Xiaomi Watch 5 – Superior smartwatch with Wear OS

Google’s operating system for watches, Wear OS, is a variant of Android for the smaller form factor, and you can run both Google and third-party apps on the watch in addition to the typical watch features you’d expect such as fitness and health and on-arm notifications. The big problem with the system is that it is a battery guzzler. Samsung’s watches with Wear OS typically have a little less than two days of battery life. This means in practice that you have to charge the watch every day, or charge overnight and miss out on the sleep tracking feature. At the same time, the system is not as visually impressive or responsive as Apple’s Watch OS.

Oneplus (and Oppo) have previously tried to remedy this by giving the watch dual systems, in addition to Wear OS a real-time system that measures your health data but has no other smartwatch functions, but as soon as the screen lights up, the watch switches to the more resource-demanding Wear OS. In this way, the battery life has been doubled, but 3.5 days is honestly not much either.

With the Xiaomi Watch 5, Xiaomi has picked up the idea of ​​dual architecture from Oneplus with the new battery technology with silicon involvement and given the watch a battery of a whopping 930 mAh, just over twice as much as Samsung has in the Galaxy Watch 8 Classic. And for the first time, I thus feel that I have a Wear OS watch that I need to charge fairly often. During the test period, the watch regularly lasts just under five and a half days on a charge, and that includes a number of logged training sessions during that time.

It is probably not only thanks to new battery technology that the capacity has been increased, the watch is also quite large and heavy. But it is also due to luxurious material choices in the form of steel and sapphire glass. I get used to it quickly. The watch has a standard attachment for a bracelet, so if you don’t like the included bracelet, you can buy a new one anywhere.

The screen is large with relatively thin bezels around and bright enough to be fully readable in daylight. It wakes up quickly on pressure or when I lift the watch, which generally feels fast. This despite the fact that the smartwatch part is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon W5 Gen 1, which is starting to get a number of years on its neck and in other manufacturers’ watches can make them feel a little slow.

Flexibility with limits

The main point of Wear OS in the watch is that you can install apps on the watch. For example, I put in Google Keep so I can check off the shopping list at the grocery store, and I can add both music streaming services and podcast players. However, the flexibility is not unlimited. When it comes to health and fitness measurement, it’s Xiaomi’s services and mobile app that apply, you can’t switch to Google’s Fitbit or Samsung Health, for example. But you can sync to other services via Google’s Health Connect, and Strava has an app for the watch to log runs with their system.

There’s nothing wrong with Xiaomi’s health measurement either, here’s everything you’d expect, with one exception. Steps are counted, sleep and heart rate are measured, and you are informed about energy consumption and stress. The health measure that stands out by its absence is heart rate variability (HRV), which is a good measure of both fitness and stress.

You can of course log different types of training sessions and then continuously see your heart rate, lap time and other things. The watch detects if you take a break and then pauses the training. When I try to train with the watch’s built-in GPS and leave the mobile at home, the battery life is not significantly affected. One hour of outdoor training uses up two percent of the battery.

Other features that you can expect from a smart watch are the ability to make payments (via Google Pay) and that you can receive notifications to the watch. You choose which app notifications to forward to the watch, and you can respond to notifications by dictation, with emojis or with a minimal keyboard. Here somewhere, of course, it starts to get better to take out the mobile phone that you have with you if you have received notifications. The watch is not sold here in Sweden in any variant with esim.

Gestures with obstacles

The watch has a special sensor to recognize arm movements, and you can control various functions by pinching, snapping your fingers or tilting the watch. The settings for this are messy, some of the gestures you can set, others are preset which is quite unclear. For example, I never manage to take a picture by pinching my fingers twice, and I don’t know if I should have activated some additional setting or if it just doesn’t detect it. In any case, I manage to get the watch to launch a certain app by shaking it twice. But since the feature is both whimsical and also negatively affects the watch’s main advantage, the battery life, I turn it off.

Despite the large battery, the watch charges fairly quickly. Ten minutes of charging gives 20 percent which is enough for a day, and it charges 50 percent in 30 minutes. Then it goes slower and a full charge takes 1 hour and 20 minutes. The charging is not wireless and you need the special charging cable, which also does not have USB C at the other end but the old big USB connector, which means that it can be a hassle to find a suitable charger.

The disadvantages of the Xiaomi Watch 5 are small and the advantages are large. It’s the first Wear OS watch with really good battery life, and the compromises you get with it are surprisingly few after all.