#wearos

danie10@squeet.me

Xiaomi Watch 2 Pro with Wear OS to compete with Samsung Galaxy Watch 6: As much to offer but costs less

Smartwatch with its strap folded back behind the watch, and a watchface with a chronometer type face with all the inner gears showing.
The Watch 2 Pro is Xiaomi’s first smartwatch to run Wear OS. It is a properly high-end smartwatch with a 1.43-inch OLED screen inside a 46mm stainless steel case with an IP68 rating. It also features a digital crown, similar to the Apple Watch and the Pixel Watch.

Qualcomm’s 4nm Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1 chip powers this smartwatch. It comes with a 65-hour battery life promise, higher than the Galaxy Watch 6’s 40-hour claim but lower than the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro’s 80-hour figure.

Xiaomi’s new smartwatch can also measure body composition, which was earlier only available on Galaxy Watches. It also features blood oxygen measurement, heart rate tracking with high heart rate notifications, sleep tracking, and stress measurements. It has dual-frequency GPS, though, which is not available on any Galaxy Watch, and it offers more accurate location tracking accuracy.

So, all in all, very interesting, and it is high time there was better competition in the Wear OS market. It lacks ECG functionality, and we’ll have to see how it does in the real-world for heart rate tracking. So far, only the Huawei watch is close to Apple Watch territory when it comes to really accurate heart rate tracking (my own Galaxy Watch has shown rather disappointing results for exercise tracking). The Huawei watch, though, had its NFC payments functionality pulled in my country, and that was a bit of a dealbreaker for me (and interestingly, the linked article does not mention anything about NFC on the Xiaomi watch).

The Wear OS watches have not had really great battery life, like the Huawei watch does, which runs its own OS. I get about two and a half days off my Galaxy Watch, but I feel it could be better.

So, I’m going to be very interested to see the hands-on reviews of this watch, as well as the objective health tracking tests.

See https://www.sammobile.com/news/xiaomi-watch-2-pro-wear-os-launched-compete-galaxy-watch-6
#Blog, #technology, #WearOS, #xiaomi