The Good The
Amazfit Bip is a complete fitness smartwatch that's a remarkable
bargain. It has an always-on display, weeks-long battery life, plus
extras like heart rate, GPS and water resistance. Works with Android and
iOS. Gets notifications.
The Bad Plastic
design and limited watch faces aren't as flashy as premium
smartwatches. Mi Fit app isn't as refined as Fitbit for fitness or
health tracking. No installable apps. Onboard features like
stopwatch/timer can't run in background.
The Bottom Line The
Amazfit Bip is affordable, has fantastic battery life, and is the best
low-key casual smartwatch around. It's a fine replacement for your
old-school Pebble, minus the apps
A good fitness tracker doesn’t need to look like the Apple Watch 3 in order to succeed, but it sure helps. The Amazfit Bip is a head-turning wearable that, even once you learn that it isn’t an Apple Watch, is still worth your attention. For $99 or £70, the Amazfit Bip is a competent fitness tracker that is said to last longer than 30 days on a single charge. If you’re after a simple wearable that can push notifications from your smartphone, wake you up with a dedicated alarm, and track your workouts with built-in GPS, and more, the Bip makes a strong case for itself.
Amazfit Bip price and release date
The Amazfit Bip is out now in the US and UK for $99 or £69.99 (around AU$99) and is readily available on the company’s website, as well as well-traveled web destinations like Amazon.As Amazfit is a brand within Huami, which supplies wearables under the Xiaomi umbrella, distribution across the globe is a bit murky at the moment. It launched in the US in early 2018 and then came to the UK a couple of months later, while we hope to hear about it arriving in Australia in the future.
Design
We’ve already touched on the highlights of the Bip’s design. It looks like an Apple Watch. But upon closer inspection, a closer parallel might be something more like the Pebble Time.Built with a matte-textured plastic chassis, the Bip transitions nicely into a slightly curved slate of Corning Gorilla Glass on top of its colored, pixelated display.
Moving around the tracker’s interface is done on the touchscreen, but waking it with the side button is mandatory. This design choice might seem like an annoyance, though it’s defensible when you realize how easy it can be to accidentally swipe the screen when you’re working out.
Speaking more on the glossy button on its side, clicking it triggers an animation to wipe across the screen, indicating that you’ve woken it. The built-in settings allow you to designate a task that launches when you press and hold the button. Things like outdoor running, cycling, treadmill, or walking are the only options available now, but the list could grow in the future.
Once the Bip is unlocked, you have free access to slide your finger around, each direction venturing into different features. Sliding down reveals your connection status, battery level, and lets you toggle a “do not disturb” mode that disables notifications of any kind. Swiping up shows you various notifications that have come through your phone, like text messages or alerts for Twitter.
Nothing happens when you slide from the right side, but moving left reveals one of seven tiles, which can be rearranged in the Mi Fit companion app. Here, you’ll find the Status section, giving you a deep dive on steps taken, heart rate, distance traveled, etc. Some of the built-in watch faces (like the one prominently pictured in this review) reveal this info without any interaction whatsoever, so your use may vary for this view.
Following Status, there are pages dedicated to Activity, Weather, Alarm, Timer, Compass and Settings. We’ll drill into the Activity section later on, but each of the others are pretty predictable, though accessible, in their execution.
Depending on the wearable, judging performance differs quite a bit. If it’s an Apple Watch or a Wear OS smartwatch, we analyze its multitasking abilities to ensure that it delivers the rich experience to justify their high prices. But for something like the $99 / £70 Bip, expectations are a bit lower by comparison.
Fitness
The Amazfit Bip is built for those who want a wearable that can handle a lot, whether it consists of trudging through the elements with you on a tough run, or just staying alive for days on end without needing to be recharged. Thankfully, it excels at both of those things, though it isn’t the absolute best option if you’re looking for the most amount of activity support.At a similar price point, affordable Wear OS watches equipped with Google Fit support more activities, as do options like the Fitbit Charge 2 and Samsung Gear Fit 2. From an activity tracking perspective, the Bip is sorely lacking in swim tracking capabilities despite its IP68 waterproof rating – something that the Samsung Gear FIt 2 Pro handles just about the best of any smart tracker that we’ve tested thus far.
The Amazfit Bip’s list of abilities could expand with future updates but even at this price, it offers a decent amount of options. If you enjoy walking, biking or running outdoors, it comes with built-in GPS to map your progress, as well as accelerometer, barometer and compass, to track your pace and altitude. Otherwise, the only other trackable option is the treadmill.
When it comes to picking out the right fitness tracker for your needs, it’s certainly a challenge. There are so many competing models to select between, but there’s one very positive change happening, as the Bip further makes obvious: high-end features like GPS and waterproofing are coming to cheaper devices.
