Mi Band 4 Quick Review

I had been feeling groggy for a long time and I knew it was because I wasn’t sleeping well. I wanted to track my sleep just to know how bad the situation is.

Having used Mi band 1st edition, that was a quick product recall. Did a quick search to discover that Mi band 4, the latest version, isn’t available in India. I ordered it from AliExpress (and now I’m addicted to AliExpress, that’s for a different blog post). Delivery didn’t take long, I had my hands on the product within 20days. For all the other products I ordered from AliExpress, they’re yet to reach me 🤷

Anyhow, I bought the Chinese version which was at INR 1.8k whereas the International version was priced at INR 2.2k. There’s absolutely no good reason to spend extra as the Chinese version supports English once it’s synced with the MI band App.

Coming back to the review, like I said, the sole reason to purchase the product was to track sleep. And boy is it bad! I barely get few mins of deep sleep each day. I might sleep for hours but the reason I am groggy each morning is because I don’t get much deep sleep. I tried a bunch of things to correct it from using sleeping mask to maintaining constant room temperature, which means running the AC entire night. Nothing worked as well as not having caffeine post 7PM and working out. I can see it’s working, my deep sleep has increased from 15-17mins to an hour. It needs to be better. I’ll continue to figure it out.

Rest of features are pretty neat as well. I’m not sure on the accuracy of the sports features. Kilometers recorded on treadmill and the band never match. It’s always lower by a few hundred meters on the band.

I like that it’s water resistant or can be used to measure swimming. I always forgot to remove Mi band 1 before heading to shower. I’d like to believe my carelessness resulted in it’s breakdown.

I haven’t synced app or call notifications with the band. That’d be just annoying.

The Band 4 is definitely value for money. I’ve heard that it’s going to launch in India by Sept 17. You can blindly go for it.

I’m getting used to tracking Heart BPM. In my opinion it’s pretty accurate as my resting heart rate is always near to 70. Anything between 60-80 BPM is good enough. People who are more athletic usually have lower RHR.

One last thing.. I absolutely love the alarm feature. Instead of waking up to really skirmish alarm ring, the band gently wakes me up with vibration. It’s strong enough to wake me up in one go.