Mi Band 5 Smart Watch Guide

The Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 was released in mid-late 2020. It was out earlier in China where it was known as the Xiaomi Mi Band 5, and is near-identical to the Amazfit Band 5. Amazfit is another Xiaomi-owned brand.

Prices seem to vary week to week, but expect to pay under $40 in the US, or around £30 in the UK.

However, as long as you tend to run, ride or walk with your phone, the Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 will feel pretty similar in use. We’ll dig into the difference between the Xiaomi’s Connected GPS and Huawei’s “full” GPS in this review.

Its strap is not made of two pieces that lock into each side of the main watch body. It’s a single piece of rubbery silicone the watch bit slots into.

This simplifies its manufacture a bit, but with no major drawbacks. If the strap gets a bit grotty you can pop the Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 out and rinse the it under the tap. Not that you need to.

The Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 is water resistant to 5ATM, meaning you can wear it in the shower, bath or swimming pool with no worries.

Its screen covering is glass too, which should scratch less easily than plastic and helps ensure the sharpest screen image. Getting all of this for such little cash earns the Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 brownie points.

The Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5’s display is excellent at the price. It’s a 1.1-inch OLED screen of 296 x 124 pixels. And while it does not fill the entire front of the wearable, you can’t really tell because the perfect blacks of the OLED panel make its non-lit parts blend seamlessly with the surround.

It is also, notably, a larger display than the Honor Band 5’s, which is a 0.95-inch screen.

This screen is surprisingly sharp, has lovely bold colour comparable with a good phone, and top brightness is easily powerful enough to deal with bright days.

There’s one bad bit. The Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 does not have auto brightness. You have to change its level manually. This takes seven swipes and taps — I counted — from the watch face, which seems a bit much for something you’ll have to do regularly to get the perfect balance of brightness and battery life.

Still, this criticism applies to every band at the price.

That swipe-heavy style does not apply when you actually run with the Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5. Its display is very practical, laying out all your relevant stats in a scrolling display that only takes one swipe to jump through.

This is where the Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5’s larger-than-average screen comes in handy, allowing it to fit even more on-screen at once. It’s a totally different experience to the Fitbit Charge 4, which made me swipe away for an age just to see my heart rate.

Xiaomi also offers a good selection of what faces, to make the most of that great little OLED panel.

I’m quite impressed that not too many of these are effectively the same, which often happens in lower-cost trackers. Yoga, Elliptical and Indoor Cycling all just show your heart rate and an estimation of calories. But Rowing Machine counts your strokes, Jump Rope tallies your jumps, Treadmill shows your cadence and estimates distance, and Pool Swimming works out your laps.

The amount of substance here is impressive for an entry-level tracker. And the outdoors modes are all enriched by Connected GPS, which bridges the gap between the Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 5 and a much higher-end runner’s watch.