Sunday Runday
Nicholas Sutrich takes over Sunday Runday this week, a weekly column that talks about the world of wearables, apps, and fitness tech related to running and health.
The very first Amazfit product I’ve ever used was the original 2016 Amazfit Fitness Tracker. This simple gadget tracked steps and sleep, and even had a vibration motor inside to alert you to phone notifications. Since then, Amazfit has morphed into a fitness powerhouse, offering dozens of different smartwatches at every price level and functionality you could dream of.
The Amazfit Balance 2 is my favorite smartwatch from the company in a long time, and its impressive capabilities are only matched by its sleek appearance. Of course, my trusty Garmin Instinct 2X Solar is still cranking right along, good as the day it came out, and is, quite frankly, hard to beat for most fitness-related tasks.
I wore both of these watches on my latest Spartan Race and had a difficult time finding any reasonable differences in the data they provided at the end of the race. Which leads me to wonder: why would I pay more for a Garmin than an Amazfit watch? I found a few reasons, and they might help you decide.
Price
Price is the area where Amazfit wins most handily. Garmin is known for producing high-quality watches that aren’t inexpensive, which has given the brand a premium image over the years. Amazfit started from the other end of things, offering dirt-cheap products and upping their game over time (but still undercutting rivals on price).
Take the Amazfit Band 7 vs the Garmin Vivosmart 5, for instance. Both of these are the latest fitness bands with displays from each respective company; yet, Garmin’s is still three times the price of Amazfit’s. Plus, because of software updates and a fresh Zepp app, some of the shortcomings we found in our original Amazfit Band 7 review have been rectified.
This same argument can be made for many of Amazfit’s products. In many cases, competing Amazfit products offer 90-95% of the features of Garmin’s at something like half the price, and that’s a ratio I’m willing to work with.
Fitness tracking
For years, Amazfit watches felt like an obvious second-rate choice for fitness tracking. While they have offered more options for workout types — 180 on the Amazfit T-Rex 3 Pro I just got versus around 90 on the Garmin Instinct 2X I have — I wasn’t convinced of the accuracy of the heart rate monitoring until this year’s products.
Both the Amazfit Balance 2 and T-Rex 3 Pro have superb heart rate accuracy, matching all the best fitness smartwatches I’ve tested to date. I’ve taken these watches out for paddleboarding sessions, run a Spartan Race with them, and spent plenty of time in my CrossFit-style gym trying out everything from cardio days to strength training.
The only area I found where Garmin more consistently has the edge over Amazfit is during strength training and weight-lifting exercises. While several Amazfit workout types will give you a breakdown of what muscles you used and keep track of your reps, Garmin more consistently shows the correct workout type automatically.
For instance, my most common workout type is HIIT since it most closely aligns with my gym’s typical activity types. If I look at the data from my Garmin Instinct 2X Solar, it’s got muscle heatmaps of what it thinks I used, which is helpful for going back and remembering why my shoulders are suddenly sore two days later.
Amazfit only offers this kind of muscular heatmap for strength training or weightlifting exercise types. I’ve also found that Amazfit’s watches have a harder time differentiating nuanced workouts than Garmin. If I select strength training and do a bunch of front squats with a barbell, Garmin almost always marks it as “barbell squat,” while Amazfit’s watches might figure that out 30% of the time.
Companion apps and syncing
Here’s where things get a little mixed. As an app, Amazfit Zepp is superior. It’s got a better, less convoluted UI when compared to the Garmin Connect app, and it offers a ton of additional features that Garmin just doesn’t have. LLM-powered food logging is probably the greatest single feature I’ve used in any holistic workout app, and it’s something only Zepp has.
But as good as the Zepp app’s features and UI are, it’s held back by a number of bugs that are just plain frustrating. Reddit users have complained about this many times, and it often takes Amazfit a long time to address these problems. Coding and workout algorithms are hard, no doubt, but it seems like Amazfit’s team isn’t able to crank out fixes as fast as some other companies.
I don’t often run into problems with the app, but my original intent for this week’s column was to compare data from the Spartan Race I just ran. The problem is, the Amazfit watch had my entire workout on it, but the Zepp app simply wouldn’t sync the entire thing.
This left me with missing workout data when I exported the workout to quantified-self.io, the service we typically use to directly compare smartwatch fitness data. Unfortunately for my original idea, the entire stack of GPS data was missing, and the Zepp app confirmed that.
Holding Amazfit back
The problem is that there’s no way to manually sync fitness data from Amazfit watches or even export from the watch itself. The Zepp app normally automatically syncs all data from your watch at the end of a workout. When this fails, there seems to be no real way to resync.
Amazfit’s support will tell you to force stop the app, reinstall it, clear the cache, etc. But none of these options forces a total resync, even though I can still view all the data on my watch.
It’s these little annoyances (that are sometimes big problems) that Amazfit needs to fix and, ultimately, what holds it back from beating Garmin once and for all.
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