Smart Shoes Review – Xiaomi And Li-Ning Joint Development

Should you buy smart shoes made by Xiaomi? The company that brought us the most favorable, affordable and popular electornic devices on the market? Let’s check out. I am not a fan of running myself but I love running shoes and believe that they are great for everyday life. Especially for those of you who persists to be pretty active on a daily basis. Before I’ve got mine I was thinking about buying some original sneakers from Nike or Adidas. But at the moment I stumbled upon the thought: «What if I get something from Li-Ning?». For the note: Li-Ning is the one of the largest shoe companies in China. This firm creates sneakers for domestic market which is fairly well in terms of quality. Li-Ning even makes shoes for Chinese olympians and has collaboration with Xiaomi. Smart Shoes are selling in two different styles. One is “closed” with classic design. And one is “open” when part of the shoe covered with some kind of lightweight net instead of leather or typical textile. Because of my speciality I have to wear massive army boots during seasonal rains (I’m not afraid of wetting feet but there’s chance to step on a titan cutting scob. And that’s quite dangerous). So, that’s why this time I switched to lightweight Smart Shoes with durable base. Let’s take a closer look.

How They Look And What’s In The Box

Li-Ning uses recycled carton for packages of shoes. Package itself is pretty simple (as you could expect from quite cheap sneakers). Nonetheless they look and feel rather like something more decent and expensive. They’re made of synthetic materials, have no bad scents and sewed really well. A sole made of polyurethane with modified tread helps not to slid on any slippery surface.
As I said earlier some models have lightweight net in toe zone instead of ordinary textile. It helps air circulate through. At first glance Smart Shoes seem to be quite decent and firm. They definitely will survive two-three years of everyday wearing. Even on feet of a professional runner.

For me Smart Shoes are really comfortable. Sole is tough enough to protect your feet from any roughness under them. Beside sneakers itself there’s a second smaller box in the package. That’s where all the «smartness» of shoes is hidden. Inside the box you can find miniature plastic piece (with microchip inside) with QR-code and Bluetooth 4.0 module both needed to maintain connection with smartphone and transfer data to Xiaomi Fitness application (available for iOS 7, Android 4 and newer OSes).
Li-Ning says that this device can work on one charge for about a year.

How Do They Work?

Everything is pretty simple. To start using smart features of shoes you have to:

1. Get right sneaker.
2. Pull out a slipsole.
3. Put the microchip from the small box right into special hole under an insole.

After that you need to establish connection between your smartphone and the chip in the shoe.

1. You have to install the app called Mi Fit from App Store (on iPhone) or Google Play (on Android phones).
   There were some problems with application from Google Play (it haven’t been working with Li-Ning shoes for quite some time). Probably you’ll have to find patched version if it’s the case for you.
2. Than you should turn on Bluetooth on you smartphone and scan QR-code on chip using Mi Fit application.

That’s it. Now you can pull sneakers on and wait till they’re calibrated by software.

Smart Shoes can record amount of steps you pass everyday, frequency of them, distance you walked trough, speed and burned calories.To make all this data more relevant and accurate Mi Fit will ask you to set your age, sex, height and weight. Also you can set up personal goal like «walk at least 10 thousand steps every day».
Li-Ning start to record all your activities as soon as you pull them on. Even without connection with smartphone. Microchip inside the sneaker can store all the data and automatically transfers it into the app when it’s available. Shoes automatically detect if you run or walk and record it in the app with specific label (depends on type of activity). But you can purposely set it up to record every movement as running if you usually walk quite fast. In running mode Li-Ning use GPS to count steps, trajectory and distance more properly. Also there’s a voice trainer in the app which can help you achieve your goals. If GPS is turned on measurement error is about 5%. The same as for the fitness tracker Xiaomi Mi Band.

The Conclusion

Smart Shoes are great not just because they’re smart. Honestly even if you’re not fond of fitness and don’t really want boots to track your every step you still can buy them because they’re tremendously cheap. 50 dollars for such a decent footwear is a great deal. Fitness features are just additional bonuses for those who understands benefits of them. Also there’s a lot of different color styles and specific gender-based designs. If you are about to get your first smart sneakers take a look at Li-Ning. They’re cheap enough to test all the smart features out and decide is it something you’d like to wear or not. I definitely will wear them and already want to order one more pair for the next season.
The article was prepared with help of https://lifehacker.ru/(Material and Photos)