Playing with the Xiaomi Band 7
I have had the Xiaomi Band 7 for a while but I didn’t wear it properly until the start of the new year. As a silly concept I thought that I would try to wear it for the entire year and so far I have kept to that resolution. Sometimes it’s worth trying the cheapest device that you can find to see how it differs from the flagships by Suunto, Garmin and Apple.
PAI
The first thing that I enjoy is that it has the PAI indicator. The Personal Activity Index. The idea is that you should reach 100 points per week. If you go for a run you can get 45 points within an hour or so. If you walk for one and a half hours you may get 18 points or more. It’s just to indicate whether you have exercised enough, without putting pressure on high energy sports like cycling, running and others.
Training Load
It also gives you an indication of training load. The four categories are low, optimal, high, and very high. Despite just walking for the last seven days the indicator is at a high value for me, with a training load of 193 over the last seven days.
Sleep Tracking
Recently I have found sleep trackers less reliable than I used to. The main reason is that I let various watches and fitness trackers guess when I am sleeping, rather than telling me. If I get up in the night then it discards the first stage of sleep and just tracks from the moment I went back to sleep. I used to track sleep nightly, but with time I lost interest. When you have tracked at least a thousand nights the results are less captivating. I also started to worry about how quickly it was affecting mobile phone battery longevity.
Seven Day Battery
Whilst on the topic of longevity, one of the key advantages of the Activity Band 7 is that the battery lasts for seven days or more, between charges. You place it on your wrist and forget it for seven days. Apple Watches prove to be especially frustrating because you have to charge them every 18 hours and the charge time can be from two and a half to three and a half hours long. It tends to need to charge just as I want to walk, rather than at a reasonable time. With the Band 7 this isn’t an issue.
And Finally
I like the simplicity of the device. Tracking walks, runs and more is easy. It uses the phone for GPS tracking so this enables the device itself just to count steps and measure heart rate. Some people might want more but if you always walk, run, and more, with your phone, then this is a great device. It’s light and small on the wrist. It has a wealth of displays to chose from. I chose a mountain landscape, with the digital time. For 40-50 CHF this could be a good device for children and non geeks, as long as the parents and teachers tolerate children listening whilst fiddling, rather than fighting to stay awake in class.