Redmi Watch Review: Worth your time?

The Redmi Watch comes at a time when smartwatches have become less about style and complimenting your outfits, and more about working as a fitness companion-meets-personal health monitor. To its credit, it performs well on both fronts, packing in some of the best features to demand it and doing so alongside looking good. That being said, the sub-5K smartwatch segment is currently filled with fitness watches of Amazfit, Realme and then some. So is the Redmi Watch a worthy new entry into this space or is it just another fish in this ocean of budget smartwatches? I think I have the answer after spending the last week with my review unit of Redmi Watch.

Redmi Watch Review: Build and Design

If I had a dollar for every time I saw a budget smartwatch trying to look like an Apple Watch, I’d have a lot of money, though maybe still not enough to buy an actual Apple Watch * sigh * . It does not even try to reduce that tendency. In fact, the marketing material makes it look even more like the Apple Watch than in real life.

It’s certainly not a bad-looking design, and Redmi has done well to offer some nice color options for both the central body and the straps. The central module is made of plastic, and is surrounded by high-quality silicone straps. These are not attached via standard quick release pins, so you may not be able to swap them with third party straps. To the right is the single silver button, which is very attractive and helps in UI navigation. More on that in a bit.

For some reason the build quality seems to be a lot better than all the other budget smartwatches I’ve tried recently. This may be partly due to the ivory color version I received. The off-white color certainly looks more expensive than this. It weighs about 35 grams and is extremely comfortable to wear, and even sleeps with it. The Watch also has a 5ATM rating, which means that it is safe to take it to the shower or any water body of your choice.

Redmi Watch Review: Display

Looking at this watch with the screen off, watching the 2.5D curved glass slowly merge into the side frame, I actually felt Redmi pulled a stunner of a design for this price. But this confusion quickly goes away when you turn on the screen and see chunky bezels around the 1.3-inch TFT LCD packing in 320 × 320 pixels. It’s not that this is the first budget smartwatch to come with a bezel, just that you should control your expectations, especially compared to official product images that can convince you.

The screen is as good as it gets in this segment, although I’m not really a fan of these LCD watches. Colors always appear slightly washed out, especially if you have used a wearable with an AMOLED display. The extreme brightness of 350nits makes it very bright indoors, and enough to be visible in direct sunlight. I liked that auto brightness was available, although I noticed that it was always slightly lower than the level I ideally wanted. You can also manually select from 6 pre-set brightness settings. I left it to Auto Brightness for my review.

I really liked the option to choose a screen time-out between 5 and 10 seconds. In addition, the option to schedule the ‘Rise to Wake’ feature is a nice addition. You can also cover the screen to turn it off immediately, but I think it needs a little better execution, as the watch just registers the covering act as a touch action.

Redmi Watch Review: UI and Usage Experience

Navigation here is done via swipe. Left or right swipe cycle through three tabs, namely your heart rate readings, weather details and activity summary. Swiping upwards from the home screen brings you to the Quick Settings tab and swiping downwards opens the notification tray. The touchscreen experience is good, with no noticeable stutter in navigation. However, the UI here is not an independently scrolling one. It scrolls from one full screen to another, if you know what I mean, you can’t stop the animation mid-scroll. If you don’t watch you can see my video review:

Anyhow, you can long press on the home screen to change the face of the watch, which you get a maximum of 5 to store on your watch at once. The side button acts as the home button in case it is away from the home screen, and otherwise opens the app drawer. Here you have 2 grids of 3 × 3 icons neatly laid out. There is no text to tell what is, however, so you may need some time to find out what each icon means. Most of them are quite self-explanatory to be honest, you get a workout menu, your heart rate, sleep data, daily stats and then some extra features like compass, air pressure gauge, and regular features like timers, stopwatches and alarms .

In the Settings menu, you can select the vibration intensity, set the DND schedule, and select heart rate monitoring interval, etc. Notification alerts here are very well baked, with custom icons for the app I use such as WhatsApp, Gmail, Outlook. You can expand notifications to get about 20 words or 2 lines of message on the watch. For longer content, you must return to the phone. There is no way to answer notifications, nor can you answer / receive calls through the clock.
What you can do is control your phone’s music player through the watch itself, and it works fine. But the interesting thing is that you cannot do it when you are exercising, because there is no way to quit without ending the workout screen. Which basically makes the functionality unusable. Picking up your phone to skip the track makes a smartwatch redundant when you’re doing a workout, don’t you think?

Redmi Watch Review: Fitness Tracking

The Redmi Watch comes with a common set of sensors, including a PPG heart rate sensor, three-axis acceleration sensor, geomagnetic sensor, barometer, gyroscope, and an ambient light sensor. Given the importance of blood oxygen measurement in today’s world, it misses a SpO2 sensor, which seems like a major lapse. To compensate for this, it comes with built-in GPS support, which you will not find in many watches of this price segment. This means that you can track outdoor runs etc. without having to carry your phone. You get 11 different modes for fitness tracking, again not the best, but should be enough for most. Phase tracking felt mostly accurate, even 24-hour heart rate monitoring was accurate to my understanding. The Redmi Watch can also do sleep tracking and it worked perfectly well. Although the clock does not recognize the afternoon nap for me.

With the added benefit of GPS, the overall fitness tracking experience is exactly what you’d expect on a watch at this price. However, the absence of a SpO2 monitor here can be a deal-breaker for some, given Xiaomi’s own Mi Band 5 offering it at a much cheaper price.

Redmi Watch Review: App Experience

Redmi Watch can connect to your phone on Bluetooth 5 using the Xiaomi Wear app (named “Xiaomi Wear Lite ‘on iOS). It’s a neat app, although I’m not sure that Xiaomi’ Mi Fit ‘Why did you move away from the app that previously worked with Mi Band. Anyway, I really liked the animated avatar you find here on the app, it’s not customizable but still adds a bit of personality to your data Also surprising that my Redmi Band data was already saved here in this app, which I used 6 months ago. It’s a neat addition, I don’t think I’ve tried other fitness apps. Is seen holding onto the data of your old devices.

The data is represented neatly through color graphs and charts, although I think Amazfit and Huawei bring a lot of insight from your sleep / fitness data, etc. You can also change some clock settings from the app, you can choose which notifications you want to see and install the new watch face, which gives you around 200 to choose from. Overall, the app is good but I think Xiaomi will definitely have to work on the analytics part to really stand out.

Redmi Watch Review: Battery and Charging

Redmi claims that the Redmi Watch can last up to 10 days on a single charge, which in my experience is a tall claim to match any LCD screen watch. I was using the Redmi Watch with a heart rate monitoring set, notifications on, and auto brightness enabled at 30-minute intervals, and it fell below 10% on the 5th day. This was accompanied by about 40 minutes of workout tracking per day. So expect it to last a full week, if your usage is mild. For the 10-day mark, you may just have to turn off the auto heart rate monitoring feature.

Charging is via USB-headed charging cradle, which is of a much better quality than any other smartwatch in this segment. It takes more than 1.5 hours for the clock to be fully charged at less than 10%. All in all, pretty standard experience for the price.

Redmi Watch Review: Price and Decision

Redmi Watch starts at Rs. 3,999. It is similar to Amazfit’s Bip U and is 1000 rupees cheaper than Realme Watch S. Amazfit Bip U gives you SpO2 monitoring and a very sophisticated app experience. However, it lacks the built-in GPS and definitely feels a bit cheaper compared to the quality of the Redmi Watch. The Realme Watch S features a circular face design, which can attract you more, plus it gives you SpO2 monitoring and slightly better battery life. It also doesn’t miss the built-in GPS, not to mention that it’s going to cost you more.

So the situation is like this, and keeping everything in mind, the Redmi Watch is definitely a good choice for the price. There is simply nothing here that makes it a truly unbelievable bargain or an unprecedented product. If you really need a built-in GPS, then this is the watch for you. However, if you are looking for a good fitness tracker on a budget, the Mi Band 5 or Honor Band 5 can serve you equally well, and also provide better battery life. But obviously when it comes to pure aesthetics those little curtains don’t really do much. If only there was a fitness band with a clock-like display, right? Well stay tuned