Xiaomi Mi Band 3 vs. All other budget fitness bands

In case you missed it, we had reviewed the brand new Xiaomi Mi Band 3 fitness band and it is a great performer. In this post, we’d like to compare the Mi Band 3 with all its competitors, that fall into its price segment.

We consider the following as the best competitors to the Mi Band 3. We’ll keep updating this post if we find any other band interesting or if you have any recommendation, please let us know in the comments.

Top Alternatives for Xiaomi Mi Band 3

• Honor Band 3
• Xiaomi Mi Band 2
• Xiaomi Mi Band HRX
• Other considerations

We are considering mainly the following fitness bands as its competitors because we’ve used all the listed devices and hence we are sure about what we talk.

Comparison of Xiaomi Mi Band 3 with Honor Band 3, Mi Band 2 and Mi Band HRX.

Screen and Display

Both the Mi Band HRX and the Mi Band 2 offer a similar screen – a simple OLED display with a button at the bottom. The Huawei Band offers something similar too i.e PMOLED type OLED, with a hint of a bend in the screen. All these bands displays are tuff, they don’t break easily. The Mi Band 3, however, is a clear winner in this department with a gorgeous touch capacitive display. A point to note, though, is that all the bands are sub-par in sunlight.

Fitness Tracking and main functionality

In this section, we’d like to talk about the real purpose of buying these fitness bands, the fitness tracking and the other functionalities related to fitness tracking. The Mi Band 3 and Honor Band 3 go to head to head in this section. The Honor Band 3 gets a little advantage than the competition thanks to its Huawei Health App.

Huawei Health App offers more functionality than does Mi Fit. In fact, we’d go as far as saying that it is the best any fitness app can offer. It does take up a lot of memory, though.

In terms of sleep tracking, Honor Band 3 takes the upper hand again. It tracks mid-day naps, calculates the amount of Deep Sleep, REM Sleep etc. Mi Bands do track sleep, but it is very rudimental. Step count wise, all of them are pretty equal – they all manage to do a decent job – with an accuracy of about 90%, we’d say. In terms of heart-rate sensor, however, Mi falls a bit short, as both the Mi Band 2 and Mi Band 3 fail to detect heartbeat many a time. And the Mi Band HRX lacks heart rate sensor altogether.

On a whole, Huawei Honor Band 3 takes the lead in this one.

Features

On the features front, Mi Band 3 takes the cake with features like the weather, stopwatch, etc. The Honor Band 3 does have a dedicated option to activate swim mode though that logs the workout into the Health app. Honor Band 3 and Mi Band 3 are 50m waterproof, while the rest are splash resistant. So yeah, you can’t take a dip with the Mi Band 2 or the Mi Band HRX.

Battery Life

All the bands excel in this department. They are all, again, pretty much equally suited, except the Mi Band HRX which does a little better thanks to the absence of heart rate sensor. That said, all bands last easily for 20 days on a single charge – stretching up to a month, based on what settings you have on.

Value for Money

Summing up, we’ll have said the Xiaomi Mi Band 3 edges out Huawei’s Honor to offer the most value for money (being priced at Rs.1,999/-) because it offers more features than the others and, you know, is simply the newest band in town.

Note: During offers such as Big Billion Day, Flipkart priced the Honor Band 3 at Rs.1,999/-, equal to the price of Mi Band 3. Recently we came across negative reviews from users that the Mi Band 3 is having huge battery drain issues. But the unit we got is fine and haven’t faced any such problems. Maybe due to the mass production and heavy demand of the smart bands, quality decreased. If you are in such fear, buying the Honor Band 3 on Flipkart is a much safer option. Because by end of the day, other fitness bands perform decently.

That said, all the fitness bands discussed are pretty good. If you are looking for something basic that gets the job done, Mi Band HRX is for you (the Mi Band 1 is also a good choice, if you can get your hands on it). Mi Band 2 is essentially the HRX version with an added heart rate monitor if that is something you are after. It’s pretty neck to neck when it comes to front-runners, Honor Band 3 and Mi Band 3. Both of them excel in a lot of different things and are just good all-around fitness trackers. In the end, it really comes down to what you are looking for in a fitness tracker – but you cannot really go wrong with any of these.

In case, the Mi Band 3 is your choice we have a coupon code for you on Gearbest which gives you a surprise discount.

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With the Great Indian Shopping Festival, Prime users can get exclusive Rs.1 discount on the Mi Band 3! Funny offer isn’t it ??

Jokes apart, you can get more discount using Amazon Pay and other payment options.