It means swiping through menus and viewing graphics and stats is much smoother - and much more in line with what you would see from a smartwatch with a much loftier price tag. Features, OS and ecosystem

Band 8 - Xiaomi UK Xiaomi Smart Band 8 - Xiaomi UK

Notifications may be a little cramped on that 1.64-inch display, and you still don’t have the ability to really do anything with them other than view, but they are at least customizable through the Mi Fitness app and come through reliably. Xiaomi’s proprietary OS is also very zippy - a feeling that's is aided by that bump-up in refresh rate we referenced earlier. As shown in our example above, all the data seems within a healthy range of the wrist-based Running Dynamics info available from our Garmin Epix Pro (Gen 2), which, considering the incredible price difference, is impressive stuff.Xiaomi also continues to mimic plenty of the more advanced insights you’ll find on Apple and Garmin devices - such as training load, recovery time, and VO2 max - but none of these are really anything close to being useful. SpO2 readings never dipped below what we would expect to see from our blood oxygen data on other devices - between 95-99% - and resting heart rate data was similar. Gone is the long-standing unibody design of older Mi Bands/Smart Bands, and in its place are now the more typical slot connections on each end.

Band 8 review - Wareable Xiaomi Smart Band 8 review - Wareable

For those planning to use the device in Pebble Mode, we should also note that our tests found that you’ll only lose around 5% of battery per hour of running. In its condition out of the box, with most of those power-intensive features turned off, as we mentioned above, the battery drain is very minimal. Typically, we saw it lose around 5-7% per day, which roughly equates to Xiaomi’s estimate of 16 days. Like with some health features, the Smart Band 8’s more advanced sleep monitoring is turned off by default, which means you’ll initially only be given very basic data. The omission of GPS continues to be a bit of a killer, and means you’ll have to take your phone with you if you want any kind of reliable distance data. And even then, we’ve found this to be pretty poor - distances are often underreported and location trails in the app are essentially non-existent.There are thankfully some insights that are a bit more useful, though, and they generally come from when the device is instead attached to your running shoe. Pebble Mode

Band 8 Active - Xiaomi UK Xiaomi Smart Band 8 Active - Xiaomi UK

Steps are sometimes massively underreported compared to our other test devices - the Garmin Epix Pro (Gen 2) and Oura Gen 3 - while calorie burn estimates are also very unpredictable.

Interestingly, the Mi Fitness app will still point out your lowest HR from a particular 24-hour period, as shown above, and this was always very in tune with our Oura and Garmin. This splits your night’s sleep into either light or deep sleep, though this expands to include REM sleep and heart rate monitoring (leading to more accurate sleep stage information) after you enable the setting. And the results are surprisingly pretty good. The big downside here is that you’ll still need to set up a workout from your phone and take it with you on your run, but the data does seem to have some value.

Band 8 hands-on: Comprehensive fitness tracking on a budget Xiaomi Smart Band 8 hands-on: Comprehensive fitness tracking on a

An hour-long, aerobic run will see the Smart Band 8 advise taking the next 63 hours off to recover, meanwhile, and tag the workout as mostly anaerobic despite an average HR reading of 153. Some, like Garmin and Oura, simply take your lowest heart rate reading from sleep, while others, like Xiaomi and Apple, instead look for your lowest reading when you’re in an awake and inactive state. With a simple switch in the app (and the help of an attachment sold separately), you can transform the Smart Band 8 from a wrist companion into a bonafide running pod. However, anybody looking to get anywhere close to the most out of the Smart Band 8 will want at least a few of these features enabled, and that’s naturally where things begin to decline. This isn’t necessarily a negative, though. You can’t have it all at this price point, after all, and the few smarts present here actually work very well.

While we’ve seen previous Smart Band devices barely change from their predecessors, the Smart Band 8 offers some genuine reasons to get excited. On our test runs, we’ve found that the heart rate readings don’t react too well to fluctuations in real-time - even when the pace is relatively steady. The positive here for the Smart Band 8 is that we didn’t encounter any glaringly incorrect data, in which the heart rate readings never got going or spiked way too high, as is sometimes the case with cheaper devices. As shown above, all three devices registered a maximum reading of around 170 BPM on one test run, while the average reading was 4BPM higher than Garmin and 8BPM higher than Whoop - both much more in line with our effort. For example, we’ve run 30 miles in a week with the Smart Band 8, alongside two gym sessions and five hour-long walks, yet our training load is still considered ‘Low’.