Cooking appliances are witnessing a major revolution these days. They now integrate with our home network, communicate with each other, and help us cook faster, tastier, and healthier than ever before. If you have a busy schedule and not enough time to cook meals every day, you may want to try Xiaomi's Mi Smart Air Fryer. It’s an interesting device that helps you cook around 100 recipes (mostly fried), in just a couple of minutes, with reliable results. Are you curious to know more? Read this review to see whether the Xiaomi Mi Smart Air Fryer is a great choice for you:

Mi Smart Air Fryer: Who is it good for?

Xiaomi's Mi Smart Air Fryer is a great choice for:

• People with little spare time who want a tasty meal with minimal effort
• Cooking healthier fried dishes for one or two people
• Those who don’t want to spend a fortune on cooking appliances

Pros and cons

My testing revealed several qualities of the Xiaomi Mi Smart Air Fryer:

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• Reasonable price that many can afford
• Easy to use and set up
• Decent build quality and well-rounded feature set
• Easy to clean
• The Mi Home app has a reasonably long list of recipes to get you started

There are some downsides to consider as well:

• It takes some time to get used to closing the basket
• It’s too small for family-cooking
• A limited ecosystem of recipes and cooking experiences

Verdict

Mi Smart Air Fryer 3.5L is a no frills, no thrills kind of product. It delivers all the basics you need from an air fryer with no unique accessories or features. It’s the kind of machine built to get the job done at a reasonable price. If you live alone or with your partner, you tend to eat many fried dishes, and you want them to be healthier, Xiaomi Mi Smart Air Fryer is a great choice that won’t make you break your piggy bank. However, if you need to prepare food for a family of three or more people, and you want to cook diverse dishes, then you should look for a multi-cooker with a larger capacity instead. An air fryer will be too limiting for you.

Unboxing the Mi Smart Air Fryer 3.5L

The box in which I received the Mi Smart Air Fryer 3.5L had been transported a couple of times to different publications, so it wasn’t in the greatest of shapes when it got to my place. Nevertheless, the box is made of cardboard, with plenty of photos of the device on all its sides.

Xiaomi Mi Smart Air Fryer 3.5L comes in a large box

All the features of the Mi Smart Air Fryer 3.5L are presented in detail on the sides of the box. When you take out the air fryer, you’ll also find a grill, its frying plate, the warranty details, and some basic instructions.

These are the only accessories you get

The unboxing experience for the Xiaomi Mi Smart Air Fryer is quick and simple. There’s no special accessory bundled with it, and to set it up, you must install the Mi Home app for Android or iOS. It may sound weird that you have to install an app for an air fryer, but yes, this is what you must do. I’ll tell you more in later sections of this review.

Design and hardware specifications

The Xiaomi Mi Smart Air Fryer has a practical yet boxy design. Its dimensions are 33.5 x 25.4 x 30.4 cm or 13.18 x 10 x 8.03 inches in width x depth x height, and it weighs about 4.6 kg or 10.14 lbs. As you can see in the picture below, it has a plastic, glossy white exterior and a dial with an OLED display. The dial is useful when you don’t have the Mi Home app around, and it can be used to set timings and temperatures, select preset functions, and even the language of the device. You also use it to connect the air fryer to your Wi-Fi to then manage it from the Mi Home app on your smartphone.

Xiaomi Mi Smart Air Fryer has an OLED display on the front

Xiaomi Mi Smart Air Fryer has a volume of 3.5 liters, which means you can use it to cook for a maximum of two people. With the grill inside, you can arrange the food into two layers and have them cooked simultaneously. The maximum rated power is 1500W, and you can set the cooking temperature to anywhere between 40 and 200 degrees Celsius or between 104 and 392 Fahrenheit.

The grill helps you arrange the food into two layers

On the back of the Xiaomi Mi Smart Air Fryer, there’s an outlet that allows it to take out the hot air while in use. Xiaomi claims that this air fryer can work up to 24 hours continuously when cooking at low temperatures.

The outlet allows the fryer to take out the hot air

Being a smart device, the Xiaomi Mi Smart Air Fryer also uses Bluetooth 4.0 and Wi-Fi to connect to your smartphone and home network. With the help of the Mi Home app, you can also configure it to work with Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa and have it cook your fries through voice commands.

If you want to go through all the official specifications of this product, visit this page: Mi Smart Air Fryer 3.5L.

Setting up and using the Mi Smart Air Fryer

What makes the Xiaomi Mi Smart Air Fryer a smart appliance is the Mi Home app that you should install on your iPhone or Android smartphone. The app can detect the air fryer through Bluetooth and connect it to your home’s Wi-Fi.

Adding the Xiaomi Mi Smart Air Fryer to the Mi Home app

After you install the air fryer, you can access it from the app and start any of its default modes, which help you cook meals like fries and chicken wings, bake a small cake, or even dry fruits.

Choose a device mode or find more recipes

If you want access to other recipes that can be cooked in the XIAOMI Mi Smart Air Fryer, tap the More recipes button in the Mi Home app, and you get a list with about a hundred of them.

The list of recipes is reasonably long

Tap on a recipe, and you see details about what you need, as well as step-by-step cooking instructions. Prepare the ingredients according to what the app tells you, and then tap Start program.

I cooked some ribs on the Xiaomi Mi Smart Air Fryer

One recommendation you should always follow is to enable the Preheat period for all the recipes so that the Xiaomi Mi Smart Air Fryer gets into optimal working condition before cooking. You’ll get much better results this way.

I tested this air fryer only for a couple of days, and I didn’t get the chance to cook many diverse meals on it. I’ve only made some fries, ribs, and chicken wings. All of them were cooked well and tasty, with little to no oil required. Following the recipes on the Mi Home app wasn’t difficult at all, and the results were pretty good. The only problem I had was with the basket, which isn’t always easy to insert. You must set it in the correct position before pushing it into the air fryer. Otherwise, it won’t fully close, and you won’t be able to cook stuff. However, after a couple of tries, I got the hang of it.

Do you like my fries?

On the upside, cleaning all the accessories is easy. They can even be loaded into a dishwasher. However, the air fryer gets dirty easily, and you’ll need to clean it regularly if you don’t want it to have lots of grease and food residue on it after only a couple of days of use.

While I didn’t cook on an air fryer machine before, for the last couple of months, I have been using a Ninja Foodi Multi-Cooker with an air frying feature. While the two devices don’t have the same audiences and price points, there are some important differences you might want to consider:

• An air fryer is useful, but it allows you to cook a limited set of dishes: mostly stuff that can be fried. If you want to cook healthy and diverse dishes, you are better served by a multi-cooker which also includes air frying. The diversity of foods you can prepare on a multi-cooker is astonishing.
• I cooked the same recipes on my multi-cooker before, and I noticed that the fries were a bit tastier on the multi-cooker than on the Xiaomi Mi Smart Air Fryer. Also, most recipes for the multi-cooker don’t require you to pause mid-way and turn over the food, while you regularly have to do this on the Xiaomi Mi Smart Air Fryer.
• Xiaomi Mi Smart Air Fryer lacks an ecosystem of recipes and people cooking with it, sharing their experiences on YouTube, cooking sites, and social media. While trying to decide what to cook on this air fryer for the first time, I didn’t find anything to inspire me on the internet, and I was stuck using only the recipes from the Mi Home app. If you are passionate about learning to cook using similar smart appliances, this may be an important downside.

If you’re on a busy schedule most of the time and you need a smart appliance to help you cook a fast and tasty meal, Xiaomi Mi Smart Air Fryer is a helpful choice that quickly fries almost anything for you.

What do you think about the Mi Smart Air Fryer?

Now you know what I like and don’t like about the Xiaomi Mi Smart Air Fryer 3.5L. Before closing this review, tell me what you think: do you like this smart cooking appliance? Would you buy it? Are you also considering other types of devices, like multi-cookers, for preparing your meals? Comment below, and let’s discuss.