Smartwatches are nice-to-have accessories that give you notifications on your wrist, but they also deliver some crucial functions. For example, fitness and wellness buffs would love their health and fitness tracking functions, while they also help you find your phone with device-tracking abilities and alerts.

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However, devices like the Apple Watch Series 10 and Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra are expensive, with prices starting at over $400. Furthermore, these often require a battery charge once daily, with the more expensive options lasting up to just two days. This lack of battery life and daily recharging is one of the reasons why I’m not a fan of smartwatches. After all, for a device that supposedly tracks my body every hour of the day, I have to take it off at least an hour or two to juice it up.

But if you don’t need fancy features like ECG and blood pressure monitoring, then you’ll likely prefer a decent fitness tracker like the Xiaomi Smart Band 9. This device will give you most of what you need, like tracking over 150 sports and fitness activities, heart rate and SpO2 monitoring, and even sleep tracking, but at a fraction of the price. 

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And, as a bonus, you don’t need to charge daily just to ensure that it doesn’t run out of power in the middle of your day. So, let’s check out the Smart Band 9 that Xiaomi deliver to us for our review and see how this could be your next fitness band.

The Xiaomi Smart Band 9 is a tenth-generation fitness tracker from Xiaomi, and you can see how the company has refined it through the years. This small fitness tracker weighs 15.85 grams (or around half an ounce) and offers a 1.62-inch AMOLED display with a 490 x 192 resolution. This, combined with its maximum brightness of 1200 nits, makes it easy to see and use, even under the brightest of conditions.

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Because of its small size and light weight, you could barely feel the fitness tracker even when you’re wearing it. You could also easily change the watch face so it could match your style, and there’s a good number of designs to choose from. However, if you’ve already owned a smartwatch before, like the Samsung Galaxy Watch 7, you might find the choices limiting as there’s no third-party watch face store.

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The Xiaomi Smart Band 9 comes in five color options — Midnight Black, Arctic Blue, Mystic Rose, Glacier Silver, and Titan Gray. You also get a comfortable TPU band which matches the color option that you choose right in the box. Nevertheless, if you don’t like the look of a TPU band on your wrist, you could find several other accessories — both from Xiaomi and from third-party sources — that will let you customize it to your taste.

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Xiaomi offers several official straps on its website, including a Cuban chain strap, metal straps, leather straps, and even a braided strap. You could also get a running clip that allows you to attach the fitness tracker to your shoe if you want more accurate data recording.

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If you want to use a formal watch but still want to track your health and fitness, Xiaomi also offers a unique pendant that turns the Smart Band 9 into an elegant necklace. And because you can customize the watch’s face, you can wear it with confidence, and it would fit right in with your chosen fashion.

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Aside from what Xiaomi offers, there’s also a healthy third-party marketplace for Smart Band 9 accessories on Amazon. You can find everything from soft silicone straps that come in various colors, elegant metal chain straps, rugged nylon straps, and leather straps of all shapes and sizes.

I’ve been wearing the Xiaomi Smart Band 9 continuously for over a week, only removing it when I’m taking a shower, and I didn’t need to charge it even once. I finally decided to top-up the battery after 10 days so that it would have a full battery when I photographed it, and it was still at more than 35%. That’s even if I turned on some battery-intensive features, like continuous heart rate monitoring, advanced sleep monitoring, and all-day blood oxygen and stress tracking.

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It also took me less than an hour to recharge it full battery. This means I could recharge the Xiaomi Smart Band 9 every time I’m taking a bath and never have to worry about running on empty, even if I take a long-haul flight and then take another long drive. This is totally different from my Samsung Galaxy Watch 4, which needs to be recharged daily. If I travel for about a day or two, I will find myself reaching for its charging cord that I always keep in my bag and using my power bank to recharge it.

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My only problem with this fitness tracker is that it uses a USB-A charging cable. This is kind of inconvenient, given that most of my devices and charging adapters mostly use USB-C. And when I looked for a replacement charging cord, neither Xiaomi nor other third-party sellers offer a USB-C charging variant. It’s a good thing that most of my charging adapters have at least one USB-A port, otherwise, I’d need to buy a USB-C to USB-A adapter just so I could recharge it.

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One of the reasons that you’d get a fitness tracker or smartwatch is if you want to track your everyday health. And while it may miss out on some advanced features, you’d still get the basics that most people would find useful. The Xiaomi Smart Band 9 has heart rate tracking, sleep tracking, blood oxygen tracking, and stress monitoring.

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It also has a “Standing” feature, which reminds you to stand up when it detects you’ve been sitting down for so long. This is perfect for those with standing desks, so you can simply bring your desk up to standing height and continue working when it gives you an alarm.

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In general, I find these tracking features accurate, and the data that I get on Mi Fitness, the companion app of the Xiaomi Smart Band 9, is no different from what my Samsung Galaxy Watch delivers. Aside from that, I love how the sleep tracker counts my sleeping score even if I have a weird sleep schedule. You see, I often work through the night and sleep during the day, and my Samsung smartwatch would often mark my daytime sleeping habit as a “nap.” On the other hand, the Xiaomi fitness tracker recognizes that even through I sleep when the sun is out, it knows that it’s my “nighttime sleep” and not just a nap.

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The Xiaomi Smart Band 9 is also great at tracking fitness, and it can track more than 150 different exercise and fitness activities. The main workout app on the fitness tracker shows eight activities on its main screen: walking, outdoor running, freestyle exercise, hiking, outdoor cycling, treadmill, jump rope, and pool activities.

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However, if you tap more, you’ll find several more activities broken down into different categories. These include water sports, outdoor sports, training, dance, combat training, ball sports, winter sports, recreational activities, card and board games, and others.

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Note that since the Smart Band 9 is just a fitness tracker, it doesn’t have GPS on it, so you’d still want to have your phone on you if you want to record your progress on a map. But if you just need to see your speed, distance taken, number of steps, and other information, you could just wear the fitness tracker and leave everything behind. Then, when you finish your activity or workout, you can then sync the tracker to your phone so that you’ll have a record on the Mi Fitness app.

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If you only need basic functions like a step counter and heart rate tracker, then a smartwatch might be too much for what you need. So, instead of spending hundreds of dollars on a device that you need to charge daily, you could save money and still get the information you need with the Xiaomi Smart Band 9.

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Although it may look and feel simple, a little bit of customization can make it go a long way towards looking stylish and sophisticated. And because this fitness tracker is just $60 in the Xiaomi store on Amazon (with its price on sale for $54.70 at the time of writing), you’d have a lot of room to purchase several accessories, allowing you to easily match it your mood and personality.

I’ve been using one iteration or another of the Xiaomi Smart Band since 2019, and I’ve seen how it has gone a long way to deliver all the features it has today at a fraction of the price of competing smartwatches. So, if you ask me if the Xiaomi Smart Band 9 is worth getting, my answer would be a resounding yes.

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