Amazfir GTS Review 2020
Short Overview
The Amazfit GTS smartwatch is like a Copy of Apple watch. But it comes with almost every feature which we can accept from a SmartWatch. You can connect this watch on both Android and iOS.
What's inside the box?
You get the watch itself with the strap already installed, a proprietary magnetic charging cable, and an instruction manual.
Detailed Review
Design:
It’s difficult not to compare its design to an Apple Watch,
it looks very similar but with a basic central button on the side, rather than
the off-center Apple Watch digital crown. It’s well made with a Gorilla glass
touch screen, aluminum surround and what feels like a hard plastic bottom housing
the heart rate sensor.
The included black strap is made from relatively thin
silicone with a standard buckle, but you can get replacement 20mm straps fairly
cheaply off Amazon or eBay. Changing the strap is straightforward and
tool-free, you just use your fingernail to release the catch. The watch is a
little thicker and heavier than the Amazfit Bip at 11mm including the heart
rate monitor bump and weighs 39g with the strap.
How to connect the watch?
Download the Amazfit app from Google Play or the Apple App
Store. The instruction manual has a QR code you can scan to take you straight
to the app’s download page, but this gave a page not found which a great start
wasn’t.
Turning the watch on for the first time with the side button, prompted a factory reset which seemed a little strange. After the reset, you’re ready for the app with the watch. Hold the phone over the watch’s QR code and accept the pairing request. Let the app download any updates to the watch, which takes 5 minutes or so.
Amazfit app features
In the Amazfit app, you’ll see the current charge status. I
quite like the default watch face, but you have a wide range of watch faces to
change it to. Just tap on the watch face you like and let it sync across.
Watch Features
You can turn on incoming call alerts which will display the name of any known contacts if you have that setting turned on. You can’t answer phone calls, you can only reject them if you’re busy, but it’s still useful seeing who’s calling you. You can set alarms from the app - the watch will vibrate when the alarm goes off. Under App alerts, you can control what notifications you’ll get. I have WhatsApp turned on. For some reason, you’ll need to go into More Incoming SMS to turn on notifications for SMS messages. You can’t respond to any messages.
Find watch will vibrate your watch if it’s in Bluetooth range. Display settings let you choose your watch pages. You can rearrange their order and hide pages you don’t want to see. Here’s also where you configure your location for the weather forecast. If we go back you can also set your steps goal under my goals, Activity goal, and under Add accounts, you can connect to Strava so theoretically you can sync your activities across.
However, although I could easily connect my Strava account, the app instantly forgot the setting which meant this feature didn’t work. I did contact support, but two weeks on there’s still no fix. Watch overview The AMOLED display protected by Gorilla glass is by far the most impressive feature of the watch. Its 341 PPI screen looks as sharp and clear as that of an Apple Watch Series 4 costs over three times the price. It has an anti-fingerprint coating and feels very smooth to the touch.
Depending on your watch face, it can look like the display extends all the way to the soft rounded edges of the screen, but there is in fact an approximately 4mm bezel. The screen measures 40mm by 35mm with the display occupying roughly 33mm by 26mm. A watch face. You can customize the various modules by tapping on them and scrolling through the available options. These can display live info like heart rate or steps, or they can just be shortcuts to some of the watch functions like Music that I’ll cover shortly. Different watch faces have different widgets that can be customized but it is impressive the amount of customization that’s available. Swiping left and right switches between steps and heart rate. The side button will always take you back to the home page.
Swiping down from the home page confirms pairing to your
smartphone and battery remaining, in the top left in a very small font. The
central icons turn torch mode on and off which is just a white screen; and
controls do not disturb mode, the auto-brightness setting, and screen lock.
Swipe up or press the side button to return to the home page. Swiping up from
the home page you can access the various screens you chose earlier in Display
settings. These will vary depending on what you have configured, but I’ll cover
some of the interesting ones. Swiping right goes back.
In Settings, you can choose your watch faces from the ones that come with the watch or any you’ve synced across from the app. You can configure the screen time-out under Screen auto-off. Raising your wrist or tapping the screen activates the screen. By default, it’s blank when not woken up, but you can turn Always-on display to have the time displayed throughout the day. Make sure you have the latest firmware to see this feature. This will reduce battery life, but it’s a feature only introduced to the Apple Watch in its current Series 5 version. Music will let you control anything currently playing on your phone or through any Bluetooth headphones connected to your phone. Music and podcasts could be controlled off my iPhone.
You can pause and play music, skip tracks, and adjust the
volume, which is all very convenient. If you use this a lot it might be more
useful to set a long press of the side button to take you straight to this
page. Or at least have a shortcut configured on your watch face.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work with the YouTube app but it
worked with most other apps I tried including Spotify and Amazon Music and the
native Music and Podcasts apps on iOS.
Notifications flash up on the screen, but to access them after that you
need to go to the Notifications screen.
You can swipe left to delete notifications or scroll to the
bottom to delete them all. Under more, there’s a compass and you can scroll down
for an Air pressure gauge and an Altimeter.
There’s also a stopwatch and a countdown timer.
I haven’t used this enough yet to determine if it provides
valuable data or not. You can’t access sleep stats from the watch, you need to
use the accompanying app. I’ll cover workouts and activities and sleep shortly.
You can press the side button to return to the home screen, or swipe right.
Battery life
To be honest, I got around 14 days of battery backup in my
moderate uses. I always use the heart rate and sleep monitoring on and three 30
minutes of GPS workouts a week. It’s hard to explicitly test this since it depends
so much on how you use your watch, but I’ve had everything on including the
always-on display.
I’ve worn it 24 hours a day for sleep monitoring too, and
I’ve done long bike rides and runs with GPS on. I’ve only charged it a couple
of times in the last two weeks. And it wasn’t even empty when I did. That is to
say, battery life is still very good. I’m not sure it’s quite 2 weeks and it’s
not as long as the almost 1 month of the Amazfit Bip but it’s considerably more
than most smartwatches I’ve tried.
Other Features
Sleep Monitoring:
Sleep monitoring The Amazfit GTS makes a pretty good watch
if you’re interested in sleep monitoring. It’s lightweight so isn’t too
noticeable on your wrist and all you need to do is wear the watch to bed. It
will automatically determine when you go to sleep and will monitor how well
you slept.
I measured sleep with my Apple Watch Series 4 via the Auto
sleep app since there’s no native sleep app, the Sleep Cycle app on my iPhone
rested on my bedside table and the Amazfit GTS. Results varied by were generally
in line with each other.
I haven’t found any sleep monitoring solutions that reliably
measure awake time - for me at least. And I don’t put an awful lot of trust
into how these apps determine light and deep sleep and whether it really
matters anyway.
Activity Tracking
There were only a few activities you could track, heart rate
monitoring wasn’t particularly accurate and most annoyingly it was difficult
exporting your activities to platforms like Strava.
By default to start a workout you long-press the side
button. Depending on your activity type you’ll get varying pages you can scroll
through during the activity. The time is still displayed in a small font in the
top right, but you can’t access any other functions of the watch while the
activity is in progress. So for example, you can’t control your music during a
run. You long-press the side button to end the workout. But as I mentioned
earlier, I couldn’t get this to work, on iOS at least. But sometimes activities don’t sync across
from the watch to this app so it’s still a frustrating experience actually
getting activities off the watch.
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