Xiaomi Smart Band 7 Pro

We tested the Xiaomi Smart Band 7 Pro over a couple of weeks, wearing it continuously to track our activity levels, sleep and other health metrics. We also completed a variety of workouts and activities, including walking, yoga, strength training and cardio exercise, to see how well this fitness tracker monitored our heart rate.  

To try to gauge the accuracy of this device, we wore a Garmin Vivosmart 5 fitness tracker alongside it. This provided a reference point for metrics such as step counts, heart-rate tracking and sleep.  

Notifications were turned on, so the Band 7 Pro alerted us to any incoming texts, calls and other apps. And finally, we used the Mi Fitness app to see how well the data was synchronised, how clearly it was presented, whether there was any other support to help explain what the data meant, and how we might improve our numbers.

It was easy to set up the Xiaomi Smart Band 7 Pro. You’ll need to plug the device into the charger to turn it on for the first time. After this, you can either download the Mi Fitness app from the relevant app store (iOS | Android) or scan the QR code that’s displayed on the watch. 

After installing the app, you’ll need to create an account, adding information such as your age, height and weight. Once this is complete, connect the device via Bluetooth, and complete the step-by-step process. It’s all very straightforward. 

We did need to complete a software update on the unit we were testing. This took around 25 minutes to download, and a further 10 minutes to install. But overall, it’s pretty painless.

As we mentioned before, the design of the Xiaomi Smart Band 7 Pro blurs the lines between smartwatches and fitness trackers. It doesn’t have the lozenge style design of the standard Band 7 and has a slightly squarer shape reminiscent of some smartwatches.  

This does make the Band 7 Pro feel a bit bigger than a traditional fitness tracker, although it is still light on the wrist and comfortable to wear. The removable silicon strap uses a traditional watch buckle that is easy to put on single-handed, and we didn’t experience any irritation while we wore it.  

The 1.64-inch (41.7mm) AMOLED display is bright and easy to read. Xiaomi claims that this device has a 50% more visible screen than the standard Xiaomi Smart Band 7. It is notably larger, and for many this may be desirable. But it is bigger on the wrist as a result, so if you’re looking for something delicate, this may not suit.

Unlike the standard Band 7, the Band 7 Pro also includes an ambient light sensor, which means it will automatically adjust the brightness to suit the conditions. This makes life much easier when going out in bright sunshine and can also help to preserve battery life. 

There are over 150 different watch faces available to download and install on the watch, catering to most tastes. And while we tested a black version, other colours are available if you want something a little more vibrant.  

In terms of durability, the display is made from tempered glass with an anti-fingerprint coating. The body is plastic, but still feels reasonably solid. We’d expect it to withstand general everyday wear, but wouldn’t recommend it for outdoor pursuits that may require something more rugged.  

It’s also water-resistant. Xiaomi suggests that this means it’s fine for shallow-water swimming, for example in a pool. But they advise against wearing it in a hot shower, or for diving, or any high-impact water sports. 

The Xiaomi Smart Band 7 Pro is slightly paradoxical: it has some features that are only available in premium fitness trackers, such as built-in GPS, but it also lacks some features that we’ve seen in cheaper devices. 

It covers all the basics – step counting, heart-rate and exercise tracking, and blood oxygen, sleep and stress monitoring. It will also provide calorie-burn estimates, although this isn’t perfect, as we’ll explain later. In addition to these features, there is a breathing exercise tool, which you can receive prompts to use when your stress levels get too high.  

Xiaomi claims that the Band 7 Pro can track over 150 workouts, ranging from the obvious – such as running, walking and cycling – to the more niche, such as tug of war, kite flying, and parkour. Quite how the device can differentiate between all of these is unclear. 

Finally, there are plenty of smartwatch features, including a torch, on-wrist camera control for your phone’s camera, Alexa voice assistant, event reminders, timers, a stopwatch, weather reports and music controls. Xiaomi has designed this watch to cover a lot of functions that are more commonly found in a smartwatch, with the aim of making this more than just a fitness tracker. 

This is a solid set of features, and we’re particularly pleased to see built-in GPS, which allows you to track outdoor activities without needing to take your phone with you. But we’re slightly puzzled by the absence of other features.  

Compared with the standard Xiaomi Smart Band 7, the Band 7 Pro doesn’t offer VO2 Max measurements (this can be used to estimate your cardiovascular fitness). Nor does it offer a training load score, or a personal activity intelligence (PAI) score. These two features are designed to help ensure you are training at the right intensity to improve your fitness, without overdoing it.  

It seems a little odd that the cheaper device offers insights that are absent on the more expensive one. If we compare it with fitness trackers from Fitbit or Garmin, for example, it has far fewer of the added metrics that make those devices so insightful.  

Overall, it’s not a terrible set of features, and it covers all the essentials. If you’re looking for some general insight into your activity levels, this device will do the job. It just seems strange that it includes a valuable feature like GPS, but then takes away other metrics that can be helpful to people who are trying to improve or maintain their fitness levels. 

Given the absence of some of those features that we highlighted earlier, it’s clear that the Xiaomi Smart Band 7 Pro isn’t going to give you as many insights into your health and fitness as you may find from other fitness trackers or smartwatches. Realistically, this is a device that’s designed to track all the basics, and encourage you to be more active, while also serving up a few smartwatch features. 

And in this aim, we felt the Band 7 Pro performed well in relation to heart-rate tracking, but was a little less consistent in other respects. 

In everyday tracking, step counts were consistently below the Garmin Vivosmart 5. And by quite some margin – the Band 7 Pro always counted fewer steps than the Garmin device, and the difference was between 20% and 50% each day. This is a significant margin, and we didn’t feel it was a true reflection of how many steps we were taking each day. 

It’s a similar tale with calorie estimates. The Band 7 Pro suffers from the same issue as the standard Band 7 and the Amazfit Band 7, as it only shows you a measure of the calories you’ve burned during activity. But we couldn’t see an overall tally of our daily calorie burn estimate.

In comparison, the likes of the Garmin Vivosmart 5 will tell you your active calorie burn, resting calorie burn, and total daily calorie burn. This lack of information is a problem because if you don’t know (even roughly) how many calories you’ve burned, it makes it difficult to decide how many calories you need to consume, depending on your goals. 

Exercise tracking is one area where we felt the Xiaomi Smart Band 7 Pro performed well, especially in terms of heart-rate tracking. Average heart rates during exercise were typically no more than one or two beats per minute different to the Garmin fitness tracker, and maximum heart rates were either the same, or one beat per minute different. This is extremely consistent.  

Calorie-burn estimates were less in agreement, with the Smart Band 7 Pro consistently calculating a lower calorie burn than the Vivosmart 5. Differences were variable, with some workouts within 10% of one another, while others had differences closer to 25%.

Interestingly, the “active” calorie counts of the two devices showed that the Band 7 Pro counted a higher calorie burn overall. But this information isn’t especially insightful unless you know your basal metabolic rate. Even with that information, we weren’t overly confident of the accuracy of these numbers. 

Built-in GPS is one of the features we were most pleased to see, as, in theory, this should make tracking walks, runs and other outdoor activities easier and more accurate. During testing, we found this to be consistently more accurate than the connected GPS found on the likes of the Fitbit Inspire 3 and Amazfit Band 7.

Compared with the Vivosmart 5 (which also uses connected GPS but proved accurate in testing), the Band 7 Pro was generally 100 metres (109 yards) or so short of the distance the Garmin said we’d covered on our usual 5.6km (3.48 miles) route. In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t much of a discrepancy and the Band 7 Pro is likely to be the more accurate of the two. 

We’ll add our usual disclaimer that sleep tracking on fitness trackers and smartwatches does have questionable accuracy. And there was little consensus between the two devices we were using.  

Much like the Xiaomi Smart Band 7, the Band 7 Pro only shows how much deep sleep and light sleep you’ve had but doesn’t try to estimate your REM sleep. It also shows how many times you woke up, but not how long you were awake for. And rather than give you a sleep score, you’ll simply get a description of your sleep ranging from “not bad” to “excellent”. 

In terms of sleep duration, there was little consistency between the two devices. Some nights, the Vivosmart 5 measured longer sleep, and on other nights it was the Band 7 Pro that suggested we’d slept longest. There was significant disagreement between the two devices in terms of the amount of deep sleep and light sleep we had, sometimes differing by nearly two hours. There were certainly occasions where we were awake but lying still, and the device classed this as sleep. 

We can’t say with any confidence how correct the sleep tracking is on the Xiaomi Smart Band 7 Pro. It offers fewer insights than some rival devices (for example, with Fitbit Premium your Fitbit fitness tracker can even give you a “sleep animal” to describe the nature of your slumber). But this may suggest that Xiaomi isn’t trying to make claims that it can’t back up. 

The Band 7 Pro uses the Mi fitness app to display all your data and any accompanying insights. It’s not a terrible app, but it is far more basic than the best available. 

For some people, that simplicity may be a boon, as the app is easy to navigate and understand. The landing page provides a snapshot of the metrics the fitness tracker is watching, with an overview of your step count, active calories burned and hours you’ve spent standing displayed at the top. Below this are tiles for highlighting any workouts you’ve completed, your sleep, heart rate, step count, calories and other metrics. 

You can tap on any of these tiles to access a slightly more in-depth view of each metric, and some supporting information to explain what the data means. Some metrics offer more insight than others, but you will, at the very least, get an explanation of what they are and how they’re measured. 

The app synced quickly with the fitness tracker, and there were no problems connecting to it. It’s a competent app that presents you with all the essential information you’ll need to monitor your data. But there are better apps that offer more insights and support, and a better overall experience. 

Xiaomi claims that the Smart Band 7 Pro will give you around 12 days of battery life based on “typical” usage, or six days battery based on “heavy usage”. These are respectable numbers that outperform devices from Fitbit and Garmin, but still aren’t quite as good as some cheaper products we’ve tested. 

Turning on all the features, such as constant heart rate and blood oxygen monitoring, meant that our device went from fully charged to flat in six days. A roughly 15% decline each day is in-line with Xiaomi’s claims. A one-hour walk with GPS active reduced the battery by around 1%, and a 30-minute workout by around 3%. 

Charging was swift. Using the proprietary charger, we went from 0% to 68% in half an hour, and the device was fully charged within 60 minutes. If you ever needed to quickly charge this fitness tracker to make it through another day, a quick charge while you’re showering would almost certainly be enough.

At £84.99, the Xiaomi Smart Band 7 Pro is the same price as the Fitbit Inspire 3, and costs about £30 more than the standard Xiaomi Smart Band 7. At full price, you’re getting a lovely screen and built-in GPS, for a relatively low price. For reference, the Fitbit Charge 5 has an RRP of £129.99, although is sometimes available on offer for £84.9.  

All these devices routinely see discounts, so you can buy this tracker for as little as £64.99. And at this price, it suddenly looks like very good value for what’s on offer. It is, though, slightly hampered by the lack of other health and fitness features that are available on many comparable devices, and its performance isn’t as good as the best fitness trackers.  

A lot will come down to what you consider most important in your fitness tracker. If you mainly do indoor exercise, the ambient light sensor and built-in GPS probably won’t mean a great deal to you. But, if you like to track outdoor sports and activities, these features are valuable, and at this price make for a compelling package. 

Of course, the Xiaomi Smart Band 7 Pro isn’t the only fitness tracker out there. Here are a few alternatives we feel may be worth considering: 

The Fitbit Inspire 3 is the closest device in price to the Smart Band 7 Pro, with an RRP of £84.99. It’s a much smaller tracker, with many of the same health and fitness monitoring features, plus a few that the Xiaomi device lacks, such as Cardio Fitness Score and deeper sleep insights. 

The Fitbit app is also far more polished than the Mi Fitness app and offers greater insight and support than the Xiaomi app. There is a lot of supporting content available via Fitbit Premium for £7.99 a month, including workouts and recipes.  

It lacks built-in GPS, and in testing it isn’t as accurate as the best trackers in this market. But for many people, it will do everything they need.  

A slightly more expensive device with an RRP of £129.99, the Vivosmart 5 is one of the most accurate budget fitness trackers we’ve tested. It offers plenty of health and fitness tracking features, and the Garmin Connect app is one of the most detailed around. If you really like diving into the data side of things, this app will suit you down to the ground. 

The device itself has a small monochrome screen, which is a little disappointing for the price, and the overall design is functional rather than stylish. But if you’re looking for maximum insights into your health and fitness, this is an excellent choice.  

The cheapest alternative on this list, the Honor Band 7 has an RRP of £49.99 and is often available for under £40 on promotion. In return, you get a device that has all the essential health and fitness tracking features, a few smartwatch features, and respectable accuracy. You also get superb battery performance and a bright, clear display. 

The app isn’t as polished as those from Fitbit and Garmin, and in our review we didn’t feel it was the most intuitive to use. But for the price, this is well worth considering. 

On paper, the Xiaomi Smart Band 7 Pro is a very enticing package. One of very few fitness trackers to offer built-in GPS, it also has an excellent display, decent battery life and tracks all the essential health and fitness metrics we’d expect to see. And all of this at a competitive price. 

The standard Xiaomi Smart Band 7 is an already very good fitness tracker, and Xiaomi has added a few extra features here – most notably a smartwatch design and built-in GPS. The question is, do those extra features make this worth buying instead? 

If you’re someone who values tracking outdoor exercise without using your phone, you may well lean towards this over the standard model. And indeed, it’s extremely rare to find built-in GPS in a budget fitness tracker (the more expensive Fitbit Charge 5 is one example).  

However, it isn’t simply a binary choice between two Xiaomi products, and there are a few reasons why you may choose not to go for this device. We were disappointed by the lack of insight and metrics on offer and were surprised that for a ‘Pro’ device, the features are still limited. It doesn’t compete well in this regard against the likes of Fitbit and Garmin – both companies offer devices with a wide range of added insights that make them more rounded products. The drawback is you’ll pay more for them. The Mi Fitness app isn’t especially polished, either. 

Overall, this is a good, but not perfect, device. It offers a few features that may make it more appealing than cheaper products, and those same features help it undercut more expensive rivals. There are undoubtedly better all-round fitness trackers available, but the price of this device means that it will be a very appealing choice for some, though not all, users.  

• Built-in GPs is a ‘must-have’ for you  
• You prefer the smartwatch-style design 
• You’re happy with the basics in terms of health and fitness tracking 

• You want additional insights and support 
• You’re looking for the most accurate tracking available 
• Total calorie-burn estimates are important to you