Amazfit Active Review | Trusted Reviews

Verdict

The Amazfit Active is a smartwatch that’s jam-packed with features. Some work well, others not so. If you can hone in on the Active’s standout qualities, then you’ll have a good experience from an affordable smartwatch that can deliver a lot.

Introduction

The Amazfit Active is a smartwatch that Amazfit tags in its lifestyle category, so it’s about offering a mix of smartwatch, health, fitness and sports features in a sleek, unisex design.

It’s also packing in software smarts that wants to tell you when you’re ready to tackle a busy day and will also drill deeper into your sleep and fitness data using AI.

Priced at £149.90/$149.90, this mid-range smartwatch firmly sits up against the likes of the fellow square options like the Fitbit Versa 4 and Garmin’s Venu Sq series.

Amazfit have made some really solid smartwatches and some slightly more forgettable ones, so should the Active be added to the list of good ones? Here are my thoughts.

Design and screen

• Available in three colours
• Weighs 24-27g
• Waterproof up to 50 metres 

The Amazfit Active is a pretty dinky-looking square smartwatch with a 42mm sized case, so it’s not quite as small as watches like the Garmin Venu Sq 2 or the smallest Apple Watch Series 9 model available.

It’s got an aluminium case, so you’re getting something that’s light but also doesn’t feel cheap, and that comes matched up with a silicone strap. Opt for the lavender purple version, which is one of the three colours available, and that gives you a titanium case and vegan leather combination instead.

There’s just one physical button, with a 1.75-inch, 390 x 450 resolution AMOLED screen acting as your main means of interacting with the Active. It’s a bright, colourful screen that’s nicely responsive to taps and swipes and does give you the option to keep the screen on 24/7.

Around the back of the watch lies Amazfit’s BioTracker PPG optical sensor that can deliver heart rate, heart rate variability measurements for stress monitoring, and track blood oxygen levels.

Amazfit sticks to the same charging cable it uses with pretty much most of its smartwatches that’s magnetically secured to the pins around the sensor. If you want to go swimming with the Active, you can be active with it in the water up to 50 metres depth thanks to the 5ATM-rated design.

While it’s not a hugely original design, the Active at least doesn’t feel budget and has been comfortable to wear throughout the day and night.

Software and smartwatch features

• Runs on Zepp OS
• Amazon Alexa included
• Offers music player and Bluetooth calls

The Amazfit Active is compatible with Android smartphones and iPhones and I’ve been using it with the latter. You’ll need the Zepp companion phone app to set things up and to get you up and running.

The experience of using this smartwatch with either platform will give you largely the same features, although there are a couple of small differences. With an iPhone, you’ll be able to use the watch screen as a camera remote though only for taking pictures. Paired to an Android phone, you’ll get the extra ability to send quick replies to notifications. Outside of those, you’re getting a pretty impressive array of smartwatch features here.

Along with staples like notifications, music controls, checking the weather and picking from a good collection of watch faces, you also have access to Amazon Alexa, room to store up to 250MB of music, handle calls over Bluetooth and upload membership cards. You don’t, however, get contactless payments. And while you do have access to the Zepp App Store, this is mostly made up of native apps and apps to improve support for third-party apps like Spotify on your phone.

The smartwatch experience on the whole is fine. Notification support, music controls and Amazon Alexa work without major issues. The watch interface isn’t hugely sophisticated and the companion app is a bit on the busy side. There are a surprising amount of features and support here given the price, and it shows that Amazfit’s ecosystem is improving.

Fitness tracking 

• AI-powered Zepp Coach and Zepp Aura features
• Works with Strava, Komoot, Apple Health and Google Fit
• Import routes and basic navigation support

The Amazfit Active is a smartwatch that is fully packed with health and fitness features. Getting to know them all and working out what actually works well can be a tall order.

This is a smartwatch that wants to play sports watch, fitness tracker as well as be your sleep and fitness coach, and that approach can feel overwhelming. It does some of those things better than other things.

From an activity tracking point of view, it will track your step counts, score you with Zepp Health’s PAI heart rate-based health scores, measure heart rate, stress and blood oxygen levels.

Daily step counts were at times 1500-2000 steps off two other fitness trackers I was wearing at the same time. For tracking heart rate continuously, resting heart rate data felt nicely in line with the other two devices, though average heart rate was typically higher on the Active by around 10 bpm. While stress graphs were similar to Garmin’s, the stress scores typically never matched up.

When it’s bed time the Active will score your sleep out of 100, break down sleep stages and monitor metrics like heart rate and breathing quality. I’ve been wearing the Active alongside the Oura Ring Gen 3 and I found that, while sleep scores never tended to match up, core stats like sleep duration and key sleep stages were similar.

That sleep data also powers a new Readiness feature, which sounds and works a lot like Garmin’s Training Readiness metric and Fitbit’s Daily Readiness Scores.

Amazfit uses sleep heart rate, heart rate variability from sleep, temperature and breathing quality to tell you if you’re ready to take on the day.

I’ve been comparing readiness scores against Garmin’s and Oura’s and found scores to mostly be similar. Metrics like resting heart rate, heart rate variability powering these Readiness scores were similar too.

To bolster its sleep skills, the Active also includes Zepp Aura, an AI-powered feature where you can ask for sleep stories, get more detailed sleep reports and interact with a ChatGPT-style chatbot to get further sleep analysis. However, this comes at an additional cost of $69.99 a year. 

There’s a similar feature available when you use the Active to track your exercise. Zepp Chat is another Chat GPT-style chatbot that lets you ask questions about sports, though I didn’t find this element hugely useful. It’s also not tied in with the Zepp Coach training plans where that extra context would be beneficial. 

The core sports tracking experience is good for an affordable smartwatch. The built-in GPS and heart rate tracking performance do an okay job, though I found accuracy came up a bit short, both on distance tracking and heart rate monitoring. Average heart rate came out lower compared to a chest strap monitor, while maximum heart rate was closer in accuracy. Even on easier tempo workouts the heart rate accuracy didn’t feel great. 

There’s a host of other extras included here like the ability to import routes via the Zepp app and follow simple lined routes. There’s also automatic exercise recognition for seven of the 120 supported sports modes, and the app hosts additional features like run predictions, which did feel nicely in line with Garmin’s run time predictions.

To reiterate, there’s a lot here and it often feels like Amazfit could focus on some of those features rather than throwing a lot of stuff at you that doesn’t all necessarily work perfectly.

Battery life 

• Up to 14 days in smartwatch mode
• Up to 10 days in heavy usage
• Up to 16 hours of GPS battery life

The Amazfit Active packs a 300mAh capacity battery that’s capable of powering the watch up to 14 days in what Amazfit deems typical usage.

That drops to 10 days in heavy usage and jumps to 30 days in the more restrictive battery saver mode. When you’re using the GPS for outdoor tracking, you can expect up to 16 hours of battery life.

I’d say based on my time that the Active is definitely capable of lasting anywhere between a week and longer. Getting longer means disabling the more advanced health monitoring features and sacrificing the always-on display mode, which does noticeably dent the battery.

Daily battery drop-off can be anywhere from 5-10% depending on which features you’re putting to use. When using the GPS, I found the battery dropped by 10% for an hour’s use, so that doesn’t quite equate to the 16 hours promised here.

Charging the Active from 0-100% isn’t super snappy and takes around two hours. There’s no fast charging mode to give you a quick top-up either.