Xiaomi’s Smart Band lineup is among the most popular smart wearables on the market. And yet, even in its ninth generation, it manages to add important upgrades to stay relevant.
This is the Pro model (we reviewed the regular a few months ago) and it adds a bigger display, nicer build, and a GPS tracker for runners.
Version nine brings an 18% bigger battery than its predecessor, bumping the expected standby from two weeks to 21 days. The screen has kept its size and resolution, but it’s now twice as bright as the older model. Xiaomi also added a linear vibration motor for more pleasant haptics.
Xiaomi sells the Smart Band 9 Pro for €80 (exactly twice as expensive as the regular model), and it ships with a proprietary two-pin magnetic charger, and a silicone band.
You can buy several official accessories like this €15 leather band.
The leather band is a step up in design to the silicone one. The texture is nice and supple. However, this reviewer finds the silicone band a more appropriate choice for a fitness accessory like the Smart Band 9 Pro, and it sits more securely during a workout.
The leather band
It adds lugs to the Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Pro, which can be used to attach other official Xiaomi bands.
Design and build quality
On the surface, the design of the Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Pro is mostly the same as its predecessor. Upfront is the 1.74-inch 336x480px AMOLED display that is the centerpiece of the entire device. Because there are no physical buttons on the Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Pro, you’d use the display to control everything.
This model introduced a 2.5D curve on all four sides of the front glass. It makes the band feel nicer to control because your finger glides off the edge of the screen, and it looks better because of the light that gently curves at the edges of the glass.
The bigger upgrade comes by way of the peak of 1,200 nits of brightness. Up from 600 nits, means the display will remain visible even under strong sunlight.
The lack of a home button leaves us with mixed feelings. Yes, the device looks sleeker and more minimalist. On the other hand, it’s great to have physical control to rely on when you’re working out, have sweaty fingers, or are doing something outside in the rain.
Any smartwatch or smart band is only as good as its selection of watch faces. Xiaomi has a lot of really high-quality choices for the Smart Band 9 Pro. There are nine preloaded faces, each with its own custom always-on variant.
You can download hundreds of additional faces from Xiaomi’s Mi Fitness app.
The display and its AOD variant
Round back, the Smart Band 9 Pro features an optical heart rate sensor and pulse oximeter. Combined, they continuously measure heart rate and blood oxygen, and Xiaomi says the algorithm behind the sensors has improved by 15% over the previous gen.
Software, health and fitness tracking
The Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Pro runs on its proprietary OS. The main screen is your watch face. A swipe to the right takes you to your quick toggles – Do Not Disturb, Alarms, Raise to wake, Screen Flash, Find your phone, Settings, Power saver mode, and Screen on for 5 minutes.
A swipe up from the main watch face will show the grid of apps, which you can change to be a list. A swipe down on the watch face shows the notifications, and a swipe to the left moves through your different widgets – Weather and fitness, health, music, etc. You can rearrange these on the band itself or through the app.
The health and fitness tracking credentials are excellent on the Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Pro. You get continuous heart rate and blood oxygen tracking, and the band can measure your stress levels based on those readings.
If you like, you can enable the Vitality score, which takes all of your data into consideration to give you an overall score and pointers on how to improve it. The band also supports women’s health management for cycle recording and prediction and guided breathing exercises.
Sleep tracking is good but not great. The band will automatically start sleep tracking when you go to bed – no need to enter any special modes, which is convenient. You get a breakdown of your total sleep in light, REM (rapid eye movement, aka your dreaming sleep), and deep sleep. If you’ve been awake, you’ll get a reading of how long as well.
However, the Smart Band 9 Pro doesn’t give you a reading of your sleep cycle count, or your movement, and it lacks skin temperature data – things more advanced wearables provide. The band rarely recorded this reviewer’s waking times, which my other tracker picked up without fault.
Then there’s the deep sleep reading, which is the downfall of most basic trackers. Xiaomi’s tracker is overly generous with its deep sleep reading. One night, it showed 2 hours of deep sleep compared to 40 minutes from the Galaxy Watch6 Classic and 1 hour and 40 minutes for the Huawei Watch Fit 2 (another deep sleep culprit).
One annoyance with the Xiaomi is that you can’t see your total deep sleep on the band when you wake up – the full breakdown is available on your phone.
Sleep tracking
I can’t fault the heart rate reading, accelerometer data, or GPS readings. The band was very quick to lock onto the GPS signal before my run.
Running with the Smart Band 9 Pro
I did a few runs wearing the Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Pro, the Huawei Watch Fit 2, and the Samsung Galaxy Watch6 Classic to compare data. I’ll lay out the numbers so you can judge for yourselves. I measured my run on a few different GPS mapping sites and the total length was an average of 4.27km to 4.36km – meaning the Xiaomi shows around 150m to 220m of deviation, which isn’t all that bad. The Samsung watch was worse, while Huawei’s was the closest.
Distance
Pace
Average heart rate
VO2 Max
Samsung Galaxy Watch6 Classic
3.96 km
5’50” km
166 bpm
40.7
Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Pro
4.12 km
5’39” km
156 bpm
37
Huawei Watch Fit 2
4.16 km
5’36” km
169 bpm
45
Distance
Pace
Average heart rate
VO2 Max
Samsung Galaxy Watch6 Classic
4.06 km
5’35” km
167 bpm
41.2
Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Pro
4.14 km
5’31” km
159 bpm
38
Huawei Watch Fit 2
4.23 km
5’24” km
145 bpm
46
At the end of the day, tracking your health or fitness will rely more on the consistency of your data rather than its complete accuracy – meaning if you use one wearable for a long time and judge the change in data, you can get a good idea of where you’re at in terms of health and fitness.
Battery life
The bigger battery of the Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Pro truly delivered. With light use – raise to wake, AOD off, notifications enabled, three workouts per week, no sleep tracking – the band was able to hang on for an incredible 14 days of use.
When I enabled the Always-on display and added daily sleep tracking, the band got down to 7 days of use (it needed a charge on the 7th day).
Charging the band back up took an hour and 26 minutes.
Conclusion
The Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Pro is a great smart wearable for a reasonable price it arrived on the global stage just in time for the holidays. The bigger battery and the curvier, brighter screen make this a solid update over the Smart Band 8 Pro – and make for a solid smart wearable.
If you need an all-around good fitness and health tracker that can deliver notifications and last for days at a time, there’s really nothing the Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Pro can’t do. Xiaomi’s wearable is hard to beat – you’d need to look to Huawei’s Watch Fit series to get a similar package for a similar price.
Pros
Well-made and sleek with 2.5D screen curve
Responsive UI, pretty watch faces
Display is bright and easy to read under any light
Good health and fitness tracking suite
Superb battery life
Affordable
Cons
No home button is a tradeoff
Overly-optimistic deep sleep reading
You can’t reply to notifications
You can buy the Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Pro from Amazon Germany here.
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