That often, however, xiaomi hopes to change that rhetoric with the watch s1 series which debuted in the global market a couple of months ago, and i have been using the s1 active variant for a little over two weeks now at 200 dollars. It goes against the likes of the amazfit gtr 3, the mobo tick watch etsy and huaweis watch gt3 tough, proud, i know so – has xiaomi finally struck goals with the watch s1 active or does it still have a long way to go in this space? Lets find out in this review Music. Okay, the first thing you need to know about this guy is that it is not that different from the regular xiaomi watch s1, which costs around 50 more for that premium, price youre, getting a more classic design with a stainless steel frame and sapphire glass on the Front, on the other hand, the watch s1 active comes in this sporty look composed of polycarbonate material all around, except for the metal. Bezel ive used smart watches of all prices from the absolute flagship ones to those that cost a fraction of the money, and the only thing that matters to me as far as the design and the quality is concerned is that a it should fit. My wrist and b, it should be comfortable to wear without causing any sort of skin irritation, and thankfully, this watch takes both those boxes with ease and its super lightweight too weirdly enough.
Xiaomi has used tpu straps on the space black and ocean blue color options, whereas the moon white variant enjoys a softer silicon strap instead. So if you dont like the feel of a tpu strap, you can easily swap it with any 22mm band. Since the company has gone with a universal design here, okay, in terms of durability, the watch s1 active is 580m water resistant. Although i feel like some sort of dust protection should have been on the cards as well. Anyway, you will find two buttons for navigation on the side. The home button on the top is non customizable and it can either take you to the home screen or launch the app menu. The one on the bottom can be configured to trigger different types of workouts or the workout menu in general, but thats about it up front. This watch has a large 1.43 inches amoled display. It is sharp, its vibrant and bright for comfortable visibility at all times. I also found the auto brightness feature to work perfectly here, which means whether i am out in the sun or going to bed at night. This screen seamlessly adapts to the surrounding lighting conditions. It supports always on display too, but i never really bothered to turn it on for power saving reasons. As for watch faces, xiaomi says you can choose from over 200 options here. Most of them look pretty well designed and informative to me, and i am especially fond of this one called json, which shows date time and different health metrics in json syntax for durability.
This display is layered with just a simple tempered glass on top, so i am somewhat worried about its long term durability and if youre, someone whos constantly on the move or a somewhat clumsy person in general, i strongly advise you to apply a screen protector here with That out of the way lets talk about its ui now the xiaomi watch s1 active runs on xiaomis proprietary, miui watch 1.0 and um. I am not sure if this is something they built from scratch or if its just a simple modification of the rtos that xiaomi has been using in its previous smartwatches, but if youre already familiar with xiaomis ui for smart purchase, this should feel right at home. But sadly, notifications are not actionable here and you cant even reply to messages with quick replies or something on top of this xiaomi has not bothered to format the text properly either. Since a single word breaks down into two lines, if it runs out of screen, space, support for nebali and hindi, unicode, fonts and emojis are also missing here. Nevertheless, this watch lets you make bluetooth phone calls and the call quality is pretty good as long as youre. In a fairly quiet environment, and although there is no dialer app here, you can directly make calls from the watch as long as theyre in the call history. But, more importantly, you can call your emergency contacts by clicking the exercise button on the bottom three times.
In a row, thats definitely something better to have and not need than to need and not have. As friends kafka said, it Music, okay, now its time to talk about the health and fitness tracking features as expected from a flagship smartwatch. It can keep track of. Basically, every health metric you could want. This includes everything from womens health, heart rate, monitoring, blood, oxygen saturation and stress monitoring that too, on a 24 hour basis, while most of them work completely fine. The sleep tracking, well um, im having a major deja vu, because my experience with the watch s1 active has been the exact same as the redmi watch 2 lite that i reviewed a while back first things. First, it completely fails to log my sleep time, whereas compared to the galaxy watch 4 classic it also over records things like my deep and rem, sleep duration, even the overnight spo2 measurement, is unreliable here. Hence xiaomis got to improve its sleep tracking algorithm by a lot and its not just us. Gsm marina has reported similar results as well as for fitness tracking. It supports a total of 117 sports board, out of which 19 of them are professional ones. So you can get deep and helpful insights on exercises like walking, running swimming and jump rope, and the remaining 98 sports modes are limited to just keeping track of your calories and heart rate levels. Only since all my workout includes is walking running and maybe cycling, sometimes the watch s1 active is more than enough for my fitness tracking needs, plus it can automatically detect and record walking and running exercises too.
But, unlike the galaxy watch for classic, you will have to manually end the workout here. On the other hand, i am really impressed with how fast this watch locks onto a gps signal, granted that the actual workout trail is not as precise as it could be. This is still quite amazing stuff. Similarly, like every other xiaomi smartwatch, the watch s1 active pairs with the me fitness app, which is available for both android and ios devices and in my usage i found this app to still have a few bugs and inconsistencies on two separate occasions. It over recorded my daily steps grossly over recorded. Might i add, as you can see, the app says that i somehow took over 150 000 steps on may 17. thats about three marathons worth of steps, if im not mistaken, and even when i manually synced all my health data before switching phones, i still lost about A weeks worth of exercise and sleep logs, other records, like heart rate, spo2 and stress levels, are here just fine, but i have no idea what happened to those two? Okay, keeping all this chaos aside, the galaxy watch s1 active battery is actually really incredible. Xiaomi says that you can expect up to 12 days of endurance under normal usage and in my usage pattern i managed to get six to seven days before requiring a fill up, but charging it is a little too slow. Since the watch takes two and a half hours to go from zero to hundred percent, so all in all the xiaomi watch s1 active has impressive hardware for the price.
No doubt about that, its a sporty look is attractive and comfortable. Its amoled display is no slouch and its battery endurance is some sort of best in business and for what its worth miui watch is pretty reliable too then, again, its littered with some minor and some major issues that may or may not be a deal breaker due For instance, i can easily live without nfc payment or summoning alexa, but its unreliable step. Tracking mixed with inconsistencies in the companion app is something that should not be a thing on such a premium smartwatch. Maybe it will be fixed with a software update sometime soon or maybe a point, but as a reviewer, i must charge a product in its current state, not what it could be in the future. Then again, if my concerns do not apply to you, this is still a decent bag, so guys that was all for our full review of xiaomis watch s1 active.0wXOi1ZpI9I
