Solid health tracking on a budget
The Redmi Watch 5 is another solid-performing sub-£100 smartwatch that offers a likeable look and enough smarts that make it a strong option at this price.
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Improved look on Redmi Watch 4 -
HyperOS runs smoothly -
Good quality AMOLED for the price
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Call quality is just fine -
Music player made for Android users -
Exercise heart rate tracking still not impeccable
Key Features
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Review Price: £89.99 -
Exceptional battery life
With up to 24 days of use on a single charge, the Redmi Watch 5 can keep on going. -
Built-in GPS
Despite the budget focus, the Redmi Watch 5 offers built-in GPS for more accurate exercise tracking. -
2.07-inch AMOLED display
A big, bright AMOLED display is great for displaying watchfaces, reading notifications and more.
Introduction
The Redmi Watch 5 is the budget smartwatch update to the Redmi Watch 4, offering once again a mix of smartwatch, fitness and wellbeing features for less than £100.
In terms of promised upgrades, there’s now a bigger screen, improved heart rate and sleep tracking accuracy and even more battery life to keep you away from a charger for weeks.
Xiaomi’s sub-brand is up against Huawei, Honor, and Amazfit, as opposed to Samsung, Apple, and Google, to be the go-to affordable smartwatch, and it makes a pretty convincing argument that it’s the one to grab.
Design and screen
- Available in 3 colours
- Larger AMOLED screen
- Optional leather and nylon strap
The Watch 5 remains a square smartwatch that’s matched up with a removable TPU strap, and it’s available in black, grey or purple. That 47.5mm case is made from an aluminium alloy, with plastic reserved for the caseback, and measures 11.3mm thick. That makes it a touch thicker than the Watch 4, though it is not a chunky watch to wear.
You’re still getting an AMOLED touchscreen that’s grown to 2.07 inches and ramps up resolution to 432 x 514 pixels with a maximum brightness rating of 1,500 nits.
More expensive AMOLED smartwatches can go brighter. However, you’re hardly shortchanged here with what the Watch 5’s screen offers, staying visible in more challenging light conditions. The colours and black levels are pretty good for a smartwatch at this price, and is a display that you can choose to keep on at all times.
A rotating crown button assists your interactions with Xiaomi’s HyperOS software. It can be pressed to wake up the screen and access apps, or twisted to scroll through menu screens or messages.
On the strap front, the TPU strap included is pretty standard fare. It’s comfortable to wear, remains secure and is easy to remove. Xiaomi does offer additional strap options, with leather and woven nylon options also up for grabs, and they cost less than £20 to pick up.
I was definitely a fan of the olive green nylon strap. I switched to it from the TPU band, and it certainly adds to what is already a pretty good-looking smartwatch overall.
If you want to go swimming with it, its 5 ATM rating makes it suitable for submerging in water up to 50 metres deep.
Performance and software
- Runs on Xiaomi HyperOS
- Offers Bluetooth calling
- Built-in music player made for Android users
Xiaomi’s HyperOS powers the software experience on the Watch 5, along with a Mi Fitness companion app for iOS and Android. This is where you’ll set things up, get access to more watch faces, and link up to third-party apps like Strava, Apple Health, and Suunto.
Using that software is pretty straightforward. Like a lot of other smartwatch software, it is all about swiping from different directions from the main watch screen. It’s a nice touch that you can choose how the main app screen is presented, and you’ve got a nice enough mix of watch faces to pick from, too.
The core smartwatch features are led by the fairly standard ability to view notifications, see weather forecasts and take calls over Bluetooth.
The notification support works absolutely fine and having that crown to scroll through them is useful. Taking calls is straightforward to do, but I wouldn’t say the call experience is fantastic. It has more to do with the call volume than anything else, which will make it more challenging to use it in noisier environments
There is also a music player and music playback controls. However, those music features are only reserved for Android users, which is typically the case for smartwatches at this price.
There are other extras here, like using it to take photos remotely from your phone, turning the screen into a torch, and ticking off jobs you need to do. It’s not giving you a whole lot more than the Watch 4 with software that still runs very slick, and while not the most advanced smartwatch, it does execute what it can do pretty well.
Tracking and features
- Promised heart rate and sleep tracking improvements
- 150+ sports profiles
- Built-in GPS
Like the Watch 4, the Redmi Watch 5 throws a lot at you as far as what it promises to track on the fitness and general wellbeing front. There’s built-in GPS, hundreds of sports you can track alongside some non-sporting ones, and has the sensor array to track your daily steps and metrics like heart rate and stress.
Xiaomi states that you should now enjoy more accurate heart rate and sleep tracking. I definitely had issues with the former on the Watch 4, and it does seem to have improved when continuously tracking your heart rate. However, there are similar struggles when using it for tracking heart rate during exercise.
The sleep tracking has been good overall. I’ve been using it alongside an Oura Ring 3, and data like sleep duration and sleep stage info hasn’t been far off. At most, more generous sleep scores are sometimes awarded to interrupted nights of sleep. The Mi Fitness app offers some sleep insights, but they aren’t the most neatly presented and keep things pretty basic with those insights and recommendations.
The built-in GPS performance, unsurprisingly, doesn’t rival what the best sports watches can offer on that front. If you’re more of a casual user who’s starting to track workouts and not necessarily turning to the Watch 5 for serious training, the performance here should be fine.
Xiaomi does offer some useful running sessions and additional training metrics. These include assessing your training load and VO2 Max, but given the performance of the heart rate sensor that powers those insights during exercise, I wouldn’t pay huge attention to them.
You can track your blood oxygen levels, monitor stress, and access guided breathing exercises that are a bit more developed than some of the guided breathing support we see on other smartwatches. The Redmi Watch 5 certainly has enough in its locker to be a useful fitness and wellbeing tracking companion. Maybe it could strip away some of those more advanced features that simply feel a bit out of place.
Battery life
- Up to 24 days battery life
- Battery optimisation mode
- Ultra battery saving mode available
The Redmi Watch packs a 550mAh capacity battery that Xiaomi says can dish out up to 24 days battery life. That’s up from 20 days on the Redmi Watch 4.
That performance is based on Xiaomi’s lab testing, so isn’t always going to reflect real-world usage. It doesn’t take into consideration regular use of battery-sapping features like GPS, the most accurate heart rate and blood oxygen tracking or the always-on display mode.
I’ve been using the Redmi Watch 5 for a few weeks and the battery has been very good overall.
When I switched from using raise-to-wake to an always-on screen, the battery does inevitably drop quicker. It’s the same story if you decide to activate the most accurate heart rate monitoring or turn on the all-day blood oxygen monitoring. This is a smartwatch capable of lasting a week in heavier usage.
There’s an ultra-power-saving mode that pushes things further and restricts you to seeing the time and display step counts. There’s also a useful battery optimisation mode that shows you modes and features you can turn off to boost battery performance. I never felt I was caught short on battery, and that’s the biggest takeaway from using the Watch 5.
When it’s time to charge you’ll be grabbing a proprietary charging cable, which I’m not a massive fan of. It’s the kind that is easy to knock out of place and I’d definitely prefer something that holds tighter to that case back.
Should you buy it?
You want a cheap smartwatch that doesn’t look cheap
The Redmi Watch 5 design doesn’t really match its budget status with the big AMOLED screen, a real highlight of its attractive look.
You want the most feature-rich cheap smartwatch
While the Redmi Watch 5 gives you a lot, you can find other smartwatches in and around its price that can do a bit more or offer more premium features.
Final Thoughts
The Redmi Watch 5 makes some nice design improvements to make it a more attractive, affordable smartwatch all while largely sticking to the same software features as its predecessor. You can definitely get a richer smartwatch experience elsewhere, but the Redmi Watch 5 gives you enough in the key departments to make it a worthy smartwatch companion.
Take a look at our selection of the best smartwatches and best fitness trackers to see how it compares to the competition.
How we test
We thoroughly test every smartwatch we review. We use industry standard testing to compare features properly and we use the watch as our main device over the review period. We’ll always tell you what we find and we never, ever, accept money to review a product.
- Worn as our main tracker during the testing period
- Heart rate data compared against dedicated heart rate devices
FAQs
The Redmi Watch 5 can make calls when paired to an Android phone or iPhone over Bluetooth.
The Redmi Watch 5 is waterproof up to 50 metres depth and carries a 5ATM rating, making it suitable for swimming and showering.
Full Specs
| Redmi Watch 5 Review | |
|---|---|
| UK RRP | £89.99 |
| Manufacturer | Xiaomi |
| Screen Size | 2.07 inches |
| IP rating | Not Disclosed |
| Waterproof | 5ATM |
| Battery | 550 mAh |
| Size (Dimensions) | 41.1 x 11.3 x 47.5 MM |
| Weight | 33.5 G |
| Operating System | Xiaomi HyperOS |
| Release Date | 2025 |
| First Reviewed Date | 07/03/2025 |
| Colours | Obsidian Black, Silver Gray, Lavender Purple |
| GPS | No |
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