Xiaomi Mi Band 6

The Xiaomi Mi Band 6 is Xiaomi’s flagship fitness tracker for 2021. New features include a bigger AMOLED display, more than double the activity tracking modes, blood oxygen monitoring, and breathing quality assessments during sleep.

The Xiaomi Mi Band 6’s design is essentially unchanged from the previous two generations of Mi Bands. It’s made of a small tracker module that fits into a thin silicone strap.

The strap that comes with the Mi Band 6 feels okay. It’s soft and doesn’t collect dust or hair, which is always a win. Also, the Mi Band 6 works with Mi Band 5 bands (and vice versa).

The one big improvement on the design front is the upgraded display. The Xiaomi Mi Band 6 boasts a much larger 1.56-inch AMOLED display, which is 50% bigger than the Mi Band 5’s 1.1-inch screen. The display nearly spans to the edge of the case and makes the fitness tracker look much more modern.

Unfortunately, there’s no ambient light sensor. The display gets plenty bright, even when viewing it outdoors in direct sunlight. Still, you might find yourself manually adjusting the display brightness if you’re transitioning between darker and lighter environments.

Battery life is never an issue for Mi Bands, and that’s also true for the Mi Band 6. Xiaomi claims the fitness tracker can last 14 days on a single charge with “normal” usage.

Many of the Mi Band 6’s features drain the battery quickly. Turning on Xiaomi’s new breathing score feature, all-day stress monitoring, or increasing the frequency of resting heart rate readings all affect battery life.

The Xiaomi Mi Band 6 is a fitness tracker that excels at the basics.

The Mi Band 6 will track your steps taken, calories burned, distance traveled, resting and active heart rate, and sleep throughout the day. There’s no standalone GPS, though there is connected GPS if you don’t mind bringing your phone with you while you’re out exercising.

One major improvement over the Mi Band 5 is the number of sports profiles available. The Xiaomi Mi Band 6 can track 30 activities, up from 11 on the Mi Band 5. Niche profiles like Zumba, kickboxing, and badminton have been added to the tracker this time around. It can also automatically detect six activities: running, walking, treadmill, cycling, rowing machine, and elliptical. For all other activities, you’ll need to select it on the device and hit start manually.

Blood oxygen monitoring has been an increasingly important metric in fitness trackers lately. Xiaomi included an SpO2 sensor on the global Mi Band 6, allowing you to spot-check your blood oxygen levels throughout the day.

The Xiaomi Mi Band 6 offers basic smartwatch functionality and a few smaller features that aren’t usually found on other fitness trackers. The Mi Band 6 can mirror your smartphone notifications for any app. Notifications aren’t actionable — nor are they particularly easy to read on a display this size — so you’ll likely only glance at that incoming email or text then need to pick up your phone to see the whole thing.

Mi Band 6 has a few basic apps built-in like an alarm, stopwatch, timer, event log, a “find my device” app, and a camera control app. You can also control your smartphone’s music from the Mi Band. That’s where the app list ends, though. There are no third-party apps and no third-party watch faces.