Smartwatches are serious business and Xiaomi clearly doesn’t seem to take this lightly. Not even a little. The second addition to the Mi Watch range and the third watch for the company in India is the new Mi Watch Revolve Active. This will now sit next to the Mi Watch Revolve and indeed the Redmi Watch GPS. The new watch also has a really good sense of time and place, as there’s the addition of the blood oxygen monitor, or SpO2, which the older sibling doesn’t have. And that’s why the upgrades to health monitoring and wellness have been built, with activity and healthy lifestyles coming on the radar of more and more people who have been locked in their homes for months now. The price of the new Mi Watch Revolve Active? That will be Rs 8,999 for now.
It’s been a while since I last experienced the Mi Watch Revolve, but there seems to be a clear similarity in the design that the Mi Watch Revolve Active brings out. It’s a mix of symmetry, smooth textures and a fairly balanced blend of sophistication and youthfulness. This is a 46mm watch, which means you’ll also need to consider your wrist size and perhaps large watch faces too – I like large watch faces, which is why the Mi Watch Revolve Active taps into the personality aspect in its entirety. The color choices are between Beige, Black and Navy Blue, and you can also add some more color with some vibrant watch faces, which will grace the 1.39-inch AMOLED display. What you see photographed here is the beige colorway, and in a way this is definitely a fresher take on smartwatches that aren’t usually seen in such bright colors.
The only buttons that break the beautifully curved and sculpted round watch frame are on the right side, while wearing the watch. For once, they’re labeled too, and it’s not exactly like trying to give your brain cells some extra work every time you have to do something on the watch and trying to remember what does which. The higher up is the Home key, while the second key is called Sport, which in itself gives a hint as to what it does – this is the quick access to the workouts. The Mi Watch Revolve Active has 22mm watch bands, just like its older sibling, which should make the color choices even wider for you in case you’re in the mood for some fancy play of colors. The Mi Watch Revolve is available in Midnight Black in Leather, Neptune Blue, Cosmic Dust Maroon, Space Black and Astral Olive, depending on availability, and those strap options can now add contrast to the Active iteration. In fact, the Mi Watch Revolve Active weighs about 32 grams, which is a good 8 grams lighter than before. There is one note about the bands that register every time I wear or take off the Mi Watch Revolve Active. The straps, at least on the variant I received, seem to have too much frictional resistance meaning you have to struggle a bit to get the strap through the other layer and when it’s time to go through the two retainers as well.
The 1.39-inch display is the AMOLED real estate just better than what you might have expected, admit it. This screen is bright, colorful and bright. There’s also the Always On display mode if you want to keep that active – not me, to be honest. Raising the wrist to wake the display option works pretty well for me – although something very simple often doesn’t work that well on many watches. The screen of the Mi Watch Revolve Active has a brightness of 450 nits and effectively ignores the glare and reflections caused by bright sunlight. Yes, you may have to move your wrist a tiny bit at times to eliminate a really lingering reflection, but that’s about it. Something I had noticed with the Mi Watch Revolve, and it’s very true for the Mi Watch Revolve Active too – the screen seems to catch fingerprints a little too easily, though. That’s a bit of a pain if you want to keep your gadgets clean and spotless. This screen is big, vibrant and just gets the job done without ever having to poke the glass more than once.
The same goes for the software. It never gets in the way of what you intend to do. There are familiar aspects to what Google Wear OS does, what Xiaomi’s previous smartwatch has shown, and what Fitbit brings fitness-focused watches to the table. Mind you, this is by no means a criticism – it’s all about simplicity, and it’s good that Xiaomi isn’t trying to redesign the wheel. It doesn’t matter which smartwatch you switch from, you have to get used to the software of the Mi Watch Revolve Active pretty quickly. Swipe right or left on the gorgeous watch face (there are more than options to choose from) and you’ll scroll through widget screens that tell you your heart rate and body energy (this is my favorite, and often beautifully illustrates how exhausted I am on time), sleep data, stress level and the weather details. Now the blood oxygen monitor is here too. All of these are beautifully laid out with very readable font styles and sizes.
That said, the app drawer, while nicely formatted, may not be the slickest to use. While laid out as simply as possible, the icons don’t always give you an idea of what a particular app is for – and I didn’t see the option to add text. And I would have liked to see more customizations and controls available for the elements within the different watch faces. That’s just not an option at the moment, meaning what you see is what you get, with no flexibility to customize the finer elements on the Mi Watch Revolve Active.
Xiaomi implements the new LifeQ Health Information algorithm, which should make fitness and health reading more accurate. This specifically improves heart rate measurement, SpO2 measurements and sleep tracking. More data calculation points are available, which means that the readings you get are more accurate and the suggestions better match your needs. The SpO2, or blood oxygen monitor, wasn’t exactly the fanciest feature in smartwatches until the coronavirus came around. Now everyone wants something that allows them to track their blood oxygen stats. Yes, these statistics and measurements are often an early and crucial indicator if you have COVID-19 or even any other illness and can often be the early call to contact your doctor. In my case, the measurements from the Mi Watch Revolve Active’s blood oxygen monitor were with a point from the standalone Dr. Morepen blood oxygen monitor device – the Mi Watch Revolve Active is usually on the higher side.
Mind you, smartwatches and no smartwatch including the Mi Watch Revolve Active claim to be absolutely accurate and comparable to medical grade devices. But if you read something else several times, you can get a reasonable idea that something is indeed wrong.
The one feature I absolutely love is body energy monitoring. This returns a calculation and a figure of the energy value in real time, by understanding the various data and statistics that the Xiaomi Mi Watch Revolve Active and the range of sensors collect about a person’s health. For me, this worked quite accurately as the score I saw matched pretty well how I generally felt at the time. There’s also the Stress Monitoring, which uses heart rate variability statistics and performs complex calculations to indicate when you’re stressed. If nothing else, a graph of this data just tells you how you’re wasting your life, not that there’s much you can do about it with bills to pay. Sports and workouts get a boost with the Mi Watch Revolve Active, with around 117 sport modes available, and these also include professional workouts, including intense training, yoga and triathlons. Because the watch is water resistant, with the 5ATM rating, and that also makes the Mi Watch Revolve Active ready for swimming sessions.
Last but not least is the addition of Amazon Alexa to the Mi Watch Revolve Active. Now all you have to do is call Alexa on your wrist and easily order it for different usage scenarios: alarms, to-do lists, calendar management and even all the smart home devices in your home. Please note, if you buy the Mi Watch Revolve Active and Alexa is not built in, all you need to do is do a software update as this functionality will be rolled out later. Nice addition to have, if you have an Alexa ecosystem at home, complete with smart speakers and smart devices. Still, this isn’t just the reason why you might want to splurge on the new smartwatch.
The final word: Mi Watch Revolve Active is an incremental but important update
Smartwatches are usually not as complete with the list of features, as the Mi Watch Revolve Active. The good thing is that the foundation remains strong with the Mi Watch Revolve Active, succeeding the impressive Mi Watch Revolve just a few months later. The big additions are the SpO2 monitor and the fitness functionality updates. But the really good looking design, the very usable software, the vibrant display, the strong battery life that should last you a couple of weeks in most cases, and some interesting features like stress detection really make this an even stronger proposition. The Mi Watch Revolve price has recently been slashed to Rs 7,999 to make room for this, and the Mi Watch Revolve Active is going to be a smartwatch worth considering if you mainly use an Android phone and don’t really want to spend a lot of money that would take you to the Samsung Galaxy Watch or the Fitbit area. At Rs 8,999 for the moment and eventually Rs 9,999 for a smartwatch, the Mi Watch Revolve Active doesn’t really throw any curveballs.
