[General Accessories] Deleted member 3493119:
I've used many different smartwatches over the past months but as they tend to have a rather weak vibration motor I started to look into a device to use along with it solely for notifications, and then I found the Miband 1S which seemed to fit my needs. I've positive experiences with Xiaomi devices in the past so I placed an order, I've now used the Miband for about a month and this is my review of the unit. Let's jump into it, shall we?

The Miband itself comes in a tiny little box that don't reveal all that much about the actual product, other than a Xiaomi logo on the front and on the back of the box there's some technical specifications that are related to the product. When you open the box, the first thing that you'll find is the actual "core unit" attached to a thick piece of cardboard, and below it is the accessories that are included with the product. There's not many accessories other than a special proprietary charging cable with a flat noodle-styled cable and a band made of some kind of rubber.

After removing the unit, I almost instantly felt that the item was made out of high quality as it feels very solid, and it definitely doesn't feel cheap in any way I could think of. The front of the core unit is covered by a plate made out of anodized aluminum and there's also 3 LED's, and on the back is the actual sensor that's used to measure the heart rate. On the side there’s nothing more than 2 pins that are made out of copper, that are used to charge the unit as it’s waterproof.

To fully take advantage of the MiBand 1S you’ve to sideload an application that’s available on the Chinese MIUI appstore, as the app for Miband that’s available on Google Play is heavily outdated and doesn’t support the heart rate monitor. After the app is sideloaded, the pairing process was very straight forward as the app is in plain English and guides you through the entire process.

So when it comes to the app for the product, I really like the fact that it’s easy to navigate and does display the data in a way that’s very easy to understand, and it’s also very easy to make changes to the settings of the band. I also like the fact that there’s a running mode and that you can manually measure the heart rate from there. However, there’s some major disadvantages with the app such as that it does not offer not many settings and lacks some features such as no proper notification support. However, with third party apps such this isn’t really a problem and those apps work along with the official app with no issues that I could find.

When it comes to the tracking the band does, I’m quite surprised by that it’s pretty accurate for the price that this unit comes in at. The statistics are pretty much the same as the ones that my other unit, Moto 360, counts while wearing both devices at the same time. The data isn’t very detailed but it does what it’s supposed to and make monitoring easy, and the added heart rate sensor is a nice bonus that bring additional value to the product.

The battery life isn’t as good as with the older generation of the Miband, but that’s primarily due to the added heart rate sensor that consume additional battery. For me, the Miband lasts about a week on a charge with all the settings enabled that are said to decrease the battery life but for me that’s not a problem as for me it’s a habit to put the device on the charger.

So conclusion time; the Miband 1S is one of my favorite smartbands out there due to its competitive pricing. The battery life is decent and the vibration is strong, and the data it collects are accurate. There’s no real reason not to buy this device and for the $26 that it costed me it’s certainly one of the better purchases I’ve made lately!

Bought my unit @ Everbuying.net for $26 and the link is:

http://www.everbuying.net/product1113384.html