Amazon Halo View vs. Xiaomi Mi Band 6

Amazon Halo View

With all the features you'd expect from a premium fitness tracker, the Amazon Halo View also adds some unique ones, like the ability to analyze the tone of your voice and access to recipes. But you need a subscription to access many of the features.

Xiaomi Mi Band 6

When it comes to budget fitness trackers, the Xiaomi Mi Band 6 is worth considering, offering features you'd typically only find in premium wearables along with impressive battery life, and a customizable look.

There's a lot of focus on the most premium smartwatches and fitness trackers these days that can set you back a few hundred bucks or, at the very least, over $150. But there's a market for people who just want simplicity — something to wear around their wrist to track sports, steps, calorie burns, sleep, and more. However, it's tough to resist the value of premium features like detailed sleep analysis, continuous heart rate measurement, Spo2 measurements, and more.

Thankfully, there's a new category of bands that sit at under $100 yet still offer premium features. Great for the first-time user who just wants to try out the concept of an activity tracker, or for those on a strict budget, there are two models in particular worth considering. And when looking at the Amazon Halo View vs. Xiaomi Mi Band 6, they are both compelling in their own ways, but with very distinct features.

First, let's break each down by specs.

Both these trackers have all the essential features you'd expect from a premium activity tracker but also come in at an affordable price. For basic tracking, they have everything you'd want and need. But let's delve deeper to see how they compare.

Amazon Halo View vs. Xiaomi Mi Band 6: Style, design, and overall look

Both these trackers are traditional band style with long, rectangular faces that feature color AMOLED screens, though the Xiaomi Mi Band 6 has a larger, higher-resolution screen and rounded edges versus the Halo View's straight corners. If you struggle with being able to read tiny screens, you might want to opt for this model instead of the Amazon Halo View, which might be difficult to read text notifications on if you're far-sighted.

Both come with bands that are made of high-performance TPU and a variety of fun color options: Active Black, Lavender Dream, or sage green for the Halo View and black, blue, orange, yellow, olive, or ivory for the Xiaomi band. But note that while you can buy the Halo View in any of these colors, the Xiaomi Mi Band only comes with the black band — if you want to further personalize the look with one of the other available colors, you would need to buy the band separately and swap it. In both cases, you can also opt for third-party band replacements to further personalize your look: there are already tons of bands for both trackers available, including some great bands for the Amazon Halo View.

Both are swim-proof down to 50 meters (about 164 feet) so you can shower, swim, walk in the rain or snow, or go virtually anywhere with them without worry. As with any fitness band, however, take care when in chlorinated and/or saltwater.

Both will display notifications from a Bluetooth-connected phone, the time and date, and other pertinent details, like step counts, heart rate, and more. You can customize the look of the Xiaomi Mi Band 6 by choosing from more than 60 different screen options, which is a nice touch (though many of them are tacky at best, says our reviewer). You can also simply raise your hand up and the screen will light up to show progress thanks to the raise-to-wake feature.

Both work with respective apps, and the Xiaomi Band can work with either the Wear app or the Mi Fit app.

Amazon Halo View vs. Xiaomi Mi Band 6: What can you do with them?

With both trackers, you can log steps, heart rate, detailed sleep data, activities, and sports.

The Halo View includes access to programs like HIIT and strength, yoga, barre, walking, and low-impact workouts, ranging from five minutes to an hour. However, you will need a subscription to access these (more on this below). Once subscribed, you can follow the workouts live on the device's screen. You'll get on-demand workouts, as well as meditation and support for sleep and nutrition to complement the exercise. A neat body composition measurement assesses your body fat percentage using your phone's camera and the app to help you monitor progress over time.

The Xiaomi Mi Band 6 offers 30 fitness modes, from HIIT to boxing, basketball, and Zumba dancing, and can auto-recognize six of them: walking, running/treadmill, cycling, elliptical, and rowing machine. It can also automatically detect five different swim styles, which is a plus for swimmers. Additionally, there are guided breathing exercises ranging from one to five minutes to help you de-stress along with female health tracking.

A nice addition to the Halo View is movement assessment within the app that can help you develop a personalized exercise program. It also offers on-demand measurement of blood oxygen levels, as does the Xiaomi Mi Band 6.

A unique feature with the Halo View is Tone of Voice analysis, which analyzes your voice when you speak using your phone and the app to let you know how you sound when talking to others, whether it's a colleague, significant other, or your kids.

Both can detect sleep, including light, deep, and REM, though you need the subscription with the Halo View to get detailed analysis. The Halo View also offers daily meditations from experts like Headspace. A nice added touch is access to more than 450 recipes from Whole Foods with the Halo View as well.

Additionally, the Halo View comes with support for Alexa-enabled devices so it can audibly advise you of your health summary, including activity score, sleep quality, and other details, when used with a compatible device. (It does not have a built-in mic, though).

You'll get a week's worth of battery life (up to seven days) with the Amazon Halo View, while the Xiaomi Mi Band 6 doubles that to 14 days, but only when in "normal use." With heavy use, presumably while running workouts and logging data like heart rate all day, you'll get up to five days of battery life. If you only want to log the essentials, you can extend battery life of the Mi Band to up to 19 days using power savings mode, great for when you're on vacation.

The Xiaomi Mi Band 6 has some neat additional features, including the ability to store and play music, find your phone, mute a compatible Android phone, show you the weather, set a timer, call and event reminders, and idle alerts.

Amazon Halo View vs. Xiaomi Mi Band: Subscription requirements

There are no subscription requirements with the Xiaomi Mi Band 6 — all the features mentioned above come standard. It's different with the Amazon Halo View, though.

A subscription with the Halo View is $3.99/mo. and without one, you only get basic tracking, limited access to workouts, heart rate tracking, calorie burn, time awake and asleep, and sleep temperature (but no detailed sleep analysis). If you want to enjoy the Tone analysis, movement health, and personalized improvement plans, you'll also have to subscribe.

The tracker does come with a one-year trial so you can use that time to figure out if you would really miss those details. But chances are once you get used to them, you won't want to lose them. That means it will cost you $47.88 per year thereafter — more than half the price of the band itself.

This is the factor that could be a dealbreaker for some. Many of the features you get with a membership for the Halo View are features you'd get standard with a premium tracker from another brand. Other trackers might cost more upfront but don't require any recurring fees.

Amazon Halo View vs. Xiaomi Mi Band 6: Which should you buy?

Android Central's Harish Jonnalagadda reviewed the Xiaomi Mi Band 6 and dubbed it the "best budget fitness band." You can't go wrong with the price, and he calls the addition of blood oxygen monitoring (Sp02), a feature rarely found in budget trackers, to be a marquee one for the device. His only issue was that it doesn't have voice assistance nor NFC, which means you can't make contactless payments. He also found heart rate data to be inconsistent with the Mi Band 6, which can almost negate the feature, altogether. If you can't rely on it, it doesn't add any value. With that said, there's a possibility this could be rectified via a software update in the future.

By contrast, the Amazon Halo View, reviewed by Android Central's Courtney Lynch, offers compelling features with the membership. But, as she notes, it "becomes a shell of itself" should you decide not to sign up. You can rely on the heart rate monitoring with this tracker more so than the Xiaomi device, which could sway some to the Halo View instead, particularly if you want something to focus on heart health. You also get premium features like Sp02 tracking and unique options like Tone Analysis.

Both offer decent battery life and quick charging times, so it really comes down to your budget and if you are willing to pay for a membership. If you're opting for a band like the Xiaomi Mi Band 6 when some of the best fitness trackers can still be had for just over $100, chances are you're doing so because you're on a very, very tight budget, or you're not yet willing to invest until you try out the world of fitness and activity tracking. If budget is your main concern, you'll be pleased with the Xiaomi Mi Band 6, which offers a nice balance of premium-like features for an unbeatable price.

If you have a bit more to spend, when you factor in the membership that's required to get the most out of the Amazon Halo View, you might be better off spending a bit more off the bat and opting for another activity tracker that includes all these features as a standard. With that said, if you want to save a few bucks initially and like the look of the Halo View along with the unique options like Whole Foods recipes and Tone Analysis, you might appreciate saving a bit upfront rather than forking over $4 per month to keep going once the one-year trial period elapses. It's essentially the price of a fancy latte, so to sacrifice one of those per month to get solid coaching and motivation towards your fitness goals is a no-brainer.

With that said, when deciding between the Amazon Halo View vs. Xiaomi Mi Band 6, for a first-time buyer, I'd suggest going with the Xiaomi Mi Band 6, using it for a year or so, then upgrading to something more feature-rich once you are ready to get serious.