Up to now, apart from my Samsung Gear, regular readers will have only seen me ranting about low-cost smartbands and will know that my all time favourite up to now is the Xiaomi Mi4. Well, today I’m moving upmarket a little, heading back towards the likes of the Gear and here’s a good example. The which came all the way from Banggood – they might sell more of this excellent watch by providing more face examples – I can’t be the only sucker for a good range of watchfaces.
The original of this blog entry was written on Nov 4 2019. I still love the Amazfit watch – but since then I sold my Samsung S2 and S3 and bought the Samsung Galaxy in the Black Fiday sales. With only one left wrist available, Samsung wins but not by a lot.. Samsung battery life is rubbish – but watch faces are fantastic. In both cases we are talking top notch watches here.
So – to the Amazfit – at first sight I thought “that’s not very bright” – but the thing is it is “not very bright” i.e. just enough, in every light condition I’ve put it in so far, which is more than can be said for some. So indoors you might think “well, that’s ‘ok’ but I’ll bet it is unreadable outside” – wrong.
On the principle that a picture is worth 1000 words, see combo photo at the top, various shots from my wrist this morning and yes, I know, only 80+ steps, it is Sunday – and it is early. Initial pairing with my Pocophone was so easy I didn’t bother to take notes. When the Gear came out, it was one of few with a choice of watchfaces (and it does have a massive library of faces) but now others are catching up…
I think the plastic band on the Amazfit will have to go in favour of a leather one as the watch isn’t the smallest in the world, but that’s easy to fix. Check out the link above for all kinds of detail and glorious photos, spec etc. See a random sample of available Amazfit faces, no doubt in the coming weeks I’ll spend FAR too much time downloading more.
One thing I DO find annoying – and if someone steps in here maybe we can help others, is the Amazfaces APP. I used this with my Xiaomi Mi band until one day Xiaomi Mi changed the way they do thgs and all of a sudden the AmazFaces app had to change. Now I’m trying to use it with the Amazfit Stratos watch and I simply cannot get my head around the app.
Amazfaces will from time to time say “Check your Inetrnet connection, and try again” (two mistakes in there, both theirs). The Amazfaces app also wants me to ensure I have AmazMod on my phone (I grabbed that) and on selecting one of the many faces available will (after I press “download”) say “Update Service” indicating a need for watch service application version 12 or higher. I downloaded the latest version from their link and no change. They really need to think about their handling of users. But to be fair that’s an extra, the main watch app works just fine.
I’ve had one of these for over a year and it’s great. It’s my main watch and also use it to track walks and bike rides. If you enable auto-airplane mode overnight i.e. switch bluetooth off, then you can extend the battery runtime.
Any – how are you coming on with the Amazfaces App.. I cannot get it to work. Hundreds of faces and I can;t get to them – somethin about the watch needs a driver update. The normal faces work just fine but are not as interesting imho.
Not used the app, I’ve loaded a couple of aftermarket faces and used old skool manual method of command line copy of the face APK file into the watch filesystem.
I’m not familiar with how to do that Andy – care to enlighten me?
My Samsung Galaxy Gear S3 gave up the ghost about 2 days before I was going on holiday so I did some reading up and then ordered the Amazfit GTR 47mm version. It looks way more expensive than the 113 GPB equivalent I paid for it locally. Battery life lasted the 4 weeks I was on holiday for although I did have the charging cable with me. Well impressed as I have it on all the time except when showering as I like the sleep tracking that it offers. The display work quite well outside although it often takes a second or two, to adjust the brightness when you first turn it on. All in all, I am pleased with it but would like the ability to give basic canned replies to messages from the watch instead of having to pull out the phone each time.
I DO hope my Samsung Gear S3 doesnt pack in – it was not cheap and I sold the S4 as I prefer the look of the S3…. I’ll have to check out the Amazfit GTR. My only gripe up to now is that Amazfaces APP – I cannot get to grips with the setup either on my Mi4 band or my Stratos.. any ideas, fire away. I just keep getting told I have to update something on the watch.
I’ve not given in to a smartwatch yet, but I’m interested to see what the Pine64 Pinewatch delivers next year.
The link is not working Pete.
it should have a so called “transflective” display, which is very good in consuming very low power AND to be readable in external light… the downside, the colors are not so bright when you are inside, compared to an lcd or oled…
but in that case you have to charge them daily, while this should last from 1 to 2 weeks, depending if you enable its internal gps or not, which allows you to leave phone home AND have you trips tracked anyway…
my friend here, which has one from months now, says that the gps turns on automatically when you start a sport activity. but should be configurable… he says the most power hungry application is notifications always on via BT, let’s wait your tests 🙂
Antonio (MrShark), now you mention it I believe you are right, I’ve not seen these transflective displays for some time. Not exciting but the battery life on this looks good so they have benefits… yup, I’m managing over a week… not as good as my tiny Mi4 (but with considerably more info and facilities) and WAY better than the Samsung which gets a couple of days or so out of the battery. Now, if I could just get to grips with the AmazFaces App… I did find a slightly better manual online – https://en.amazfit.com/pdf/manuals/stratos.pdf
Pete,
I know that the heart-rate monitoring is probably high on your list of must-have options for these things, but have you come across any of them which have an anywhere-close-to-accurate blood pressure function? My better half is putting on an arm-cuff twice a day, so an actual functioning watch version would make a great Chrissy present.
-John-
Apparently calibration is the key. I’ve seen other watches that do blood pressure but say you should calibrate off an arm band.