Xiaomi calls themselves the “world’s number one wearable band brand”, and a lot of that perceived success is built upon the foundation that is the Mi Band series. Launched globally earlier, the Chinese company has now brought over the latest iteration of the popular fitness band to Malaysia: the Mi Smart Band 6. As usual, it’s more of an incremental upgrade from its predecessor, but the Mi Smart Band 6 (again, as usual) still offers one of the best value-for-money you can get on a smart wearable today.
Sound good? Here’s everything you need to know if you’re in Malaysia, and you’re keen to pick one of these up soon.
Price and availability
Let’s get to the juicy bits first. From the 15th of April 2021, the Mi Smart Band 6 will officially open for pre-orders in Malaysia at a discounted price of RM169—exclusively on Lazada.
Xiaomi Malaysia says this promo will be available for a limited time, following which you’ll be able to make purchases at official Xiaomi stores on Lazada and Shopee, as well as authorised Mi Stores and other official retailers nationwide at a RRP of RM189.
Mi Smart Band 6 specs
In case you missed our global announcement post, here’s quick breakdown. The Mi Smart Band 6 comes with a significant upgrade to its display, which is now roughly 50 percent larger than its predecessor at 1.56″ (it’s also an AMOLED panel with a pixel density of 326). Xiaomi says that you’ll have over 130 custom watch faces to choose from, unless you’d prefer to use your own pictures as your custom wallpaper.
Meanwhile, the Mi Smart Band 6 also comes equipped with more sports modes now—30 in total, while you also get 50m of water resistance (5ATM). Six of these sports modes support auto-detection, which means that the fitness band can automatically begin “workouts” without needing you to manually start an activity. You also get 24/7 heart rate monitoring, along with SpO2 tracking functionality to measure the saturation of oxygen in your blood.
Other features include sleep tracking (includes various sleep stage data), accelerometer and gyroscope sensors, Strava app compatibility, and the PAI (Personal Activity Intelligence) metric. As for battery life, you’re looking at up to 14 days on a single charge (up to 19 days with battery saver mode), which is identical to figures for the Mi Smart Band 5. This time, however, you’re looking at a larger, higher-res display. And of course, you’ll have the magnetic charger that Xiaomi first introduced on the last generation of the Mi Band.
At the global launch, Xiaomi announced two versions—one with NFC, and one without. As expected, the variant that will be officially released in Malaysia will not have NFC, probably because many of the NFC-compatible functionalities (such as Mi Pay) are not supported in this region.
So, what do you think? The return of the fitness band king?
