Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

TLDR: After owning a $150 FitBit and a $35 LETSFIT, this tracker blows both out of the water. It's not just another Chinese knockoff. Do yourself a favor and purchase this if you want a simple watch/steps/sleep/HR/messages tracker. In 2018 I bought a FitBit off of Craigslist. The band broke twice in 1 year and there were software bugs sprinkled throughout my time of owning it. I just didn't like how it fit. Then in Nov. 2019 I bought a LETSFIT tracker that the screen cracked on within 2 months, had really inaccurate steps reporting, and said my heart rate was almost 200 during workouts (yea right!). So after hours of scouring Amazon for a better & more affordable tracker, 9 pages in my search for "Fitness tracker" I stumbled across this and the reviews looked great and the look of the watch looked incredible. After owning it for a week I can flat out say that this is the best tracker I've owned and possibly the best one on the market for someone who just wants to track their steps/sleep/heart rate and have something that tells the time. The Screen: First, there are probably hundreds of faces for the watch you can switch out to, and to my knowledge so far, they're all free. You just open the Mi Fit app, go into your Profile, go into the Smart Band 5 device, and navigate to the Store. Press the one you want and it will sync to the watch. It's so easy. The faces that I've used look beautiful (my photos do not do them justice), like someone who actually knows about art design and color created them. One of the faces shows the watch's battery (in %), the time, the date, how many steps I've taken, and my heart rate, all on the main screen. Perfect. There's an on-screen button at the bottom of the watch face that when pressed, takes you to the home screen or turns the watch face on. It's very similar to an android device. You can swipe the screen left, right, up, or down on the screen and get to a different feature. Swiping to the left gets me the weather, which is dead on, and swiping the other way takes me to my messages, which pop up instantly when someone sends me a text. I even get messages from group texts! Something my LETSFIT watch would not do. The text looks sleek and professional. Easy to read. The Tracking: The step tracking seems way more accurate than my LETSFIT watch. I'm on my feet almost all day, constantly walking around, sometimes short jaunts, and sometimes long ones. I'd get done with the day and my LETSFIT watch would tell me I had only about 6000 steps. That's after walking around for 12-14 hours.. Not so with this watch. There are some mornings when I've been running around walking long distances and I'll have 3000 steps before 10am, which seems pretty accurate to me. I've owned 2 fitness trackers and I used to run/coach cross country, so I have a pretty good idea how many steps it should be tracking from my FitBit that tracked fairly well. The heart rate tracking is way more accurate than my LETSFIT, but I haven't come to a full conclusion on it. I have it set to track every 5 minutes and my normal resting heart rate is usually about 49-52. That's what my FitBit would register at and my doctor confirmed it. My resting HR on this band has been in the 60s-70s so it may be a little off. When I'm working out it seems to work better though, and maybe that's because it's tracking the entire time and not every 5 minutes. I'll hit up to 164 which seems pretty normal as a max for the intense workouts that I do. The battery: Well so far I've clocked in the battery running about 10% per day. This is with the HR checking at 5 minute intervals (you can go as low as 1 min intervals). I'd say that gives you about 9-10 days of battery life, which is excellent, in my book. The syncing: This thing syncs up quickly when you open the app. It also syncs with Google Fit if you open the Mi Fit app and go into accounts and add Google Fit. When you first get the watch and want to sync it, download the Mi Fit app, then make sure you long press on your Bluetooth on your phone and find the watch itself and pair it. Then when you press the screen of the watch it will say it needs to sync first. Press the check mark or next icon and it will automatically pair up. Other cool things that I'm just flat out impressed with: I thought I wouldn't like the elongated elliptical shape of the watch face. I was wrong. It's nice and minimalistic. The band is SUPER LIGHT and so easy to put on. Thread the band through the loop and press the little pin into a hole. Done. This means there's no excess band to flap around accidentally. Normal watch bands have the excess band that slips through a small loop on the watch after you've secured it, and it can come loose and you have to rethread it. Not this one. Since the end of the band is what gets pinned into the hole, this thing stays nice and secure on your wrist. The manual says you can wear it in the shower or during swimming. I don't plan to try either, but man, that's just cool. The sleep tracker is dead on accurate. I have cats and so I get up in the early morning to feed them, and sometimes go back to bed on the weekends. This thing will pick up when I get up, and then resume my sleep tracking once I go back to bed. My old tracker would just stop tracking once I got up. The app itself is very sleek and well done. I've not encountered any bugs, and everything is very well organized. You can turn on notifications, incoming calls, smart analysis of your sleep tracking and exercise, and you can set 3 types of alarms: Mon-Fri, every day, and once, and dictate the time. You can go into the app itself and have it grab your location for the weather and change it between Fahrenheit and Celsius degrees. There is even a feature to control your phone camera from the watch for taking pictures, but I haven't really messed with that yet. Recommendations to the Mi Band company: You need to add the words "watch" or "fitness tracker" closer to the beginning of your product name, or something to get you listed better on Amazon when someone does a search for your product. It took me 9 pages of sifting through every other Chinese knockoff watch to find yours. It makes me wonder if Amazon realizes that every cheap knockoff fitness tracker with a different name is actually the same company just calling themselves something else, because they all have the same watch face & same graphics.