Heart rate tracking sleep tracking and many many more so the mi band 7 clearly has some pretty big shoes to fill, but honestly it does that pretty well. So this has some pretty substantial improvements, including a 25 larger display. Thats brighter easier to read has an always on display mode. This also has substantially better fitness tracking with more workouts vo2 max and recovery time estimates, and on top of that, it also works better as a smart watch with better readability. More notifications and other features well talk about throughout this video but of course well dive into how this actually compares to the me band 6 in just a minute, but lets start off with just a physical design of the new me band 7.. So much like most of the other mi bands, this is rated for 5 atmospheres of water resistance, its actually really easy to replace the strap as well just by popping out the little device in the middle and the strap is just a silicone band. It has the same design as the old ones where you feed it through a loop and then on the back. You can snap it into whatever hole you want. I find it very comfortable, its a little tricky to do it. One handed like yeah. It takes some getting used to, but once you get used to it very comfortable and very easy, additionally, you can replace the color with whatever you want. I mean i have just a little baby blue one here and a black one and just switching between those feels.
Like a completely different device, now lets take a closer look at the actual unit itself, so we have a 1.62 inch amoled display, and this sounds really similar to every other mi band, but its actually substantially wider. Now this display is 25 larger because its wider and so youre getting a really a nice display. That feels a lot more like a smart watch and a lot less like a fitness band. So by that i mean you can actually read notifications on here and they can pack a really incredible amount of information onto such a small display that, in my opinion, is still very readable. Additionally, having that larger display is really advantageous if youre going for a run, and you want to see at a quick glance, some information again, the larger display with a lot of color on there goes a long way now its also an amoled display, as i said So its very bright and very vibrant, this one is also brighter than the me band 6, and so even in the brightest daylight i tested this. So, as you can see, my arm is totally washed out from how bright it is outside, but you can still read the display now. There are many different watch faces on here. If you get the zep light or zep life, app youll actually be able to swap these out. This is no longer using the me app. They just moved to zap its kind of a rebranding thing there, but a lot of the watch faces do look pretty decent with the larger display youre getting more information on here, and you can go back to some simpler ones as well, including this one which shows Mars now there is no home button on here.
Ill show you the interface in a second but essentially youll be swiping from the left to the right to go back or to go home. And if we flip the mi band over to the back youll see we have our two nodes for charging and it comes with a little magnetic charger in the box, which is actually strong enough to hold this from an outlet. So if you have this charging, you dont need to worry about an extension, cable or anything, and next to that well see the array of health sensors. Of course, weve got the heart rate sensor on here, which i will test out for accuracy, and we have a blood oxygen monitor which is improved to now have all day blood oxygen monitoring so lets dive deeper into the me band 6. Compared to the me band. 7. i mentioned that the display is 1.62 inches. The old one was 1.56. That sounds really really close, but the difference is thats. Actually a diagonal measurement and the me band 6 is a lot narrower, so the mi band 7 is actually 25 percent larger. It also has substantially more sport modes on here, and it has actually a slightly brighter display, offering 500 nits versus 450 nits theres, mostly the same connectivity and mostly the same sensors except the mi band 7, is using bluetooth 5.2 instead of 5.0, and, as i mentioned About having more activities to track when it comes to workouts, the me band 7 really has a big improvement with 110 activities versus 30.
But personally i dont really get that excited about that. Like uh 110 workouts, i dont think ive done 110 different workouts in my life. I think 30s, probably just fine most of the time im just using this for running, maybe lifting weights. But you know what, if youre doing something a little bit more esoteric? Maybe the 110 is really going to give you what you need with the blood oxygen sensor were also able to get some more advanced metrics like anaerobic training, notifications, recovery time estimates and vo2 max, which is really nice to get a general baseline of where your cardiovascular, Fitness is so other than that they really are very similar devices. Some subtle software improvements, but im going to show you the interface now, because that is with the larger display, youre, really getting a pretty different experience on here. So, taking a look at the interface, the always on display is dependent on the watch face you can see. This watch face has a lot of information all the way around and the wider display really makes it pretty readable. If we swipe up or down it, takes us through a loop and in this loop youll see that weve got a lot of different things here. The personal in activity, intelligence, thats, just basically a little summary of your day. So far, weve got heart rate. Weve got pai, which i think also stands for: personal activity, intelligence, but thats, just a single score to kind of give you a digestible index of how well youre doing then if we go back uh.
Of course, the swiping from the left brings you back. Weve got blood oxygen, weve got workouts with 110 different workouts weve got workout history, weve got workout status, which so kind of redundant right. There weve got stress, sleep, weather and, of course, weather you can set to wherever, whatever location you want or your current location and as you scroll down you can see, it shows us a lot of information, including the weather, for pretty much the rest of the week. So i think thats really useful weve got music controls, thatll just control. What music is being played on your phone? You can set alarms on here and itll, just vibrate. There is no sound, but the vibrating motor in here will wake you up or it wakes me up. At least weve got events thats your calendar weve got flashlights the whole screen just gets kind of bright, we can go to settings or we can go down to more and if you tap on more youll, see that we have quite a few more things here that I just did not add to my main loop, so weve got female health tracking weve got breathing exercises a timer, a stopwatch, find my phone event reminder a a different kind of timer down here and, of course, the remote shutter to take pictures with your phone. So if we go back and just keep swiping from the left, we can also go through and have a quick access for any of our kind of the tiles is what you might want to call them, so our weather widget over here, uh you can again.
This is interactive, so if you tap on it, itll bring you into that weather app. So if i just tap on it, you can go and scroll through and its going to do the same thing that we saw below, but its just more accessible right here through these little tiles. So if we go to the next one, this is music control. Weve got exercises here: weve got heart rate here, blood oxygen, stress, breathing and i just went back to this, but you can customize all of that within the app so like i said, the app is pretty basic. You can go to store and see a ton of different watch faces all different styles, including photos, and things like that on there you can set notifications and reminders in here. You can check out some health monitoring settings go to band settings, app settings theres a lot of different things you can do here now. This also has a find band feature which is kind of weird, because if its sitting sideways, this is silicone, so it dampens it. A lot so you cant really hear it, but if it happens to be sitting on its face, you probably can hear it. So i dont know its better than nothing. Some additional things to note. With the interface youre getting over a hundred different watch faces, you cant get third party apps, but whatever is in the actual app on your phone. You can put it on here pretty easily and you can also reject or silence calls so, rather than just rejecting.
We all know if youre getting a scam caller and you reject them. That tells the system that you are responsive and you will get a lot more phone calls, whereas if you just silence it youre less likely to get more phone calls later in the day. So when it comes to battery life with the mi band 7, they claim that it has 14 days of battery life, but it depends on what youre doing with it. The always on display can definitely kill the battery a lot quicker. So i have the always on display set to on. I wanted to see how fast i could possibly kill this battery, and by on i dont mean the automatic mode that it has where it detects, when its off your wrist or when youre sleeping, and it turns that off. I meant i forced it to be on the entire time. Additionally, i had a pretty long workout. I got a lot of notifications. I got two updates in the past 24 hours for some reason on here, and i really used this a lot so with that being said yesterday i was at 90 and today im at 56, if you extrapolate that that gives me about three days of battery life. If youre really really pushing it, so i think thats the absolute worst case scenario, i think most people will probably expect to see closer to about nine days of battery life with this device. But unfortunately, i wasnt seeing the 14 day battery life that they actually claimed.
Now, maybe with no always on display, maybe with no really limited notifications and not much working out, you could probably stretch this to 14 days. Yes, but i dont know that was my experience right. There now lets actually get into a little bit more about the fitness tracking, including a gps and accuracy test. So, first of all, the me band 7 still, unfortunately, did not get gps. This is something i was really hoping to see. Eventually, i know itd kill the battery, i know its a small, affordable device, but still were seeing gps on things like the fitbit charge. Five, even the fitbit charge, four and yes, thats more expensive, but this is the seventh iteration of this. I would like to see gps regardless, you are actually able to use connected gps. So if you run with your phone, which you kind of have to do, or else it wont, save your workout anyway, then yes, it does have connected gps. Itll use your phones, gps, but the benefit here is: you are getting some better. Fitness tracking, like i said, with 110 different sport modes, vo2 max, which is what they call uh professional workout measurements, and you also, of course, get sleep monitoring you get all day. Spo2 monitoring with alerts for low blood blood oxygen levels, but lets take a look at how accurate this actually was. Something the me bands have always done really well, which is pretty surprising, is actually heart rate.
Now the heart rate, as you can see right here on this graph, is based on a 40 minute run where i ran at a steady state for the first half and then did sprint intervals at the end, now, typically optical heart rate, sensors on devices way more Expensive than this struggle with intervals, but as you can see right here when i compared this to the polar h10, which is a known, accurate heart rate, chest strap its actually really close. It tracked the intervals very well, even though its an optical heart rate sensor, and although it was slightly low at some points, i was really impressed with the overall accuracy here. So ive always been a really big fan of the mi bands. The me band 4, 5. 6 and now the 7 and because theyre just such easy devices to recommend theyre, affordable, theyre, small theyre, discreet and theyre, great for fitness tracking, of course, but also they kind of work as a smart watch replacement as well. So anybody looking to get into just a basic smartwatch – you dont, want to spend a lot of money, but you want notifications, you want weather, you want a remote camera control. This is a great device for that. But not everything is perfect. So i want to talk about some of the drawbacks i faced with the me band 7., although they are pretty limited, there are a couple you want to be aware of. The first thing is that i do miss the home button.
This sounds weird im happy that we have a larger display, but the lack of a home button on here means that youre gon na end up swiping back a lot, and so, if you end up swiping back a lot, sometimes this can feel a little bit sluggish. Like its not, i dont know maybe its because im used to 120 hertz on my phone, and this just feels a little slower, but you know it is what it is additionally, and probably the biggest one on here is that there is no auto brightness so automatically Changing the brightness is something that many other fitness bands do. This one does not, and so you have to set the brightness on your own and so, if youre in a bright environment or a dim environment, its usually either too bright or too dim. I kind of left it at like the 70 level and usually thats pretty good, but again i wish it would automatically adjust that there is also no gps on here. As i mentioned before, i mean its affordable, its a small device. I cant really knock it for that one, but one thing i really do wish this had is nfc, so nfc has been on the the china versions for a really long time since, like the me band 4, but this this one right here still doesnt have that. So in the united states, if you want to go to a gas station and just buy like a gatorade or something you cant do it with this, but, like i said, the mi band 7 is overall, a really impressive device, while its not a complete overhaul over The mi band 6: it is still subtly improved in many different categories, making it overall a better device but leave a comment, and let me know what you think about the me band 7.3RstKwFq-98
