As expected, Xiaomi has announced its first smartwatch and it's called the Mi Watch. It marks Xiaomi’s entry into the smartwatch category after its success with fitness tracking devices like the Xiaomi Mi Band 4.
The Mi Watch has so far only been confirmed for China, but often Xiaomi introduces products in its home market before then bringing them to other locations around the world.
The device will run Google's Wear OS software, but Xiaomi's approach is a little different to its competitors. It is not only creating the hardware platform, but it's also designing a different skin that goes over the top of Wear OS to vastly change the design.
It's called MIUI For Watch and it's a very different visual approach to the standard look of Wear OS. More than 40 major Chinese apps have also been designed specifically for the Mi Watch, such as TikTok, Nio and QQ Messenger. Xiaomi's XiaoAI assistant is also integrated into the experience.
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On the hardware front, the Mi Watch follows a design very reminiscent of the Apple Watch with a square body with rounded edges along with a crown and a button on the right side.
It has a 1.78-inch AMOLED display with a toughened curved glass on top. There's a microphone on both sides, and a loudspeaker on the left with charging pins and a heart rate monitor sitting on the rear of the watch. The casing is made of an aluminum alloy with a matte finish and comes with a host of replaceable watch bands.
The Mi Watch is powered by the Snapdragon Wear 3100 4G chipset and this uses four Cortex A7 cores clocked at 1.2GHz. It's paired with a 570mAh battery, which Xiaomi says should last for 36 hours on a single charge.
The Mi Watch is also 4G capable by making use of an eSIM to continue all phone functions without needing to be actively connected to your smartphone.
Other features such as WiFi, GPS, NFC (for payments in China), Bluetooth, and heart rate monitoring are all included. Other fitness-centric features include blood oxygen sensors, sleep tracking, body energy monitoring and the device is also water resistant for swimming.
How much will it cost?
In true Xiaomi fashion, the Mi Watch is priced very competitively at just CNY 1,299 in China (about Rs 13,000, £150, $190, AU$270), and will go on sale in the country on November 11.
We don't currently know when we'll see the device launch in other countries.
There's a more premium variant of the smartwatch as well which features a sapphire glass, stainless steel casing and a metal strap. The exclusive edition is priced at CNY 1,999 (about Rs 20,000, £220, $290, AU$410) and will go on sale at some point in December.
