Xiaomi Watch S5 review: Premium design meets outstanding battery life at a great price

Can’t say the smartwatch market has ever been idle, but there's certainly a lot of buzz around wearables these days, thanks to AI. For better or worse, I might add, because as much as machine learning is making smartwatches more clever than ever before, it’s also making them more expensive, due to soaring RAM prices.

Xiaomi’s latest wearable, Watch S5, arrives in this environment. The company, alongside brands like Honor, has built its reputation on offering more for less, and there is nothing wrong with that.

There is a huge market for watches that offer features that might have been cutting-edge 12 or 245 months ago for a lot less money than the latest Samsung Galaxy or Apple Watch.

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From this perspective, the Watch S5 offers nothing radically new, or more like, continues the tradition set out by its predecessors. It pairs a premium-looking stainless steel design with impressive battery life and a feature set that rivals considerably more expensive smartwatches.

On paper, it's one of the most compelling wearables in its price bracket, but specifications only tell part of the story. I tested the watch for a couple of weeks, and even though it won’t push my Garmin watch off my wrist, the Xiaomi Watch S5 offers a lot of value for those who don’t need full ecosystem support or care much about the personality of their wearables.

Xiaomi Watch S5 review

Price and availability

The Xiaomi Watch S5 was launched in May 2026 and is available to buy now directly from Xiaomi UK and Xiaomi EU, with prices from £150 / €179. It’s available in four colours, including Black, Silver, Jungle Green and Ceramic Blue, with the latter two costing £20 / €20 more. Xiaomi doesn’t have an Australian site (or at least I can’t find it), and the watch isn’t listed on the brand’s US site.

Design and build quality

The Xiaomi Watch S5 has a 46 mm stainless steel case that feels reassuringly solid without being overly heavy, tipping the scales at just 46g without the strap. At 10.99 mm thick, it also sits comfortably on the wrist and slides under a shirt cuff more easily than many rugged outdoor watches.

The closest smartwatch in terms of case size and weight would be the Huawei Watch GT 6 Pro, which has a 45.6 mm case (marketed as 46 mm) and weighs about the same. The OnePlus Watch 3 is slightly larger and weighs a few grams more.

The Watch S5's overall design is fairly conservative, but Xiaomi has injected a little individuality into the tested Jungle Green model. It has a forged carbon bezel that is said to catch the light differently from steel and gives each watch a unique pattern, while the green fluororubber strap lends it a slightly more outdoorsy aesthetic.

It's a handsome smartwatch rather than a memorable one. That's not necessarily a criticism; after all, there's only so much manufacturers can do with a round display and two-button layout. However, the Xiaomi Watch S5 isn’t as recognisable as rivals from Garmin, Samsung or even Huawei. It feels premium, yet its design plays it safe.

The 1.48-inch AMOLED display is excellent with a crisp 480 x 480-pixel resolution (323ppi) and a peak brightness of 2,500 nits. It’s not the brightest or prettiest screen, but it does the job perfectly, with little to no lag when responding to touch input. The rotating crown provides a satisfying way to scroll through menus, particularly when your fingers are wet or sweaty.

The watch is rated to 5ATM for swimming, features built-in GPS with support for five satellite systems, and includes an impressive array of sensors, including a barometer and electronic compass. It also has a built-in speaker and microphone.

Features and performance

The Xiaomi Watch S5 strikes a sensible balance between smartwatch convenience and fitness tracking. It doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, but it does cover just about everything most people will need, including continuous heart rate monitoring, blood oxygen tracking, stress monitoring, sleep analysis, dual-band GNSS and more than 150 sports modes.

Sleep tracking proved to be one of the more interesting features during testing. The watch records the usual sleep stages and assigns a nightly sleep score, but Xiaomi also offers a weekly "Sleep Animal" profile that categorises your sleeping habits after seven nights of data.

It's clearly inspired by similar features found on Samsung, Google and Fitbit devices, but it's a fun bit of gamification that encourages you to build healthier routines. That said, I did find some of its coaching a little contradictory.

On one occasion, the watch awarded me an excellent sleep score while simultaneously telling me I'd slept for an "excessive" amount of time. It's not a major issue, but it does make you question how much faith to put in some of its recommendations.

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Fitness tracking is similarly dependable rather than groundbreaking. I spent most of my testing running, where the dual-band GPS performed well, producing tracks that closely matched those from the Garmin Forerunner 970 I wore on my other wrist. I wasn't running through dense woodland or city streets packed with tall buildings, so it wasn't the toughest test, but accuracy was more than good enough for everyday training.

Runners also get a handful of more advanced metrics than you might expect at this price, including ground contact time, vertical ratio and cadence. They're useful additions for anyone looking to improve their form, even if Xiaomi doesn't offer the same depth of analysis or training guidance as Garmin or Coros.

Heart rate tracking also proved reliable during steady runs and day-to-day wear. I didn't have the opportunity to compare it against a chest strap during interval sessions or gym workouts, where wrist-based sensors typically struggle the most, so I can't comment on its performance during high-intensity exercise. For general health monitoring and aerobic training, though, it appeared to be consistently in the right ballpark.

One feature I particularly liked is Xiaomi's activity rings. Much like Apple's approach, the app encourages you to close daily goals for calories burned, steps taken and active minutes. It's a simple system, but it works well as a gentle nudge to get up from your desk or squeeze in a short walk before the end of the day.

Battery life and charging

Battery life is undoubtedly one of the Xiaomi Watch S5's biggest strengths. Xiaomi quotes up to 21 days on a single charge, and while you'll need to be fairly conservative with your settings to get anywhere near that figure, the watch comfortably outlasts almost every Wear OS rival.

During my testing, I enabled advanced sleep tracking and sleep breathing monitoring, and I regularly used GPS for outdoor walks and runs. Over the course of eight days, I logged almost four hours of GPS activity, including a nearly three-hour walk, plus a couple of shorter runs and an indoor HIIT workout. Even with that workload, the Watch S5 still had 14% battery remaining at the end of the test.

That's an impressive result. In everyday use, I think most people can realistically expect about 10 to 14 days between charges, depending on how often they exercise and whether they leave the more advanced health-tracking features enabled. It's not quite the headline-grabbing three-week endurance Xiaomi advertises, but it's still leagues ahead of the two or three days you'd typically get from a Wear OS smartwatch.

Charging is a little less impressive. Xiaomi bundles a proprietary two-pin magnetic charging puck with a USB-A connector, which already feels a generation behind in a world increasingly dominated by USB-C. (The puck itself is also bulkier than it needs to be.)

Charging speeds are perfectly acceptable, not particularly quick. Using a 5W charger, the battery climbed from 14% to 50% in around 25 minutes and reached 100% after roughly 80 minutes. Given how infrequently you'll need to recharge the Watch S5, it's hardly a deal-breaker, but I would've liked to see Xiaomi modernise the charging setup to match the otherwise premium feel of the hardware.

Verdict

The Xiaomi Watch S5 feels like a smartwatch that knows exactly what it wants to be. Xiaomi has focused on the fundamentals: build quality, battery life, and reliable health tracking, and the result is a wearable that consistently punches above its price point.

That's not to say it's flawless. HyperOS still feels a little utilitarian compared to Wear OS, Apple's watchOS or even Huawei's HarmonyOS, and while the feature set is comprehensive, there's very little here that feels genuinely distinctive. Even the hardware, as well-made as it is, plays it a little too safe from a design perspective.

Yet none of those shortcomings stops the Xiaomi Watch S5 from being easy to recommend. GPS performance is dependable, the health metrics cover everything most people need, and the battery life is genuinely liberating after years of charging smartwatches every other day.

If you're deeply invested in Google's ecosystem, want a thriving app store or rely on advanced training metrics, you'll still be better served by a Samsung Galaxy Watch, Pixel Watch or Garmin. But if your priorities are a premium feel, excellent endurance and plenty of features for not a lot of money, the Xiaomi Watch S5 delivers exactly what it promises.