Xiaomi Smart Band 10 review: few upgrades over the best cheap fitness tracker around
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Xiaomi Smart Band 10: One-minute review
Another year brings another cheap fitness tracker from Chinese tech company Xiaomi, but its Smart Band 10 is its first such gadget in a while that isn’t an instant must-buy for people looking for an affordable way to track their runs, steps or sleep.
This lack of competition seemingly isn’t such a good thing, though, because Xiaomi hasn’t changed all that much with the Smart Band 10 from its predecessor. The new model has a slightly larger display and a higher price than the 2024 model but not a whole lot else.
So if you’re looking for a fitness tracker on a budget, the Xiaomi Smart Band 9, with a lower starting price and a year of price cuts over the Band 10, is a much more tempting prospect than this newer and slightly larger model.
Family rivalry aside, the Xiaomi Smart Band 10 has all the strengths and pitfalls of previous members of the family, but that’s no bad thing as the last-gen model is currently our top-ranked cheap fitness tracker.
There are over 150 fitness tracking modes, which record a varying degree of metrics but will sometimes surprise you in collecting more than just time and heart rate, and a selection of pre-programmed running workouts are quite useful to save you from carefully timing your ‘couch to 5K’ style walk-run workouts. You can also measure your sleep, stress and calories burned, with GPS collected from your connected smartphone.
The Band also has options for weather reports, notification handling, music control and calendar reminders; there’s a short but useful list of features which help you outside your workout hours.
You can keep using the Xiaomi Smart Band 10 for three weeks without needing to charge it, which is a really competitive stat that’ll let you take it travelling, or on holiday, without needing to bring a charger.
Like previous Xiaomi wearables, the software can be a little buggy at times (both the tracker and its tie-in Mi Fitness app), but the problem that plagued my experience with the Band 10 most was its strap.
The default fluororubber band’s tentative clasp kept coming undone at the slightest provocation, sometimes causing it to fall off during a workout or run. Xiaomi sells extra bands, many of which have real clasps, but it’s a shame that the default one is so unreliable.
Xiaomi Smart Band 10: Specifications
|
Component |
Value |
|
Price |
$73.99 / £39.99 / AU$133 |
|
Dimensions |
46.57×22.54×10.95 (mm) |
|
Display |
1.72-in AMOLED display |
|
GPS? |
No |
|
Battery life |
21 days |
Xiaomi Smart Band 10: Price and availability
- Released in June 2025
- Costs $73.99 / £39.99 / AU$133
- Premium Ceramic Edition also on sale
The Xiaomi Smart Band was released globally in June 2025, just a few days after its announcement in China.
You can pick up the wearable for $73.99 / £39.99 / AU$133, which is somewhat of a price increase over the $60 / £34.99 / AU$79.99 asking price of the previous-gen model.
It’s still a fair way off the RRP of the Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Pro though, so it’s not ventured into premium territory just yet.
In some regions there’s also a premium model called the Ceramic Edition, which is the model I tested. I’ll get to the differences later but it’s also more expensive at £54.99 (roughly $70 / AU$110, although I couldn’t see it on sale in the US or Australia).
Depending on where you live, Xiaomi also sells a collection of alternative wrist straps, using different materials and designs to the default one. These range in price from doppelgangers of that sold-in-the-box model to fancy silk or leather straps.
Xiaomi Smart Band 10: Design
- Larger 1.72-inch AMOLED screen
- Unreliable band clasp, but other options on sale
- CE comes with premium body and different color option
Xiaomi has slowly been increasing the screen size of its cheap fitness tracker, which is how we get here. The Smart Band 10 has a 1.72-inch display with a 212 x 520 resolution and 1500 nits max brightness. All those specs are incremental upgrades over the Band 9.
I don’t imagine many people will complain about this boost; I didn’t find the previous-gen band hard to use and I again found it easy to control the watch, finding workouts to start or reading from menus or changing tunes (well, most of the time, more on that below). The brightness increase in particular helps make the screen easier to see on a sunny day.
A bigger screen doesn’t mean a bigger band body, with the 46.5 x 22.5 x 10.9 dimensions and 15.95g weight marking a size increase only in width, and of a tiny amount. The band is super lightweight, easy to forget about on your wrist. The Ceramic Edition adds an extra millimeter to the height and width and 8g to the weight.
Perhaps it’s time to touch on the Ceramic Edition, because design is the only area (beyond price) where it’s different. This model has a body that’s clad in Ceramic, not aluminium alloy as the standard model, which feels much more expensive to the touch.
The Ceramic Edition also comes in a pale white model called Pearl White, while the standard is sold in black, silver and pink.
The Ceramic Edition also has a fluororubber strap, while the standard model’s is made of TPU, and it could be a reason not to upgrade.
Like the last-gen band, the Band 10’s strap is a simple fare with one band full of adjustment holes and the other using a small tongue which you press into the hole to lock it in place. And it was anything but reliable: the tongue would fall out and cause the band to drop off with very little provocation, sometimes none at all. Throughout testing it’d constantly drop off at inopportune moments, and once I didn’t notice and would have left it on the floor had someone not pointed it out to me.
I never had this issue with the Band 9 and so have to assume it’s something to do with the fluororubber material used here, though possibly reports from buyers of the standard Band 10 will concur. The natural solution would be to buy one of the alternative straps which Xiaomi sells, though that’s an extra expense that you’ll need to consider carefully.
Xiaomi Smart Band 10: Performance
- Over 150 fitness modes
- Battery life lasts for three weeks
- No GPS, but heart rate tracker
Any battery size increase in the Xiaomi Smart Band 10 only compensates for its larger display size, and its official battery life estimate remains the same, at 21 days or 3 weeks. That’s a competitive stat, especially when you compare the band to daily-recharge smartwatches.
In my own testing, the smart band didn’t last quite that long, usually getting to 18 or 19, but that could well be because I did more exercise than normal in order to test the thing. Under average use, I can see it lasting three weeks.
One thing keeping the battery life low is the lack of GPS, with the band instead relying on your connected smartphone’s positioning when tracking movement activities. This means you have to work out with your phone to get a reasonable estimate of distance, but at least it’s pretty accurate.
The Xiaomi Smart Band 10 has just over 150 sports modes, which is the same stat as the last few generations of this wearable. They range from popular modes like running and cycling to dances, water sports, ball sports, winter activities and even various board games (you can track your game of bridge, if you like…).
The stats you get from these activities vary quite a bit, with most just tracking time and heart rate – you find yourself measuring these activities so that your app log will have a complete list of everything you’ve done, not because you’re getting an in-depth analysis of your hockey performance.
However I was sometimes caught out by modes offering more information than I thought; I tracked an indoor rowing session and the wearable tracked the number of strokes, giving me details on my average and maximum strokes per minute.
You get most information from a mode like running or cycling where you can see pace, steps, heart rate, cadence, stride and more, with averages and graphs of your workout. The app also displays the effect of your training with various metrics.
It’s not as in-depth as something one of the best Garmin watches would give you, but the low cost makes the band handy for runners on a budget, and there’s also a list of preset running courses: useful if you don’t know what you want to run.
One thing to note in the Performance section is that once during testing, the Smart Band 10 overheated and turned off. Admittedly, I was out in the sun on a fairly warm day but it completely turned off the band mid-workout, and I could only turn it back on by going home and plugging in the charger (which is the only way to turn it on at all, as far as I could tell). It’s something to bear in mind if you live somewhere warm.
Xiaomi Smart Band 10: Features
- Mi Fitness app used on phone
- Music playback, notification handling and more
- Some bugs with app and watch
The way to make the most of the Xiaomi Smart Band 10 is by connecting it to a phone or tablet with the Mi Fitness app installed. This can sometimes be a bit fiddling, and I’ve had trouble multiple times connecting a Xiaomi wearable to the app, but this wasn’t the case for the Band 10.
The app lets you see loads more information about your workouts but it’s also useful in letting you change your band display, with a huge selection of options (seemingly many of which are from third-party makers, not Xiaomi).
While the focus of a cheap fitness tracker like the Smart Band 10 is, well, fitness, the Xiaomi does offer a few lifestyle features too, none of which are actually new to this generation of band.
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For example you can set up weather reports, calendar memos, alarms and music controls. The latter of which raises an odd concern because the increased screen size hasn’t been matched by an increase in forward or back button sizes, meaning they’re small and squished to the top and bottom of the screen; I found them a little hard to reliably press at times.
You can set up notification alerts to be sent to your Smart Band though, as in all Xiaomi wearables, it can spent some time fiddling around with your phone’s permissions settings (and some good luck) in order to get it to work. Raise-to-wake doesn’t work flawlessly here either, and sometimes I needed to repeat an exaggerated wrist-lift gesture to get the band’s screen to turn on.
I mentioned sports tracking before but you can also use the band to measure sleep, SpO2 and stress, and like Apple there’s also a three-band daily counter which makes sure you’ve burned enough calories, done enough steps and worked enough active minutes per day – if I wasn’t set to do a workout on a specific day, these were still a useful reminder to do enough activity.
Xiaomi Smart Band 10: Scorecard
|
Category |
Comment |
Score |
|
Value |
A price increase and a new reliance on buying an extra strap mean this isn’t as cheap as before, but it’s still pretty affordable. |
4/5 |
|
Design |
The good-looking display is all well and good, but you may need to buy a better strap. |
4/5 |
|
Performance |
There are lots of fitness modes but only a few are very useful. Still, it has everything you’d expect at this price. |
3.5/5 |
|
Features |
A few useful features and functions help ensure the Band 10 is for life, not just a workout. |
3.5/5 |
Xiaomi Smart Band 10: Should I buy?
Buy it if…
Don’t buy it if…
Also consider
|
Component |
Xiaomi Smart Band 10 |
Samsung Galaxy Fit 3 |
Xiaomi Smart Band 9 |
|
Price |
$73.99 / £39.99 / AU$133 |
£44.99 (roughly $60, AU$90) |
$60 / £34.99 / AU$79.99 |
|
Dimensions |
46.57×22.54×10.95 (mm) |
42.9 x 28.8 x 9.9 mm |
46.5 x 21.6 x 10.9 (mm) |
|
Display |
1.72-in AMOLED display |
1.6-inch 256 x 402px AMOLED display |
1.62-in AMOLED display |
|
GPS? |
No |
No |
No |
|
Battery life |
21 days |
13 days |
21 days |
First reviewed: July 2025
