Xiaomi Smart Band 8 Pro in for review

This is the Xiaomi Smart Band 8 Pro and it’s a little bit bigger and a bit better than its predecessor.

It ships with a magnetically attachable charger and a good-looking TPU strap – ours is the light grey model. The band is already on sale in Europe, priced at €70.

This model looks very much like the Smart Band 7 Pro it succeeds but offers some quality-of-life improvements. For starters, the display is bigger – it’s 1.74-inch, up from 1.64-inch, and a bit sharper at 336ppi. And the panel is 100 nits brighter at 600 nits.

The battery is almost 20% bigger as well.

The Xiaomi Smart Band 8 Pro runs Xiaomi’s proprietary OS. It’s simple to use – a swipe right brings up the setting toggles, the different screen panels are to the left, a swipe from the bottom brings the apps grid, and a swipe from the top shows the notifications.

The band is well-built. It’s made of high-strength fiber polymer but you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for metal as it has what’s called a non-conductive vacuum metalization coating to make it look like metal.

The glass atop the display is Gorilla Glass 3. You can take the smart band swimming with you, thanks to 5ATM resistance. It’s equivalent to 50 meters but Xiaomi has a list of warnings in case you want to test the water resistance – no hot showers or saunas, and keep in mind that the resistance can deteriorate over time.