So i love having rugged and tough smart watches, and i have always liked watches that are tough and can withstand your daily beatings. The watch that were checking out is not exactly that no military, great design or built here, but a watch that is designed for those who want a rugged and active lifestyle. So the xiaomi watch s1 active is a very nice watch and was sent over to me by my friends at xiaomi, and this is also part of their mystery box, so its always nice to open one of these boxes. Every time, although these were sent over to me, there were no money exchange hands and this review is based only on my honest opinion and experience with it, and this time around, you can see that xiaomi actually has a very nice holiday team going on with their Mystery box, which is really cool. So if we turn this over yep there you go, you can see xiaomi holiday, mystery box. This is really cool, so the watch s1 active retails for a handsome 199 us dollars at launch and thats roughly around 850 malaysia ringgit. So youre definitely paying good money for this smartwatch, so lets see if theyre any good and if youre interested in buying this watch definitely check out my links in the description below. So when i first picked up this watch somehow in my mind, an active watch needs to feel a little bit heavy uh solid.
This watch doesnt feel that heavy actually and the watch actually feels really light, and i like how xiaomi puts in some subtle material choices here that breaks the mole of a cheap, looking watch and although most parts are still made out of plastics, this watch definitely doesnt Feel cheap so, starting with the top of the watch here, youre gon na get a nice gun, metal, gray bezel, which is also made of aluminum, which is really slim and gives the watch a nice slim bezel. Look that looks really cool, so on top of the bezel are some fonts. I dont think it can be picked up on the camera, but right over here, youre gon na see the phone saying outdoor and here active and they dont have buttons to coincide with them. So this is purely for styling purposes and, on the right hand, side, youre, gon na get home as well as sports, and these ones do have buttons to coincide with them. So the band of the watch is made of this very nice and soft silicone material. Very comfortable to wear very smooth to the touch and easy to put on, and my only problem with this strap is the notch inside here. So im, not too sure whether you can see that. But if you look very closely inside here, there actually is a notch. Inside here, to hook onto the watch, strap when you wear them uh, i guess thats for security purposes, so that the wash doesnt you know get unbuckled or things like that.
But the problem with that is that it gets stuck and its quite annoying to remove when youre wearing them. So not my favorite type of implementation of watch strap. But fortunately, if you decide to change up, the straps xiaomi also includes a very nice quick release, strap so you can just buy any 21 millimeter watch band and it should fit the watch nicely to change up your style. So behind the watch, youre gon na get a plastic case with a ppg heart rate sensor at the back, as well as the blood oxygen monitor at the back as well, and youre gon na get two charging pins right at the back of the watch here and Xiaomi uses a cradle style charger to help with alignment of the watch when youre charging them. So, unlike the apple watch, where you have unlimited number of angles that you can charge your watch with, so you can just put it on and youll start to charge. The xiaomi only has one position to align the watch, so you really need to get the magnet right and then it will stuck on and charge right away. So the screen in front here is one of the most gorgeous watch screens ive ever seen. To be honest, so what youre gon na get here is a 1.43 inch amoled display with 326 pixels per inch, so thats really very high and very sharp. So this watch for this size very sharp from any viewing angles and xiaomi also gives you a 450 nits screen brightness.
So, for most cases you should be okay using this watch, however, under extremely bright sunlight, its not very readable as well so battery life on the watch. S1 active is pretty good and especially one that you use for your active lifestyle and might not have access to charges days at a time so with most normal users and without the always on display turned on youre gon na get about 10 to 12 days of Use and xiaomi claims a whopping 24 days of use if you fully put it into battery saver mode. So there is no specific battery life rating for when you use continuous gps, at least for now, but i would foresee a couple of days of use with gps on a few hours a day should not be a problem for this watch. So i started using this watch about a couple of days ago and i daily wear them. It started off with a battery life of about 60 plus percent, and this is actually my fourth day with it already and i can still have 43 of battery. So i use this with my typical notifications i have calls coming in. I also use it to work out and i use it to sleep at night, so i did a gps run for an outdoor cycling activity that was about two hours of riding and the battery. Still stuck on very well, so i think thats pretty nice. So in terms of the features the watch here, doesnt run any special qualcomm chipset, but for my test with using this watch, speed, fluidity is no issue with this watch and they perform extremely well and later.
When we take a look at the watch interface test, you can see how smooth the interface really is, and the watch comes with a bluetooth, 5.2 chipset for syncing the watch to your phone and the watch is also rated to be 5 atm water resistant. So thats pretty good, even for bringing the watch swimming. Unfortunately, swimming is also one of the spots that you can choose from inside the sports tracker. You can get notifications on your watch when you get a call, but even better xiaomi gives you the ability to pick up phone calls using the watch and even talk through the watch so fantastic feature. If you dont like to walk around your house with your phone – and you still want to not miss calls – and you know pick them up so there are no specific ekg feature – probably no afib monitoring, but what you get here is a 24 7 heart rate monitor As well as spo2 monitoring, which is pretty common in watches today, so other than that, the watch also comes with built in gps. So you can use this watch for your workouts and later sing it over to apps like strava. The only thing that i noticed about the gps is that at some points during the ride, it kind of got wonky, and you know when of course granted im inside a forest environment. So gps signal may not be that good. So i cannot fully blame the watch for it, but usually on fire road climbs on open open spaces.
On top of me, where you get a very good gps signal, i think they still perform really well inside the sports tracker here. Xiaomi is going to give you 117 total workouts to choose from track, and some of these outdoor activities can leverage on your gps as well for more accurate location tracking. So overall, pretty nice watch features for this price point, so the watch interface here is similar to all xiaomi smartwatches that weve seen before. But since now you have a larger watch interface, so youre going to see some difference here and there so from the home screen itself. If you tap and hold on the screen for a long time, youre going to go into the selection for your watch faces – and you can sync many of them to your watch here and you can then choose them inside your watch, which is pretty cool theres. A couple ones that has animation, which is really cool, so you can see the mountain here actually moves, so i think thats, a really cool animation to check out so swiping down from the top brings you to your notification center. So now i have it turned off, but this is where you get to see all your notifications from now or from the past, so swiping from the bottom brings you to your command center and theres, quite a few things that you can set here. For example, you can turn on sleep mode or you can turn on race to wake silent mode and bottom.
Here you get flashlight mode. The middle one here is to keep the screen on for five minutes, and also you can go into your setting and on the next picture. Youre gon na get a feature to clear out: uh the water inside your speaker. This is useful after a swim, so you can click it and you can hear a sound and that sound basically uses some sound wave to actually blast water out from the speaker of the watch so thats, something that you will get as well. And finally, the last one is that you get to choose your alarms, and here you can set your alarms natively inside the watch, and you dont have to go into the app to set it, which is really nice. So since the screen is bigger and resolution is also higher, so swiping from the left and right gets you to your widgets and theyre both the same basically, here what you get is three pages of it. So if you swipe to the first one, youre gon na see your activities for the day, you also see your heart rate, and here is your sleep, so i didnt really have a lot of sleep. Yesterday, uh, then, the next page youre gon na get your calorie burn uh if youre connected to your phone youre gon na get weather data at the bottom. Here this is your spo2 data and you also get to choose your workouts from here and the last page itself, youre going to get your battery percentage.
Your steps, your pedometer and at the bottom here youre going to get a media control so inside here its also very cool because you may have a lot of widgets here. But if lets say you want to access any of the features here, you can just tap on it and itll bring you to the full page of your app and you can actually scroll through and see a lot more details about your heart rate and stuff like That, in terms of the buttons here, if you press the home button here, of course it brings you to either to your menu or your home and inside your menu. There are a couple of ways to view this, so the first way is to view it through a list view, and the second way is to view it in the grid view so inside the app. I have changed it to show the grid view. So this is the grid view, so you can still scroll through, but i dont really like this, because i dont really understand what each of the icons does. For me. A list view is a much convenient way of using it. So finally, pressing the sports mode button down here brings you to your sports mode here. So you can just choose any of your workouts here, 117 in total, and you can adjust them inside your phone so that you have the most frequent ones inside your watch itself. So the watch s1 active uses the me fitness, app or xiaomi rare light on the ios or, if youre on android, its called xiaomi wear and its pretty simple and straightforward app.
So the first page here shows you your health information and you can drill down into any of the details and check out more insights about your health. So here, if i click into my sleep, you can see that i dont really have very good sleep yesterday. So thats something you can also check out your workouts from here. So if i were to click here, this is my workouts yesterday, so i went for a mountain bike ride and you can see that it actually tracks quite a lot of detail about your fitness and your health and how your heart rate has been working throughout the Exercise so thats really nice so on. The second page here is where you can also start your workout. If lets say you dont want to start your workout inside your watch itself. You can then come here and it will youll be able to start your workouts here and on. The third page itself is where you can go into the various settings of your watch. You can sing your watch and you can also click on this online here, and this is where you can manage. The watch faces that you have so local is what is already inside your watch. You can change it up here, you can click apply and you just apply it onto your watch. What you get to do is also go to online, and this is the online gallery of all the watch faces.
You can download there isnt too many here. So if youre going to new, you can tap on more and you can see that there are a couple for you to choose from its not tremendously a lot, but at least you get to play around with it. So you can also see there are various settings to play around with here. You can manage how your health works, how you monitor them uh. You can also go all the way here and set up xiaomi pay, because this watch comes with nfc, so you can actually use your watch to make payments, which is really cool and at the bottom here, if you use the app, you can also update your watch Over the air – but i must say its kind of slow process to update your watch, probably because this is a pre production firmware. So i can understand that but thats, basically the app control you get with the xiaomi wear light. So i think sensors on smart watches nowadays are really very accurate already and especially from established brands like xiaomi and all tracking, for both heart rate and spo2 is really quite accurate, with very minor differences compared to an oximeter so thats, something important to you. Then, at least you know that the watch here is very accurate. So, overall, i think this is a proper smartwatch from xiaomi pricing, wise its on par with brands like samsung or huawei its a little steep, but for what it does with gps.
All the sensors, as well as the ability to pick up phone calls through your phone, is actually really cool, and i would say this is a good buy. But whether or not its a value for money buy, then thats choice is definitely up to you. So that is it for this review.f8RnBJ-hNbI
