Surprise: Xiaomi’s Mi Watch looks like the Apple Watch
Mi Watch runs the Android-based Wear OS and has a familiar shape, but it’s much cheaper than the Apple Watch
Xiaomi has a new smartwatch. And it looks very familiar.
There’s a lot of things I’d like to talk about with the Mi Watch. I’d like to talk about the fact that it runs the Android-based Wear OS, or that Xiaomi says it’s the first smartwatch to use Qualcomm's Snapdragon Wear 3100 chipset.
But it’s hard to overlook the obvious here: Xiaomi’s smartwatch looks just like the Apple Watch.
Despite support for circular screens in Wear OS, Xiaomi has gone with a rectangular display like Apple. There’s a circular dial and longer button on the right side, with a little hole (presumably for the microphone) in between -- all exactly the same layout as the Apple Watch.
The Mi Watch comes in two different configurations. The base model has an aluminium finish in either silver or space gray dark gray, while a premium model has a shiny stainless steel case with a sapphire glass screen. And yes, those are the same materials as the low-end and mid-range Apple Watches.
But there’s one area where it stands sharply apart from Apple: Price. The base model Mi Watch costs about US$185 with LTE. In contrast, it’ll set you back US$299 for an Apple Watch with cellular connectivity, and that’s for the two-year-old Series 3 model.
