Redmi Watch 4 Review: Everything you’d want on a smartwatch below RM500
If you’re on the prowl for a new smartwatch that won’t break the bank, make sure you keep the Redmi Watch 4 on your radars.
The Redmi Watch 4 was announced alongside a catalogue of new products, including the Redmi Note 13 Series and the Redmi Buds 5 Pro. Although the Note 13 smartphones hogged plenty of limelight, the Redmi Watch 4 is deserving of similar praise too, as we’ve found out.
With an official retail price of RM459, you’ll be getting a no-nonsense smartwatch that won’t leave you wanting more. Here’s our review of the Redmi Watch 4.
Sleek and sporty design
The Redmi Watch 4 comes in two colour choices: Obsidian Black and Silver Gray, with matching TPU straps to go with. You can purchase straps of other colours separately, with Mint Green, Dark Cyan, and Pastel Purple available.
Ours came in Obsidian Black.
What you’ll get is a sleek looking smart timepiece that isn’t too showy, yet elegant enough to be taken notice of. The case is lined with an aluminum alloy frame that gives it a shiny clean sheen, and the sides are slightly curved, despite sporting a completely flat display.
About its display, the Redmi Watch 4 has a 1.97″ AMOLED display, which, on a personal standpoint is the perfect size to fit over my wrist. Small watch faces don’t really cut it for me. I’d rather a large display with plenty of real estate for my fingers to navigate, as well as having all my notifications large enough to see at a glance, so this struck the balance perfectly. A drawback is that it lacks glass protection. There’s no Gorilla Glass or sapphire crystal here, which is excusable for smartwatch of this price range. Nevertheless, unless you intentionally fling the watch to the ground, the glass will still hold up well.
Along the side rails of the Redmi Watch 4 is a single stainless steel rotating crown that doubles as a home button and the function menu. The rotating crown is nothing more than a nice-to-have here, as you’ll need to turn it quite a bit before you flip to the next page; you’re better off just swiping. Also, rotating doesn’t work on the home screen. If you’re really hell-bent on using the crown you’ll have to swipe once to the widget or notifications page first, then rotate.
The smartwatch has 600nits peak brightness that’s more than visible enough to see under harsh sunlight, particularly useful for outdoor exercising. Its high brightness paired with the TPU straps that come with renders it a good balance between a sports and casual wearable in my books. More than that, it has a host of fitness features – but we’ll get to that later on.
I really, really appreciate how easy it is to change the straps on the Redmi Watch 4. I absolutely abhor straps that uses release pins where you’re forced to jam the tip of your finger nails in a nook to pull the pins out of its catch (if you’ve got stubby fingers like mine, you’ll feel me too). So it was a lovely surprise that the Redmi Watch 4 comes with a quick release mechanism that only needs you to push down a release button for the straps to eject.
Comprehensive health measurements
The Redmi Watch 4 has all the health measurements you’d expect on a smartwatch at this price range. For your peace of mind, if you’re considering the watch, we’ll do a brief walkthrough.
You’ll have the usual steps and calorie counters, along with heart rate sensors, blood oxygen monitoring, stress monitoring, and sleep monitoring.
For what it’s worth, step counters were pretty accurate. After painstakingly walking while counting 500 steps, the step counter on the watch came up to 497. The difference being quite negligible when getting an estimate of the number of steps you put in daily.
Sleep monitoring was pleasantly in-depth, with the watch being able to track three different stages of sleep: Deep, Light, and REM. There’s even an option for Advanced monitoring, where it will track heart rates and breathing during sleep. These are of course nothing more than surface level details and professional medical help should always be your go-to if you’re facing any respiratory troubles.
As with most Xiaomi smart bands and watches, there’s the Vitality Score which tracks your overall lifestyle over the course of 7 days. Vitality Scores are based on WHO guidelines, taking into account Physical Activity and Sedentary Behaviour. If you’re pushing for a healthier lifestyle, this could be a good start.
All these readings are projected onto the Mi Fitness app, which is as clean and as user-friendly as it gets. Your health data is presented in tiles on the first page itself, and navigating through device settings is straightforward.
Holistic fitness tracking and sports modes
The Redmi Watch 4 excels when it comes to fitness tracking. It has over 150+ sports modes, covering a wide spectrum of sports. You’ll find popular exercises such as outdoor running, HIIT, Pilates, boxing, pool swimming, and hiking; as well as niche activities such as dragon boating, flowriding, rock climbing, and skateboarding, to name a few.
The watch itself comes with a built-in GNSS system so you won’t need to haul your phone around during outdoor runs. I did bring my phone along for the first jog around the neighborhood, just as a way to cross-check the data between the Redmi Watch 4 and the Nike Run Club (NRC) app. After comparing stats post-run, both devices showed more or less similar readings in terms of average pace and distance ran. Route tracking was stable all the way with no random and unaccounted zig-zags, which I take to mean the GPS connection is working perfectly.
Aside from just distance and pace, the Redmi watch calculates cadence (steps per minute) as well as stride (defined as “distance between your feet before and after they land”), which provides a good base for you to keep tabs on your running form as well as determine areas to improve on.
The Redmi Watch 4 also measures heart BPMs segmented into five different levels – Light, Intensive, Aerobic, Anaerobic, and VO2 Max. At the end of each workout, a Training effect score will be given, categorizing your workout into six levels: Minor, Recover, Maintaining, Improving, Highly improving, and Overreaching.
Also nice to see is that music controls are integrated into sports mode and is just one swipe away.
Now, the Redmi Watch 4 is 5ATM water resistant, which means it should withstand depths of up to 50 metres. By no means is this a diving watch, but it will do just fine in watersport activities such as pool swimming and water polo.
Bringing it down to the pool myself, the watch performed just fine underwater and tracks swimming quite well. Again, comprehensive stats are presented once the workout has ended, including the number of strokes taken per length (for freestyle) and a SWOLF score to measure swimming efficiency.
To avoid accidental swipes and pauses, the watch face will turn off automatically whenever it is submerged; and pop up again when brought above water. It also has a ‘Clearing water’ function which…well, we’re not sure how effective it is but I suppose it’ll come in handy if you want better peace of mind.
Customizable widgets set to your preference
Customizable widgets is one feature that I will always greatly appreciate on any smartwatch. Giving power to the wearer to decide what widgets they should have instant access to just makes sense, so I’m glad this was the case with the Redmi Watch 4.
Wearables that lack the freedom to customize often means the wearer is stuck with the preset, which is usually just health readings.
On the Redmi Watch 4, you can easily customize which widgets you have immediate access to when you swipe right, as well as arrange the pages all via the Mi Fitness app. You can customize a total of four pages, with each page being able to fit up to four widgets. Aside from the usual heart rate and blood oxygen ratings, you can even add in your favourite sports mode as a widget, making it all the more convenient to tap-and-start your workout.
When it comes to receiving notifications on the Redmi Watch 4, I encountered no connection issues whatsoever. In fact, the alerts on the watch came almost simultaneously as it did on my phone.
Redmi Watch 4: You couldn’t ask for anything more
The Redmi Watch 4 proved time and time again that it is worth its value – which is relatively affordable considering there are smart watches out there that hit the RM3K mark. Most people tend to use an RM3K+ smartwatch the same way they would use one that’s less than RM500 anyway – for the health measurement and sports tracking.
Seeing that my experience with these features on the Redmi Watch 4 has been more than satisfactory, I’d consider this a solid recommendation for casual wearers and a worthwhile alternative to its exorbitant counterparts. Again, the Redmi Watch 4 retails at RM459, and is already available nationwide.
You might have remembered that the Redmi Watch 4 launched alongside the Redmi Buds 5 Pro. Well, if you are wondering, this officially retails at RM299. Having had my time with it, the Buds 5 Pro was easy to use with no fuss relating to connectivity. Sound quality was decent, and so was its noise cancellation; both of which can be adjusted with the Xiaomi Earbuds app.
There isn’t much to say about its aesthetics, it’s a capsule-like design with glossy finishing and an LED indicator for batteries and connection. It’s a sleek option, and one you can fit snugly in your pockets without having that awkward imprint. I quite liked our Moonlight White colour, but it does also come in Midnight Black and Aurora Purple, the Black version coming with vegan leather texture on the lower part of the case.
As for the buds itself, the White and Black versions has a subtle marble texture on its stem. The buds itself has silicon tips, with extra sizes in the box if needed.
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