This review was prompted by the recent “Fitbit as a Silent Alarm Clock” review. I recommend a cheaper alternative — Mi Band 1S. It’s an inexpensive ($15 shipped) wrist band which absolutely requires a smart phone (Android 4.4 and up or iOS) to function and it features:

1. Silent (vibrating) alarms
2. Activity tracking
3. Sleep tracking
4. Pulse rate meter — this is the “new” feature of the 1S version (released in fall of 2015) over the older 1 version.

There are no physical buttons on the Mi Band, although it can detect taps. However either I’m doing something wrong or they’re hit or miss. The wristband itself has no display (aside from three inscrutable LEDs), so you will absolutely need a smartphone to monitor data it records and set things up (alarms, etc).

It lasts about a month on one charge! Due to irregular hours which I’ve had to keep at work I needed at least two of these features — silent alarm and sleep tracking. I needed a silent alarm because I sometimes sleep during the day with the ear plugs, rendering regular alarms useless, and I was curious about the quality of my day-time sleep. The band’s activity tracking and pulse rate meter are a nice bonus, but I wasn’t (and still am not) much interested in those features. I can’t comment on the accuracy of the pedometer, other than to say that I think it’s decently accurate. At the very least, it’s no worse than similar and more expensive bands (with the exception of maybe Garmin), although as I understand how the Mi Band 1S works, it doesn’t keep a BlueTooth connection to the phone at all times so it can’t enjoy additional accuracy derived from your smart phone connection.

The pulse rate measuring is pretty accurate and it’s a nice bonus in a $15 device. I believe that it’s used a lot to determine if you’ve fallen asleep (more on that later). As an owner of an Android Wear wristwatch I wasn’t looking for the day-time wrist notifications about events on my phone. Unfortunately, all Android Wear devices wear out (haha) their batteries pretty quickly — usually well within 24 hours, so you have to pick either using it during the day and charging it at night or charging it during the day and only using it as an (expensive!) silent alarm.

And this was one of the two reasons I’ve ordered Mi Band 1S — it lasts about a month on its puny battery and it has a vibrating silent alarm, which is great if you don’t want to wake up your spouse or if you need to sleep with earplugs. The Mi Fit app lets you schedule up to 3 alarms, any of those can be either recurring or a one-time alarm and they can be set to be “smart” alarms, which monitor your sleep pattern within 30 minutes of your desired awakening time to buzz when you’re farthest from deep sleep. (This smart alarm feature never properly worked for me, neither with Mi Band 1S nor with the other Android apps before — I’d just be awoke 30 minutes before I needed to. So I cut my smart alarm testing after 1 or 2 unsuccessful attempts.)

The regular alarms work *very well* on this wristband. With a selection of 3 alarms, you can set a recurring alarm for the weekdays, another recurring alarm for the weekend and have one slot available for your one-time alarms when you need them. The Mi 1S Band is very worth its price just for this feature alone. Once programmed, alarms operate independently from your smartphone — the alarms are stored in the wristband memory so you can set them up, switch the smartphone off, and the wristband will still wake you.

Besides the alarms, the wristband can be set to vibrate when your phone is ringing (and locked) and also upon new texts or additional (up to 3, I’m assuming to preserve battery) apps. There’s a third party app in the Play Store which will let you configure wristband notifications for as many apps as you want or even set up different notification patterns based on the sender of the e-mail, instant message or text, but as I said I have my Android Wear for that.

Here’s the reason I decided to get a Mi Band 1S — sleep tracking. As I mentioned earlier, my sleep hygiene was pretty poor and I wanted to: 1) Monitor the hours I spend sleeping, and 2) Monitor the quality of my sleep. Here’s what I learned: If you fall asleep between 8pm and midnight and don’t launch the Mi Fit app on your phone half-way through the night, the sleep detection is fantastic. It does *not* count the time I spend reading in bed as sleep. So all in all, it can detect when you’ve fallen asleep and when you woke up with fantastic accuracy. Sleep tracking does fall short though. It does not detect very well if you wake up for a few minutes. So if you need to wake up for, let’s say a sip of water, in the middle of the night and you’re back in bed within minutes, it won’t register it. And if you need to launch an app (causing it to connect to the band and fetch the data) in the middle of the night — for example to set or adjust the wristband alarm, your sleep data is ruined for the night. Worst for me, it seems that the wristband doesn’t even try to detect the sleep during daytime. This was my biggest disappointment.

There are of course a few things which could be totally improved with the software and not the device itself: 1) While lacking normal a LCD it has three tiny white LEDs used to indicate your progress towards your daily step count. The problem is, it blinks at night sometimes. If you’re in bed with your wrist close to your eyes as you’re trying to fall asleep this blinking can be unpleasant. 2) The phone app is a bit awkward to use and lacks clarity and finesse, especially if you’ve been spoiled by some American companies’ pursuit of perfect user experience. Things have changed for the better in the recently released version 2.0, but even there I’m struggling to have the wristband vibrate with the Android’s stock alarm clock. However at $15 (just check aliexpress.com to find a large number of sellers willing to send your order all over the world) it’s a fantastic little device and if you don’t already own a more expensive activity tracker with long battery life I can totally recommend Mi Band 1S.

While this review was being prepared for publication, Xiaomi has released the new version of their fitness band — Mi Band 2. The review of Mi Band 2 (and its comparison to Mi Band 1S reviewed above) is coming up soon.

-- Stan Grishin 09/27/16