News, Smartwatch, Wearable

The Xiaomi Mi Watch Looks Like an Apple Watch Running on Wear OS

There are quite a number of smartwatches released under the Xiaomi ecosystem, but this is the Chinese company’s first smartwatch to bear the Mi branding. This is the Xiaomi Mi Watch, and it seems to take design cues from the Apple Watch quite a bit.

Aesthetic similarities aside, the Mi Watch is actually quite an interesting smartwatch. It comes with a bright and vibrant 1.78-inch 448 x 368 AMOLED display, so you’ll get deep blacks, punchy colours, and great viewing angles with this screen.

Build quality is also one of the Mi Watch’s strong suits. The back of the case is ceramic, and the casing itself is made out of aluminium alloy – stainless steel for the pricier Premium Edition. The glass protecting the display is also very interesting: the Standard Edition uses Corning Gorilla Glass 3, while the Premium Edition is equipped with more scratch-resistant sapphire glass.

Interestingly, the Mi Watch runs on Google’s Wear OS platform, but Xiaomi added its own customisation to the software. The result is a custom user interface dubbed MIUI For Watch, and right off the bat, it is pre-loaded with 40 popular apps for the Chinese market. These include TikTok, QQ Messenger, and QQ Music, to name a few.

Powering the Mi Watch is a Snapdragon Wear 3100 4G chipset, which uses four Cortex-A7 cores clocked at 1.2GHz. Thanks to this SoC, the Mi Watch comes with eSIM support, so it doesn’t need to be paired to a smartphone to access all of its functionalities.

Battery life should be great on the Mi Watch as well. It is packed with a 570mAh battery that promises up to 36 hours of use with 4G connectivity switched on. Chances are, you can extend the battery life even further if the watch is connected to a smartphone.

Rounding out the specifications of the Mi Watch include water resistance – you can use it while swimming – GPS support, NFC, a dedicated speaker, and a heart rate sensor.

Not surprisingly, the Xiaomi Mi Watch is priced very competitively. The Standard Edition goes for only 1,299 Chinese yuan (about RM765), while the Premium Edition with a stainless steel bracelet retails at 1,999 yuan (approximately RM1,180). At the moment, the Mi Watch is only available in China; it will go on sale in the country on 11 November.

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