Xiaomi Mi Watch has an always-on display and a battery life of 36 hours
Xiaomi’s Mi Watch was officially announced this week. The smartwatch has an always-on display and a claimed battery life of 36 hours. The watch will be available in China from November 11. It is still unknown whether the Mi Watch will be released in Europe.
The Mi Watch has a 1.78″ amoled screen with a resolution of, according to the product page, 448×368 pixels. The display has curved screen edges, but these are not touch sensitive. The screen is housed in a 44 millimeter rectangular case, with a ‘ crown” on the top right. The smartwatch from Xiaomi shows many similarities with the Apple Watch, which also has a rectangular case with a crown. Xiaomi is coming with two variants. The standard model has an aluminum housing and Gorilla Glass 3 from Corning. The more expensive Premium variant has a stainless steel case and sapphire glass screen.
The Mi Watch includes a Snapdragon Wear 3100 4G soc with four Cortex A7 cores clocked at 1.2GHz. The smartwatch has 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage capacity. The watch has a battery with a capacity of 570mAh, with which a battery life of 36 hours according to Xiaomi should be feasible, even when using the always-on display. The watch supports e-SIM, which means that the Mi Watch can also be used without a connected smartphone. The smartwatch also supports 4G connectivity, GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth and NFC for payments.
The Mi Watch runs on ‘Miui for Watch’, a version of Google’s Wear OS adapted by Xiaomi. With this, Xiaomi seems to be the first manufacturer to have developed its own skin for Wear OS. The operating system has a separate app store for developers. Currently there are ‘more than 40’ apps available for the Mi Watch, including TikTok, Nio and QQ Messenger. The watch also has fitness tracking functionality, including a heart rate monitor. The watch can also measure the amount of oxygen in a user’s blood.
The Mi Watch will be available in China from November 11. There is currently nothing known about a possible European release, but for now the watch seems to be mainly aimed at the Chinese market. The standard Mi Watch with aluminum housing will cost 1299 yuan, which translates to 167 euros. The more expensive stainless steel variant costs 1999 yuan, or 257 euros.