Xiaomi Watch 2 review – Wareable

As Wear OS has gained strength over the last few years, we’ve seen an influx of highly capable smartwatches from many different brands – all, crucially, with price tags to match.

What we haven’t seen is many affordable options. 

If you’ve been looking for an Android-compatible watch on a budget, you’ve been limited to old-gen models. Well, until Xiaomi announced the Watch 2 back in February, that is.

With this latest release, the Chinese giant is helping fill the gaping chasm of budget-friendly Wear OS watches – all while promising the core of Wear OS 3.5 and a 65-hour battery life.

Is it a smartwatch worth considering? We’ve been wearing the Watch 2 for the last few weeks to find out.

Price and competition

Xiaomi didn’t just introduce a budget option with the Watch 2, it also added some much-needed justification to the Watch 2 Pro – a smartwatch that we found far too clunky and buggy to justify the $240 RRP ($280 with LTE). 

By comparison, the standard Xiaomi Watch 2 costs just $169. And, as we alluded to in the intro there, no current-get device really comes close to matching that low price tag.

It’s only really a price you can achieve when you look at older generations, with the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 ($150) comfortably the best budget watch in that regard – and also capable of running Wear OS 4. 

Otherwise, as we say, entry-level Wear OS watches are relatively non-existent.

Design and screen

It’s a huge coincidence – or perhaps not, depending on how you view Xiaomi’s generally derivative designs – that the most obvious design comp for the Watch 2 is its key rival, the Galaxy Watch 4. 

Xiaomi has removed the crown from the Pro model for the standard edition, and this, alongside the 2 o’clock/4 o’clock button placement, aluminum case, and very comparable weight, ensures Xiaomi’s latest watch is a dead ringer for the 2021 Samsung smartwatch.

But this isn’t a criticism – it really works. The Watch 2 is exceptionally light for a 46mm case and felt super comfortable during daily wear, sleep, and workouts over our testing time. The display, too – a 1.43-inch AMOLED number – is bright and detailed no matter the conditions, though it is more prone than most to screen smudges from fingerprints.

Ultimately, these are likely the same reasons why Samsung is still selling this brand of lightweight, clean-edged smartwatches – and why they’re likely, if rumors are to be believed, to be re-releasing it under a new name later this summer. 

Is it a little boring? Maybe. But for the price, we don’t think many will mind. And, as we found with the more considered Watch 2 Pro, extra details can very much be to the detriment of wearability.

What we can’t really speak with any great confidence is durability. We haven’t encountered any issues with the Watch 2 over the last few weeks – and we spent plenty of hours in the weights room – but that flat edge is one we would be conscious of over the long term. 

The only negative we can find with the design is the lack of case size options.

Xiaomi is hardly the only company guilty of a lack of case variety, however – and, as we’ll come onto later, it’s perhaps more understandable not to further shrink a device with a relatively limited battery.

Features and OS

We were critical of the half-baked feel of Xiaomi’s Wear OS 3.5 skin we tested on the Pro edition. Finger-scrolling was often buggy, workouts would often bork, and there were a couple of really annoying occasions when placing it on the charger would have to result in a hard restart. 

Happily, we’ve encountered nothing of the sort with the Watch 2, indicating Xiaomi has figured out some of those nagging issues from the first go-around of blending Wear OS with its MIUI software.

It’s exactly what we wanted from our initial time with Xiaomi’s take on the software. It also ensures the Watch 2 is far superior (at least in Western markets) to the Xiaomi S range of smartwatches that don’t boast the might of third-party apps like Spotify and WhatsApp from the Google Play Store, as well as key Google services, like Maps, Assistant, and Wallet.

The big omission here is LTE – and this is probably the biggest reason to fork out extra for the Pro model. When you are connected to your phone, though, the mirroring for notifications and weather all works without issue. And this isn’t something that’s always been true of Xiaomi watches.

As we’ve seen from other Android-ready vendors, like Mobvoi, Xiaomi has also neglected to leap to Wear OS 4 with the Watch 2.

This isn’t the end of the world, since the only major difference in our view is the existence of cloud backups on the newer software, but it’s also very likely (given what we’ve seen so far) that the Watch 2 will be able to enjoy the upcoming benefits of Wear OS 5, either.

We’re confident tailored updates will still roll out over the next couple of years, so, again, it may not end up being a big deal in practical terms. Yet, it is still true that having a smartwatch with software from 2022 just isn’t as attractive.

Sports tracking

We’re already on record as enjoying wearing the Watch 2 during various workout types (lifting, swimming, and cycling during our testing period) over something like the Watch 2 Pro, but comfort is only a part of the picture.

Interestingly, though, it also bests its more premium sibling when analyzing heart rate. While the Pro’s heart rate sensor was an absolute disaster during testing – frequently unable to register big changes in intensity or, on the odd occasion, dropping out completely – the Watch 2 was much less dramatic.

We haven’t been able to put it through our usual wringer of interval training runs outdoors (which also means we haven’t been able to test the accuracy of the GPS), but our indoor exercises were very encouraging.

When we compared it to the Garmin Epix Pro (Gen 2) in real-time, it was generally within 1-2 beats per minute. And this was confirmed in the post-workout screens. We only experienced one occasion in which the Watch 2’s average BPM for a session deviated from the gold-standard Garmin by more than a beat, and this was in the water, where HR is notoriously difficult to track.

The same theme was present with max HR figures, resulting in a really encouraging performance overall. We’ll be back to test the GPS tracking and unique apps like ‘Running Course’ (full of pre-set running workouts) to see if it’s the real deal in more than just heart rate tracking.

Our only major gripe with the Watch 2 activity tracking experience has been Mi Fitness, which continues to be a total chore to analyze data from.

Like we’ve found with other Xiaomi wearables, certain sections of the app just don’t show any data unless you show them in a weekly or monthly view, while workouts are sometimes filled with glitched calorie figures or other info that doesn’t match the watch.

It’s a lack of polish we hope Xiaomi addresses soon, and, while it’s there, we’d also love to see an overhaul of its more ‘advanced’ metrics, like VO2 max, training load, and recovery time data.

These all continue to be poor imitations of what we see from the likes of Garmin. Something like lighter gym sessions, for example, will always result in a suggested recovery time we would expect from performing a multi-hour run, meaning you quickly learn to just ignore it.

Health tracking

Unlike you’ll find with its more expensive sibling, which boasts unique (if largely inaccurate) health features such as body composition analysis, the Watch 2 keeps things very simple.

You get the standard set of health and wellness-related insights here: all-day heart rate, blood oxygen analysis, sleep tracking and stages, stress monitoring, and breathing work guidance.

The presentation of these, as we mentioned just above, is nowhere near what you’ll find from premium picks like Oura, Whoop, or Garmin, but the raw data does hold up against these more advanced wearables and provides you with an accurate enough picture.

Sleep tracking, for example, saw the Watch 2 log our asleep/wake times and time in bed within 10-20 minutes of Oura each day, but never quite got it bang on. For most, that’s totally fine. We do wish Xiaomi was a bit more proactive in what it actually tracks from a health perspective, though, and not just content to take a spot reading or deliver the bare minimum.

It’s also worth pointing out that you aren’t getting advanced features like ECG or skin temperature here, either. And, as far as we can tell, women-focused health features are also scarce.

It wouldn’t be a Xiaomi review unless we moaned about the fact the company turns off almost every advanced element of tracking by default, as well.

What’s ultimately a pretty transparent attempt at pumping up battery estimates means users have to manually adjust the settings of each one to receive anything half-useful, which is a game we really hope is dropped for the next set of Xiaomi watches.

Battery life

Xiaomi quotes a fairly respectable 65-hour battery life for the Watch 2 – the same you’ll find with the non-LTE version of the Pro model.

While we did manage to scrape 2-3 days frequently with the Pro edition, though, we’ve been lucky to get more than a day out of the standard model running similar settings. 

Xiaomi says that the 65-hour estimation is based on ‘typical usage mode’ tested internally, but, at least in our experience, achieving anything close to this would require minimal usage, brightness to be low, and settings like the always-on display mode and various health and tracking features to be nerfed to their basic, factory setting form.

It’s a major disappointment that Xiaomi couldn’t find a way to make that 495mAh unit stretch a little more and alleviate some of that battery anxiety. The result, unfortunately, is that you’ll have to incorporate throwing the Watch 2 onto the charger into your daily routine.

The only saving grace there is that it does charge incredibly quickly. Just 30 minutes on the puck will see it go from around 10% to full charge, eliminating some of the friction of single-day battery life. Forget to do so, however, and it’s curtains.