Wearing the time and your health on your wrist can cost a few hundred bucks, but Xiaomi looks keen to get that price down with it latest take, the Mi Watch Lite.
If you were looking to start 2021 with a bit of a fitness kick, and a few weeks in, you hadn’t made your way to a wearable to help you keep tabs yet, there’s yet another option on its way to Australia, and it might just win people over with its price.
Xiaomi has announced that it’s releasing its take on a budget-friendly wrist-wearable in the form of the Mi Watch Lite, a softened square of a smartwatch made for the wrist that aims to tell the time and track activities in a similar way to other wristbound wearables out there.
While the Mi Watch Lite is clearly not the Apple Watch, you can kind of see what Xiaomi is channeling in its design, because it is definitely similar, complete with the time, heart tracking, sleep tracking, and as much as nine days of battery life, something we typically don’t see out of many smartwatches.
We’re told it will work on both Android and iOS, and that the Mi Watch Lite can be used to check text notifications, calls, and even help you find your phone if you’re worried you’ve lost it, with its distributor in Australia, Panmi, adding that is has some water resistance, plus bands that can be changed out.
“The Mi Watch Lite is a smart watch that helps you to get fit,” said George Saad, Chief Operating Officer of Panmi, adding that “it is an affordable smart watch with great features”.
It’s worth noting that the Xiaomi Mi Watch Lite may well be like smartwatches from Huawei in that it doesn’t appear to have a common operating system, and that may mean a choice of watch faces and supported apps aren’t necessarily found on the watch itself. That means you probably won’t be replicating your favourite analogue watch with the Mi Watch Lite, nor will you likely find an official Spotify app like on other watches.
However at $99, that also might not matter, and if an entry level price is more the reason you need to dive into wearables, Xiaomi might well have it. We’re told it’s available for $99.95 at Xiaomi’s online store in Australia this week.
