the review! Way too big, I know, but I had a lot to say. This will most likely be the final review for the Band 8 Pro and from here on out I might just edit the review to change some details here and there or leave a quick correction in there.

But to summarize this massive review: I love this watch. I love how it feels, I love how it looks, I love what it can do. And while I do miss features such as NFC or accepting calls from it, it's still an awesome device and well worth the relatively low price tag.