Xiaomi Redmi Watch 2 Lite Full Review: Elegant Design And Thorough Health Check

A inexpensive smartwatch that promises to perform above its low price is the Redmi Watch 2 Lite. In the first half of 2021, the Xiaomi-owned firm unveiled the first Redmi Watch generation. A few months later, its parent company released the Xiaomi Mi Watch Lite, which we previously evaluated.

With features including a color display, continuous heart rate and SpO2 monitoring, built-in GPS, 24/7 fitness tracking, and over a week of battery life, the Watch 2 delivers a square smartwatch appearance that works with iPhones and Android phones.

Redmi Watch 2 Lite’s appearance and display

The Redmi Watch 2 Lite has a number of similarities with the Xiaomi Watch Lite, including a similar-sized square watch casing and a touchscreen that, at first sight, seems the same. We’ve previously hinted at this.

Yet after using it for a while, you can see that there are several key distinctions between the Xiaomi and Redmi smartwatches that, in our opinion, make the Watch 2 Lite more aesthetically appealing and comfortable to wear.

You get a 41mm plastic casing with a matte finish that you may choose from either black, ivory, or blue. This is paired with a TPU strap, which has a great smooth finish and has been comfortable to wear day and night as well as when working out.

It is a watch with a 5ATM water resistance certification, so you can swim and shower with it, however Xiaomi claims that hot showers are not permitted.

To wake up and shut off the touchscreen display, there is just one physical button on the case’s side, however it is not the sharp AMOLED display seen on high-end smartwatches. In comparison to the Xiaomi Watch Lite, it has a larger and higher-resolution 1.5-inch 320×360 TFT display.

Although while the display doesn’t have the same deep blacks and vibrant colors as an AMOLED, the colors aren’t dreadfully washed out, the black bezel surrounding the screen is well-concealed, and it’s really a fairly pleasant display to look at.

The responsiveness of the screen is good while you’re touching and swiping, however there is some latency when scrolling between screens and your notification feed. It’s not the worst at this price that we’ve experienced, but it’s also not exactly a buttery smooth experience.

It looks like a well-kept smartwatch. Importantly, it doesn’t feel cheap, the screen is of decent quality, and you should have no trouble wearing it continuously both indoors and outside.

Redmi Watch 2 Lite: Features of a smartwatch

The Watch 2 Lite works with both iOS and Android smartphones, unlike other cheaper smartwatches, and we mostly used the latter throughout our testing.

You must download the Xiaomi Wear app or Wear Lite for iOS users in order to see your fitness and health statistics, monitor outdoor exercises, and adjust watch settings. Both apps still have some unprofessional design elements.

It’s recommended visiting this app after you’re set up, especially if you want to ensure that features like notifications and incoming call alerts are activated as well as some of the more sophisticated health monitoring capabilities. Setting up was simple and quick.

Also, here is where you may choose fresh watch faces. There are many more that can be downloaded through the app, but there are only four that come preloaded on the watch.

While there is a good selection of watch faces, we believe the digital watch faces match this environment the best.

You can check fresh alerts on the watch by swiping down from the home screen, and it is easy to identify where they came from.

While you can’t do anything with them, we’d argue that this cheap wristwatch handles notifications considerably better than other watches of a similar price.

When you press the physical button, the main app panel will launch, displaying additional features like weather updates, music playback controls, timers, a remote smartphone camera shutter control, and the option to configure controls.

The wristwatch functions that are not alerts that we found to be the most helpful are the controls for music playing and the weather updates. Although the smartwatch experience offered here isn’t the fullest, it nevertheless functions pretty well.

Living with the proprietary software’s gesture-based Interface isn’t difficult since it’s simple to get used to. While there can be some laggy or sluggish times when navigating across displays, for the price, this wristwatch does a good job.

Redmi Watch 2 Lite: Tracking your athletic performance

Redmi is a good example of how you can get powerful health, fitness, and sports monitoring capabilities without spending a lot of money because of how much it can cram into its tiny, square frame.

Let’s start with the fact that you are receiving an optical heart rate sensor, which drives stress tracking here as well as continuous heart rate monitoring day and night, throughout activity. Continuous blood oxygen monitoring has been added, and it now automatically tracks steps and sleep as well. Also, you may follow the health of women here and get guided breathing exercises.

There are more than 100 training modes available for exercise monitoring, including traditional sports like running, cycling, and pool swimming as well as indoor exercises like rowing, HIIT, and skipping. Redmi now supports GPS, Glonass, Galileo, and BDS satellite systems for outside tracking, enhancing tracking accuracy for outdoor runs and rides. Also, although data is mostly contained inside the Xiaomi Watch app, it is wonderful to discover that Strava is also compatible with it.

With a running watch, you may set objectives based on time, distance, and calories burned. You can also create alarms depending on time and distance. Following a 3-second countdown, you may scroll through to examine statistics from your last kilometer as well as information like pace, average pace, heart rate, stride, and cadence.
During runs, the distance tracking was little inaccurate despite the multi-system satellite assistance, but it wasn’t bad and it clearly indicated that we were moving more slowly than we would have with a Garmin Enduro. Yet, in our comparative testing, the overall calorie burn totals were comparable. In comparison to a Garmin HRM-Pro chest strap monitor, it fared rather well when digging into heart rate and for steady runs. Crank up the intensity, and it does struggle to keep up with a chest strap monitor, much like many optical sensors. Moreover, there is no way to fix it by pairing it with an external sensor.

Battery life of the Redmi Watch 2 Lite

The Redmi Watch 2 Lite has a 262mAh battery, which Redmi claims may last up to 10 days in usual use mode, which is defined as sampling heart rate data every 30 minutes, deactivating sophisticated sleep tracking, monitoring stress during the day, and using the GPS for only 35 minutes every week.

The Watch 2 Lite may last up to 5 days when put through more rigorous usage. We would argue that the battery promises are true since our testing time tended to be heavier.

We saw a drop-off of around 20% each day with alerts enabled, continuous heart rate monitoring, blood oxygen monitoring, and utilizing the GPS to track exercises lasting 30 to 60 minutes. Battery life decreased by slightly under 10% after using the GPS to monitor more than an hour of jogging, which isn’t too awful for a cheap smartwatch.

A week’s worth of use between charges is definitely possible with this smartwatch, which is the least we’ve come to anticipate at this price range. If you don’t care about having the most robust sleep tracking or continuous health monitoring functions activated, this watch proves to have some serious sturdiness.

Final judgment

The watch has a big screen, GPS, a number of fitness modes, 5ATM water resistance, and a long battery life. Anybody looking for a low-cost fitness tracker with a huge display might choose the Redmi Watch Lite 2.