I’ve never particularly liked the idea of a smartwatch. It seemed like just another way to siphon off peoples’ money for more form and less function. However, about a month ago, I got it in my head that a smartwatch *COULD* be argued for as an activity tracker. As someone who decided to dust off their old bike a year ago and has recently started to cozy up to the idea of more serious riding, I wanted to dip my toe with an entry-level smartwatch for ride tracking and health monitoring. Enter the Amazfit Bip 3 Pro.
The price tag made a choice for me, coming in at an affordable $70. I wanted to avoid buyer’s remorse as much as possible, so shelling out $400 for a Galaxy watch that I may never wear after the first couple of weeks seemed like a bad idea. This turned out to be the right decision because I’ve now reached the point where I only sometimes wear it outside of cycling to justify the purchase.
With that said, the functionality of it is designed around you wearing it all the time. The battery can last up to a couple of weeks; it has a sleep quality tracker, a heart rate monitor, and a stress monitor. I’ve worn it a couple of times to track sleep quality, and the results seem relatively in line with if I was waking up in the middle of the night or not. The heart rate monitor also seems to work fine (it tells me if I had too much coffee), although you may need to disable periodic notifications. It has an option to set a notification threshold for hitting a certain heart rate during inactivity, but adjusting that didn’t seem to do the trick for me. The stress tracking uses an arbitrary 0/100 scale, so you can quantify how stressed you are at any given moment and possibly stress yourself out more. There are a handful of other things too, like SpO2 level tracking and general activity tracking, but I don’t find those particularly helpful.
I like the exercise tracking a lot, especially after messing around with the watch while writing this and figuring out I can initiate it from the watch itself. There is functionality specifically for tracking cycling, and the data it gathers is nice. It tracks your route, approximately how fast you were going, mile-by-mile times and speed averages, some pretty nice stuff. There are also similar presets for tracking walking and running, although I haven’t used those yet.
Notifications on the watch are solid enough. The face is small, but it gives just enough information for text messages or emails to give you an idea of whether your phone needs to come out of your pocket or not.
For customization, the Bip has a decent number of options. It has quite a few different watch faces that you can install and swap on the fly (I’m using a Casio-style display right now). Swiping the watch face shows you the different health metrics being tracked, with the option to disable any that don’t seem immediately useful to you. The bands are also easy to swap out and you should definitely do so given all the non-silicone options out there.
Overall, this is good for the price if you’re looking for a basic health/exercise tracker. If you’re looking for general wear, I think this is still a good option, especially if you’re willing to mess around with the settings and buy a more comfortable band.