Xiaomi Redmi Watch 6 Review: Two-Week Battery, One Catch

The Redmi Watch 6 is Xiaomi's latest attempt to dominate the sub-£100 smartwatch market, and on the face of it, it has all the ingredients: a big, bright AMOLED screen, a fortnight of battery life and the promise of paying from your wrist. Priced from £84.99 (with an NFC version around £129.99), it is pitched squarely at the mainstream. In everyday use, though, the picture is more nuanced — the Redmi Watch 6 gets the fundamentals brilliantly right, but bumps into the limits of its closed software and an NFC feature that comes with asterisks.

The Redmi Watch 6 borrows the familiar square, Apple Watch-style shape, in an aluminium-alloy case with a soft TPU strap. It is light and comfortable at around 31g, measures 46.45 x 40.03 x 9.94mm, and carries a 5 ATM water-resistance rating for swimming. The star is the screen: a 2.07-inch AMOLED panel at 432 x 514 pixels (324 pixels per inch) with a 60Hz refresh rate and an 82% screen-to-body ratio, so it fills the face nicely. Brightness is the highlight — it peaks at 2000 nits (1500 nits in high-brightness mode), which makes it genuinely easy to read in direct sunlight, something budget watches usually struggle with.

Day to day, the Redmi Watch 6 runs Xiaomi's HyperOS 3, and it feels fluid and responsive, with a built-in speaker and microphone for taking calls from the wrist. But there is an elephant in the room: the software is a closed system. The choice of outside apps is limited, and popular services such as Spotify are absent, so this is a companion watch rather than a mini-smartphone. The "NFC" badge also deserves scrutiny — contactless payment is not the full Google or Apple Pay experience most people expect, and instead leans on workarounds through services like Curve, which will not suit everyone. If seamless payments and app freedom matter to you, that is the catch to weigh.

For tracking, the Redmi Watch 6 covers the essentials well. It uses multi-system positioning (GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, BeiDou and QZSS) that locks on quickly, and offers a long list of sport modes for almost any activity. A heart-rate sensor with blood-oxygen (SpO2) measurement, an accelerometer, a gyroscope, an ambient-light sensor and a compass round out the hardware, so everyday step, sleep and workout tracking is accurate enough for casual and enthusiast users alike.

Battery is where the Redmi Watch 6 truly shines, and it is the single best reason to buy one. The 550mAh cell delivers up to 24 days of light use, around 12 days of normal use and about 7 days even under intensive use with the GPS and always-on features working hard. In practice that means close to a fortnight between charges for most people — a world away from the daily charging a full smartwatch demands, and exactly the sort of freedom that makes a simpler watch worth the trade-offs.

The Redmi Watch 6 is an easy recommendation for anyone who wants a big, bright screen, excellent fitness tracking and, above all, battery life measured in weeks rather than days, at a budget price from £84.99. It suits first-time smartwatch buyers, gym-goers and anyone tired of nightly charging. It is not the watch for you if you want a true app ecosystem, Spotify on your wrist or full contactless payments — for those, a pricier smartwatch or one of the more open budget rivals will serve you better. But if you can live within its walls, little else offers this much screen and stamina for the money.

The Redmi Watch 6 is a superb-value budget smartwatch that nails the things that matter most day to day: a large, class-leading 2000-nit AMOLED display, genuine two-week battery life, comfortable all-day wear and dependable fitness tracking. The compromises are real — a closed operating system with limited apps and a restricted take on NFC payments — but they are the familiar price of keeping a capable watch this affordable. For most people who simply want a reliable, long-lasting companion watch without spending much, it is one of the best options under £100.

This is an editorial buying review based on published specifications and current UK pricing.