logobossstupid

After the success of Mi Band & Mi Band 2 Xiaomi recently launched the Mi Band 3. And Today in this video we will do the unboxing and find out more about this new fitness tracker from Xiaomi. User Manuals for Xiaomi Fitness Trackers: Amazfit; Amazfit Bip Smartwatch Youth Edition; Amazfit Cor Health Band; Amazfit Smartwatch; Hey Plus NFC Smart Band; Mi Band; Mi Band 2; Mi Band 3; Mi Band Pulse; Smart Dog Button Tag; WeLoop Hey 3S GPS Smartwatch; WeLoop Hey 3S GPS Smartwatch Intro; User Manuals for Xiaomi Power Banks: Mi Power Bank. Jun 24, 2018  After the success of Mi Band & Mi Band 2 Xiaomi recently launched the Mi Band 3. And Today in this video we will do the unboxing and find out more about this new fitness tracker from Xiaomi.

1. Xiaomi Mi Band 3 Review

Fitness trackers have come an extremely long way over the years. No longer are they glorified pedometers; they’re much more than that. Most standard fitness trackers nowadays can track your steps taken, distance traveled, how many calories you’ve burned for the day, and even your sleeping patterns. They’re handy little devices if you want a better look at how active you are throughout the day, and there are plenty to choose from.

Related: Best Fitbit fitness trackers Best Garmin watches

We understand it can be a little daunting trying to choose which fitness tracker best suits your needs, so we’ve compiled a list of the best fitness trackers on the market. We’ve divided our list up into separate categories to help you narrow down your options. As always, if you feel like we missed something on our best fitness trackers list, be sure to tell us in the comment section below.

Without any further delay, here are the best fitness trackers you can buy right now.

We made no changes to our list this month.

The best fitness tracker overall

Fitbit Charge 3

Fitbit’s Charge 3 is the best fitness tracker you can buy for most people. Its classy, versatile design means it’ll look good in the office and at the gym. It’s also water resistant this time around, and has one of the more accurate wrist-based heart rate sensors we’ve tried on a wearable.

Elsewhere, the Fitbit Charge 3 offers a great software experience, plenty of smartwatch features, and a battery that can last almost a week on a single charge. Unless you’re a runner, you probably don’t need GPS. For those folks, the Charge 3 is a great option. If you need a GPS, move on to our #2 pick.

Read more:The best Fitbit alternatives The most common Fitbit problems and how to fix them

Garmin Vivosport

The Garmin Vivosport is the best fitness tracker with GPS.

Garmin vívosport review

It also packs in a heart rate monitor, which is pretty incredible considering its slim and lightweight design. It’s also waterproof up to 50 meters, will last up to seven days on a single charge, and comes with a Chroma touchscreen display that’s miles better than the display on the Vivosmart 3. The display is a little small for my liking, however.

The Vivosport is available now for around $130. That’s an absolute steal for the best fitness tracker with GPS.

Also read:Best GPS running watches

Fitbit Inspire HR

The Fitbit Inspire HR is a great fitness tracker, health tracker, and sleep tracker. It’s just $100, too!

It’s small and lightweight, supports interchangeable straps, and offers smartphone notifications on your wrist. It might be small, but it doesn’t skimp on the features. The Fitbit Inspire HR offers Connected GPS, a heart rate sensor, as well as five-day battery life.

Think of the Inspire HR as the “Fitbit Charge 3 Lite.” It removes a few notable features like notification history, an altimeter, and a bigger display in order to reach that $100 price point. If you don’t need those things though, the Inspire HR is a fantastic option.

Best multisport fitness tracker: Garmin Vivoactive 3 Music

The standard Garmin Vivoactive 3 is one of our favorite multisport fitness watches. Naturally, the Vivoactive 3 Music made its way to our list right when it was announced.

Everything you loved about the vivoactive 3 is here, along with support for music storage of up to 500 songs. You can load up your favorite songs, or download playlists from iHeartRadio. Deezer support will be added in the future, too.

Don’t miss: Garmin Vivoactive 3 review Hands-on with the Garmin Vivoactive 3 Music

Aside from a slightly redesigned bezel on the new watch (and music support, of course), the Vivoactive 3 and Music version are basically the same. That means you get a fantastic running watch with a built-in GPS, heart rate monitor, 5ATM water resistance rating, Garmin Pay support, and seven-day battery life. You can check out our full Vivoactive 3 review right here to learn more.

Also read: Fitbit vs Garmin: Which ecosystem is right for you?

Best fitness smartwatch

Fitbit Versa

If you were underwhelmed by Fitbit’s first smartwatch offering, the Versa might be just the thing for you.

The Fitbit Versa is much better looking and more compact than the Ionic, and it doesn’t cost as much money. Now, that lower price tag will get you fewer features (no GPS, for instance), but that’s the whole point of this smartwatch — the Versa is a smartwatch for everyone.

Don’t miss: Fitbit Versa review Fitbit Versa vs Ionic

With the recent addition of quick replies, you can now reply to just about every app notification you receive on your wrist. The Versa also recently received Fitbit’s female health tracking suite, making this a much more powerful health tracker for women.

The Versa also brings Fitbit OS 2.0, 24/7 heart rate tracking, on-screen workouts with Fitbit Coach, over 15 exercise modes, Connected GPS, and swim tracking thanks to its 5ATM rating. There’s also room to store your music, and if you spring for the Special Edition model you’ll have access to Fitbit Pay.

If the Versa is a bit out of your budget, we’d recommend checking out the Fitbit Versa Lite. It’s just about the same thing with no music storage and no altimeter, and with a lower $160 price tag.

Fitbit Ionic

The Fitbit Ionic is a great fitness tracker/smartwatch hybrid if you need something a little more powerful than the Versa. It’s an incredible fitness and sleep tracker, comes with a built-in GPS, allows you to pay for things from your wrist, and it’s water resistant.

More: Fitbit Ionic review Fitbit Flyer review

Just like the Fitbit Versa, the Ionic now has support for quick replies for notifications and female health tracking features.

The Ionic is one heck of a fitness smartwatch. It’s available now on Amazon and Fitbit.com for $269.95, and comes in three different color options.

Best cheap fitness tracker

Xiaomi Mi Band 3

If you need a basic fitness tracker and you don’t want to pay an arm and a leg, buy the Xiaomi Mi Band 3. At only $25, it’s hard not to recommend this device.

Not only has the design been improved from the Mi Band 2, it’s also received a few nice upgrades under the hood. The heart rate monitor is fairly accurate for a budget device, and it can still track all the basics — steps taken, calories burned, and sleep.

More:Xiaomi Mi Band 3 review

To get down to this price point, Xiaomi had to make some compromises. It doesn’t support many activity profiles, and the software is a little wonky at times. If that doesn’t bother you, the Xiaomi Mi Band is probably the best bang-for-your-buck activity tracker on the market.

Fitbit Inspire

Fitbit

At $70, the Fitbit Inspire (non-HR variant) undercuts the Garmin Vivofit 4 by about $10. Aside from lacking a heart rate sensor and goal-based exercises, the Fitbit Inspire isn’t all that much different from the Inspire HR.

That means you get the same great fitness/sleep/health tracking as the pricier model, albeit with a slightly smaller feature set. Full disclosure, we have not reviewed the Fitbit Inspire, though it’s close enough to the Inspire HR that we just had to include it on our list.

Garmin Vivofit 4

Garmin’s Vivofit 3 was one of our favorite inexpensive fitness trackers of 2017. Is the Vivofit 4 a worthy successor? That depends.

Related:Garmin Vivofit 4 review Best fitness trackers for kids

In many ways, the Vivofit 4 is an improvement over its predecessor. It’s more comfortable, has a new color display, and plenty of useful extras. But the lack of heart rate monitor connectivity is unfortunate, and we hope it returns with the next model.

Throughout our two weeks of testing, the Vivofit 4 was so close to delivering accurate results but ultimately fell short more often than we’d like. To its credit, it does offer users a general idea of their performance levels, which is why most people will buy the Vivofit 4. It’s an inexpensive fitness tracker that you basically never have to take off, and it keeps track of the basics. If you need a device you basically never have to take off, the Vivofit 4 is for you. If you own a Vivofit 3, it might not be worth it to upgrade.

So there you have it, the best fitness trackers on the market right now! How did you like our list? Did we leave anything out? If so, let us know in the comments!

Related

The Xiaomi Mi Band is proof that you can get a sleek fitness tracker with amazing battery life and some advanced smart features for under $50. The Mi Band 3 doesn’t break the formula, offering some significant upgrades on the previous model, and keeping it firmly as our favorite budget fitness tracker.

Read on to find out about the Xiaomi Mi Band 3, and if you can’t wait, use the coupon code makeuseof2 to get the Mi Band 3 now for just $30.99!

Design and Specs

• 0.78″ PMOLED capacitive touchscreen
• Continuous heart rate sensor
• IP67 rated, waterproof to 50m
• Black silicone band (adjustable from 155-216mm), and proprietary USB charging cable included
• Total weight: 20g, including the standard band

Mi Band 3 vs Mi Band 2

The 0.78 inch PMOLED screen is quite a big upgrade from the 0.42 inch LED one on the Mi Band 2. As well as obviously being larger and able to display more information at once (more on that later), it’s a little more visible outdoors, though you’ll still need to squint or shade the device to view in the brightest of summer’s days.

The battery has been increased from 70 to 110 mAh, and Xiaomi claim that leads to 20 days battery life. That’s a reasonable estimate, but only if you don’t have constant notifications or very frequent heart rate monitoring. With heart rate measurements being taken every 10 minutes, I was getting through about 5% per day. When I enabled notifications for nearly everything (and that’s a lot of emails), it ate through closer to 10% per day. That’s still a solid week, even with the most energy consuming things enabled. 20 days estimate for most people is definitely possible.

The device itself is ever so slightly bigger to accommodate these changes. Place them side by side and you probably wouldn’t notice. However, it’s different enough that you’ll need to buy a new band, as it won’t fit in the old ones.

The physical button of the Mi Band 2 has been replaced by the fully capacitive screen. This leads to one very welcome new feature: IP67 waterproof rating, up to 50m. You can shower, swim, or hangout poolside without worry.

Setup

UPDATED: Shortly after this review was scheduled, the English language firmware update was made available. The device is now fully in English, but if you buy the Original Version linked in this review, it will arrive in Chinese packaging, and will need a firmware update before transforming into English.

That said, it didn’t really matter being in Chinese. The Mi fit app is completely in English, and the Mi Band device itself is easy to understand with simple iconography.

The only daunting part of setting a device up in Chinese was the initial welcome message when we turned the device on. It translates as “connect to the app”, which means download the Mi Fit app, logging in or registering an account, then adding a device. However, even after adding our Mi Band to the app, another message asked us to “open the app and update”. Even with the aid of my Chinese speaking wife, we weren’t sure precisely what that meant given that the app was already open. It turns out we needed to force close the app, and open it again. This triggered the required firmware update. From then, all the options are set using the (English) Mi Fit app.

Note: there’s also a NFC version available, which costs twice as much. Don’t buy that. It’ll only work within China using Mi Pay accounts, not Apple or Google Pay. In the US or UK, the NFC likely won’t function at all.

Navigating the Mi Band

Even in Chinese, navigating the Mi Band menu structure is really simple thanks to some obvious icongraphy, with one exception, which we’ll talk about in a moment. Here’s an overview of what you’ll find:

• Main screen: time and date, as well as steps (if configured to show this). The Chinese characters display day of the week.
• Status screens: steps, distance travelled, calories burned.
• Heart rate tracking: manually initiate a reading by holding down the button.
• Weather: today, tomorrow, and the day after. This shows high/low temperatures, and a summary icon for rain/sun etc.
• Utilities: stopwatch, find my phone (looks like a phone with a magnifying glass), change watchface (a t-shirt, for some unimaginable reason), and model/version info.
• Notifications: up to 5 stored which you can scroll left and right to view.

Scroll up and down to cycle through the first level screens. If the screen has more information, you can scroll left and right to access the other pages. Otherwise, selections are performed by holding down on the capacitive indent button at the bottom of the screen.

To be honest, it’s all rather obvious as long as you’re not the sort of person who will panic at the sight of a foreign language, particular one that consists largely of squiggles. The only thing I wondered about was the t-shirt icon. Clicking through to that gives you a choice of three basic “watch faces”, only one of which includes step count summary. Hold down on the button again to make your selection.

Fitness Tracking

Your steps and a basic classification of activity (light walking, standing, light activity) will be automatically recorded, but for any other kind of specified activity, you’ll need to use the app to initiate the session. The default activities are:

• Outdoor running
• Treadmill running
• Cycling
• Walking

All of those will record your route using the GPS in your phone (except for treadmill running); continuous heart rate monitoring (with a configurable alarm for maximum heart rate); and will give period updates through your phone’s speaker on how fast you were, how long the previous kilometer took, and how far you’ve travelled in total. Curiously for a device that’s waterproof, swimming is not one of the defaults.

A range of other activities can also be tagged, but for some reason these are accessed through your profile tab, in a section called “Behavior Tagging”, rather the standard activity tab. These include things like standing, eating, and having a bath. You can even add a custom activity, like “Wasting time playing Fornite BR”. For most people, this level of granularity is clearly far too much, but those interested in the concept of quantified selfThe Quantified Self: How To Track Your Life With Your iPhoneThe Quantified Self: How To Track Your Life With Your iPhoneIf you track your actions, you will be able to do them better. However, tracking can be tiresome if you don't have the right tools. Let's make it as simple as possible.Read More will find it fascinating to track their entire day.

Xiaomi Mi Band 3 Review

Heart Rate Monitoring

Using an optical sensor, the Mi Band 3 will automatically track your heart rate during fitness activities and during sleep, but can also be configured for continuous heart rate monitoring at set intervals of 1, 10, or 30 minutes throughout the day. I set mine at 10 minutes to get a complete daily picture of fluctuations, as I assumed optimistically that anything strenuous I did would be for longer than 10 minutes at a time.

Whether the data is reliable or not is hotly debated. My only point of comparison is a cheap blood pressure monitor, which seemed to line up, but the accuracy of which could also be questioned. I’m not a doctor and I wouldn’t rely on this for serious heart problem monitoring, but the numbers obtained lined up with whatever activity I was doing, and seemed sensible.

On rare occasions, the heart rate sensor can fail. It works better if the band is on tightly, so you’re advised to tightly it up before an activity if that data is important to you. Generally I found it reliable, as you can see from the graphs above, there were only a few times when the sensor just couldn’t get a reading, probably because the band was too loose, or twisted round my arm.

What I drew from the information is that I don’t do nearly enough exercise to get my heartrate really up to aerobic levels or higher. I probably didn’t need a fitness tracker to tell me that though.

Sleep Tracking

Making use of the accelerometer and heart rate sensor, the sleep tracking provides an overview of your total sleep and attempts to classify how much deep sleep you enjoyed. Again, exactly how reliable this data is–particular the sleep classification–is debatable. The sleep and wake times lined up with reality though, and according to Xiaomi, I generally sleep better than 99% of people, which I’d tend to agree with.

Without wearing an EEG at night, the sleep tracking is about as good as you’re going to get from a fitness tracking wrist band.

App Notifications

The larger screen is certainly better at displaying notifications than the Mi Band 2, but it’s still not ideal. You can fit enough Chinese characters on here for a full sentence or two, but English words are less efficient. Slack messages, for example, displayed the fact it’s a Slack message, who it’s from, and the first five to ten words of the message. Email subject lines were cut off half way. You could scroll right to view the rest of it, but if it looks important you’ll probably just take out your phone anyway, which somewhat defeats the point.

That said, I did find eBay notifications useful. My phone gets so many messages that I tend to just ignore the buzzing, but that means I miss the auction end. Looking at the Mi Band was a quick way to filter through notifications, and quickly ignore those that I didn’t care about. Then again: I should probably just set my phone notifications more carefully instead.

You can also enable a break reminder, which will buzz you if you’ve been sat around doing nothing for an hour. Minor feature, but I found it helpful during those long coding sessions.

Finally, you can schedule alarms or events through the Mi Fit app too, but I can’t see any reason to use this instead of your phone’s built-in apps or Google Calendar.

Apple Health Syncing

Like all good fitness trackers, the Mi Band 3 is able to sync data with Apple Health (and Google Health, though we didn’t test on Android). Your data isn’t locked away inside the app, unable to be shared because the device makers want to keep you tied into their system. Yes, I’m looking at you Fitbit.

Steps, sleep, and weight data will be automatically exported once linked. The latter obviously isn’t a feature your Mi Band supports, but you can manually enter weight into the Mi Fit app, or buy some Xiaomi Smart Scales to automate that.

Curiously, continuous heart rate measurements are not exported to Apple Health, but manually initiated measurement are. There are third party apps that can handle this if you’d like, but you’ll to pay a few dollars extra. I hope this is just a bug that’ll be updated in future, since the app does register itself as a data source to Heart Rate, at least on iOS.

Should You Buy the Mi Band 3?

For most people, the Xiaomi Mi Band 3 is a fantastic value fitness tracker. It offers some advanced features like app notifications, continuous heart monitoring, sleep tracking, integration with Apple Health, as well as being completely waterproof. And it’ll be at least a week before you need to recharge. That’s an awful lot of bang for your $35. For comparison, the FitBit range starts at $100.

For very active users who think manually initiating an activity is tiresome, you’ll want to look at those more expensive devicesFitbit Versa Review: Fitbit's Best Wearable Yet?Fitbit Versa Review: Fitbit's Best Wearable Yet?Read More that can classify workouts automatically.

We didn’t have a problem with setting up the device in Chinese–you could wait for the international edition, but we don’t think there’s any need to. If you do choose to purchase now, use the coupon code makeuseof2 to get the Mi Band 3 for $30.99.

Alternatively, enter our competition below to win a Mi Band 3!

Explore more about: Fitbit, Fitness, MakeUseOf Giveaway, Smartwatch, Xiaomi.

1. What about without phone features?
   I mean, I'm sure that Mi phones can't connect to two device at the same time. I carry a Bluetooth headphone every time so not possible to stay connect to this band 3.
   Do you want to say something about that?

   • You can connect to multiple Bluetooth devices, just not multiple audio output devices.

     • Thanks a lot. It's helps. I was about to cancel my order about 'Band 3'.

2. Thanks for the review. Did you test the step counter? I have been using a mi band 3 for 5 days now and the step counter seems to be massively over counting. It counted 70 steps while I was at my pc for 30mns, 100 steps while watching TV for 1 hour and 1000 steps after driving for 45mns! Faulty product?

   • Mine is reliable, and I saw a video review where the band was extremely reliable (various step pattern, tested against a 'clicker'). It did better than the Fitbit and Garmin trackers which were also tested.

3. Does it support notifications on iOS? Are there any Android-specific features?

4. Bought two but both fell offf since its wrist holder is not strong or grip is not enough. 4000 down the drain. let them make it physically hold onto the wrsit strap properly or make steel wrist band?

5. Does the 'other' on/off button under App alerts refer to all other apps on IOS ?

6. I ordered the Mi Band 3 package with an extra wristband and was pleasantly surprised that I could track shipping all the way from China. Delivery took about 3 weeks. Unfortunately, they sent the wrong package--I did not get the spare wristband. Also, I was not able to set up an account using my phone number, so I used my Google account. After that, setup went pretty smoothly: the app connected to my device and immediately updated the firmware. So far it seems to work pretty well.

7. Best feature of the Mi Bands is that they act as a trusted device to unlock my phone.

8. Mi band is not enough to sleep traking. Because i sleep at 06:00 am sometimes but it shows the sleep time after 10:00 pm. I hope they fix this so i can buy a new one :)

9. But sleep tracking is not enough. Because i am sleep at 06:00 am three times of a week but mi band only shows the sleep time that begins after 10:00 pm. I hope they fix this so i can buy the new one :)

10. The updated English firmware is now out. My Mi Band 3 updated last night.