The Xiaomi Watch 2 is a decent smartwatch that's beginning to show its age. The 2024 hardware still delivers surprisingly solid performance alongside the crisp AMOLED display, and the sheer number of sports modes is hard to argue with. But spotty heart rate tracking and a middling battery life do take some shine off the experience. At R3,900, it's difficult to ignore that this is a two-year-old smartwatch in a market that hasn't exactly stood still.
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Design
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Features
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Battery
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Tracking
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Value
Many South Africans probably have something of Xiaomi’s tucked away in their homes. But we don’t often see something from the Chinese brand meant to accompany its owner everywhere. That describes the Xiaomi Watch 2 — or any smartwatch, really — to a T. We strapped this holy union of glass and plastic to our wrist to test whether the now two-year-old hardware is truly worthy of the R3,900 price Xiaomi has assigned it.
The wrist test
Xiaomi hasn’t gone to great lengths to help the Watch 2 stand out. The overall look and feel is overtly minimal, with the plain black appearance helping it blend in just about anywhere. Look hard, and you’ll clock the miniature time indicators lining the circular watch face. They’re tucked inside the bezel (there is a bezel).
That leaves the Watch 2 feeling more than comfortable to slip into every morning. It employs our favourite quick-release strap design, though the TPU construction doesn’t exactly lend itself to an overall premium feel. The aluminium chassis and smattering of glass on top do a fair bit to correct that notion.
That chassis features a clean matte look that did wonders when fending off fingerprints. You’ll rub up against the Watch 2’s right-hand side regularly to reach the two physical buttons, which sit flush with the body. Xiaomi’s strap mechanism lets the Watch 2 sit quite flat when not in use, which aids charging. And while it may be fine for all-day wear, that TPU strap wasn’t quite as successful when it came time to sleep.
The 1.43in circular AMOLED sits above the chassis, for heightened flair to complement the dull body. It’s not toting Gorilla Glass or the like, and we were surprised how well the Watch 2 held up on the odd occasions we got a little rough with it. It’s lightweight enough (38g) to forget about, and plenty durable, too.
The 466 x 466 resolution suits the Watch 2’s size, which is by no means small. It provided sharp images everywhere we went, with the 600 nits brightness handling whatever we threw at it. We generally left brightness to the Watch 2’s built-in sensors, and never found ourselves correcting it.
It’s a numbers game
We came away surprised at how robust the performance was. Sure, it’s running bog-standard Google Wear OS, but the Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1 and 2GB RAM went further than you might expect. It’s coupled with 32GB of storage, which feels like overkill, ’til you realise how useful it is to keep Spotify playlists locally.
Unfortunately, the same isn’t true of the Watch 2’s heart-rate tracking. Other than being able to reliably tell the time, heart rate tracking might be the most important aspect of a smartwatch. Now, no smartwatch will provide entirely accurate measurements, but something about Xiaomi’s efforts felt more ‘off’ than we’re used to. For example, a simple outdoor walk was enough to send our heart rate careening, with no baseline.
It still serves as a decent entry-level indicator of your heart’s health, but we wouldn’t trust everything it tells you. Ditto for the watch’s sleep tracking, which, admittedly, performed more accurately. It mostly relies on heart rate data, but we agreed with our daily sleep score more often than not.
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We appreciated the ludicrous number of sports tracking modes (160+), even if many simply track heart rate. Even if ten sports are technically tracking the same data with no real discernment, it’s nice to point to two different thirty-minute football sessions or just a general round of freestyle training. Yeah, that’s in there.
The most disappointing aspect was the 495mAh battery. In theory, it’s not bad — especially if it lived up to Xiaomi’s 65-hour claims. It never showed that much grit, calling for a charge roughly every 42-44 hours. That’s with all-day wear, sleep tracking, and a workout or two thrown in, though. Ditch the workouts, and you’ll get it somewhere closer to 50 hours. Make sure to update the software regularly, too.
It’s not often you see a mic-and-speaker combo, but the Xiaomi Watch 2 squeezes it in here. The clarity on the call definitely exceeded our expectations, even if it didn’t replace our instincts to answer the phone. The microphone was just as qualified, judging by our callers’ lack of comment on the odd microphone choice.
Xiaomi Watch 2 verdict
In a lot of ways, the Xiaomi Watch 2 feels like a smartwatch that wasn’t built with 2026 in mind. That’s because it wasn’t. This is a 2024 effort through and through, and it shows in a few places. That’s fine for many, including us, especially if you’re after a wearable that’s since come down in price. Unfortunately, at R3,900, it hasn’t come down far enough for our liking. There’s plenty to like here, but the dodgy heart rate tracking and middling battery life make it harder to recommend when newer competition is waiting in the wings.
