The Amazfit Bip 6 is a nice entry-level smartwatch.
I’ve always had a bit of history with wearing watches.
Way back in 1997, Burger King ran a promotion for the just-released Jurassic Park: The Lost World. This promotion was a set of four watches:
As every 10 year old boy knew back in the 90’s, dinosaurs were the shit. So of course I had all four of the watches. My favorite was the one with the holographic eye (second from the left).
From there I graduated to the C-Watch, a watch that farted and told you the time. None of my teachers were safe from “*BRRRAP* THE TIME IS 9:45 AM!”, and the watch was routinely confiscated.
In high school I upgraded to a basic Casio digital watch. I wore the hell out of the thing. I’m not exaggerating, I never took it off, even during showers. I think I wore that thing for three years straight before I got rid of it. It stunk to high hell, and my wrist had an indent that took over a year to go away.
20 years later, I picked up the Amazfit Bip 6, a budget smartwatch. At $80, it’s significantly cheaper than a Garmin or a Samsung or Apple smartwatch, which usually cost over $200. This is my first smartwatch, so I just didn’t see the need to drop hundreds of dollars on something that I wasn’t sure if I’d like.
After wearing the Amazfit Bip 6 since April, I feel like I’ve worn it long enough to give it a proper review. Like all of our reviews here at AJnet, this is a 100% neutral unbiased review. We didn’t receive this product for free or at a discount, we don’t get kickbacks or anything like that. We’re very much open to the idea though. I’m serious, I will sell my fucking soul for free tech to review.
I’ll be breaking this review up into a few sections. I’ll talk about the things I like about the Amazfit Bip 6, the things I don’t like about it, and the miscellaneous things that are neither good or bad. You know what that means: We’re breaking out the subheaders. I’m talking subheaders for subheaders on this one, it’s gonna get wild.
Keep in mind, this is my first smartwatch, so my expectations might be a bit skewed.
The Good
The price is right
If this watch were a gameshow host, it would be Bob Barker or Drew Carey, because the price is right.
For $80, this watch is surprisingly good, and from what I’ve seen of other watches maybe just as good or close to the more expensive smartwatches. I’ll talk about more of the features throughout the review, but considering how cheap this watch is compared to the big brands, I wasn’t expecting as much as I got.
I’m aware that you can find cheaper smartwatches in the $20-30 range, but after a certain point you’re going to get what you pay for. Would you trust a smartwatch with a brand name like “ANGWONGDINGDONGXFY” that has 20 identical clones with similar sounding brand names? I know the Chinese are probably stealing my data already, but that doesn’t mean I’m just going to hand it to them. Someone who’s that tight on cash probably shouldn’t be buying a smartwatch to begin with. There’s cheap, then there’s chinkshit cheap. When it comes to electronics, it’s really not a great idea to go chinkshit cheap. $80 is reasonable for a smartwatch.
The developers are responsive
Nowadays everybody wants your opinion and feedback, but nobody actually cares about it.
Like everything else in this world, there’s a subreddit dedicated to Amazfit products. But unlike everything else in this world, an Amazfit staff member actually monitors the subreddit and replies to users, acknowledging their opinions and offering troubleshooting. Yes, other companies do this, but half the time the employees are posting generic copy-pasted replies and going through the motions (looking at you YET AGAIN, Spotify). Bryce at Amazfit actually seems like he gives a damn.
I applaud Bryce and Amazfit for at the very least convincingly pretending to give a shit about the customer. Genuinely responsive devs are always a huge plus.
The battery life is great
The battery life on this thing is surprisingly good for $80.
Granted, I’m not leaving the screen on all day or looking at my watch every five seconds, but it still gets plenty of use. I charge it every Friday, and come the next Friday it’s still got over 60% battery left. I could probably go two weeks before having to charge my watch, maybe I’m just easily impressed but that seems pretty fucking incredible next to my Google Pixel 8, which has the battery life of a toddler who just ate a bunch of candy.
Decent cardio tracking
The Amazfit Bip 6 can track workouts too, including cardio and even strength training (which I’ll get to in a bit).
Back in spring I did a 12 week fat burner diet, and part of the program included cardio. I switched my cardio up between outdoor running, outdoor bike riding, and stationary bike riding. The tracking on the outdoor activities included a heat map of my routes, and kept track of my speeds and heart rate. There’s also the option to preprogram your routes, but I like to freestyle my runs and bike rides so I didn’t use this. The GPS is way more accurate than I thought it would be. It detected me crossing the street in random spots, going from sidewalk to street, little details like that. I’m guessing the watch syncs with your phone to do this, and I’ve never used the Google Maps walk feature so I have no idea if this is standard or not, but it’s still cool to me.
As for the stationary bike, all the watch can really do here is track your heart rate, the time, and estimated calories burned. I wish it could detect speed, but short of being able to sync the watch to my bike I can’t picture how they’d implement that so it’s whatever. It would be nice if they’d let me at least manually add the distance I pedaled.
I do wish that I could get some kind of big running map so I could see everywhere I’ve ran over a specific period of time, like six months or a year.
The Bad
The sleep tracking sucks
If you’ve been following this site for a while, you’ll know of my struggles with sleep.
So when I found out that the Amazfit Bip 6 (and most smartwatches) can track sleep cycles, I was excited. I wasn’t expecting a professional-grade sleep study or anything, but I still feel kind of let down.
The accuracy needs work. Supposedly this thing can track your sleep cycles based on your heart rate, your movement, and your blood oxygen levels. While it’s not completely inaccurate (it says I get less than an hour of REM sleep every night, and judging by how I feel every morning I’m inclined to believe this), it’s got its flaws. For example, it says I only woke up in the middle of the night twice last night, once for a minute around 10 PM, and the second time for 11 minutes, around 4 AM. It reports that I fell back asleep both times. The first time is probably correct, but the second time is wrong. Like, way wrong.
I woke up around 3:30. I know this because I tossed and turned for half an hour before looking at my watch to see that it was 4:00. Yet, the watch says that I was in REM sleep for that half hour. How do you mix up REM sleep with tossing and turning?! Oh, and the watch says I fell back asleep after those 11 minutes. Nope, I tossed and turned until about 4:45, when I finally said fuck it and got up.
In another instance, I got two hours of sleep, but the watch claimed it was closer to six hours.
Obviously these watches aren’t medical devices, but I just feel like it could be a bit more accurate detecting whether or not I’m awake. Short of getting up and walking to the bathroom, this thing really doesn’t register when you wake up.
I guess the sleep monitoring is okay if you’re just looking for basic information, but I wouldn’t buy too much stock in it.
Readiness level
The watch has something called “Readiness”, which uses a bunch of factors to give you a score up to 100 that determines how ready you are for the day.
This thing punishes the shit out of you for every little thing. Took more than ten minutes to fall asleep? That’s points off. Have very mild hypopnoea? That’s points off, and an annoying “Were you snoring?” message. Did cardio the day before? Your HRV is now completely fucked for the next two days, along with your readiness score. Also, you get smacked in the face with either “Take it easy” or “Feeling stressed?”. In the same breath, the Zepp app encourages you to do 40 minutes of cardio a day. Do you want me to do cardio or not, Zepp?
I’ve never gotten a score higher than 85, yet I’ve also never gotten a score lower than 72 no matter how poorly I slept. The readiness level isn’t really strict or lenient, it’s just stupid. I feel like it’s basically just a vehicle to promote buying a subscription to Aura, their AI program.
The In-between
The Zepp app
The associated app, Zepp, isn’t too bad, but it could be more. Also, it reminds me of Michael Emerson’s character from the first Saw movie, which in turn reminds me of Lost.
Thankfully the app is more reliable and less slimy than Zepp Hindle or Ben Linus. It does what it’s supposed to do, and it has enough basic useful features to justify installing it on your phone. Aside from things like weight tracking and keeping exercise logs, it can also track food. I don’t use this feature though (I track my diet with spreadsheets), so I can’t comment to its accuracy. I see that you can enter custom stuff though, so you could always make your own entries if you’re dissatisfied with the nutrition info they use.
My biggest gripe is not being able to turn off the Daily Readiness Insights:
For the record, I activated sleep mode at 9:05, and the watch reports that I was asleep come 9:18. Is 13 minutes really a long time to fall asleep?
These insights are useless and seem arbitrary at times. I don’t need a sloppy algorithm telling me that 13 minutes to fall asleep is too long, nor am I interested in your stupid AI that generates binaural beats or whatever. Give me the option to disable these notifications.
Strength training mode
The watch can also track your weight training. Sort of.
It analyzes your movements to make an educated guess about what exercise you’re doing, and it’s actually surprisingly more accurate than I thought it would be. It nails things like bench press, flyes, and squats, and it even usually gets the amount of reps correct, with an error margin of one or two. The caveat is that you have to manually enter the weight, but I can’t think of a way that they’d be able to track this with a watch so it’s a minor inconvenience at the worst.
The downside to this is that it’s limited in what it can automatically track. Since it relies on you moving whatever arm the watch is on, you’re not getting tracking on exercises that exclusively use the opposite arm (like a dumbbell row), or exercises that exclusively use your lower body (like leg extensions). It also sometimes gets the exercise wrong. For example, it has a tendency to confuse a shoulder press for a bench press, probably because the arm motion is similar.
Like I said though, this is an obvious limitation of relying on a device that’s strapped to your left or right wrist, and short of including another device I can’t think of any way that the watch could realistically track this stuff.
One feature I wish they’d include is a heatmap of the body parts you trained.
Back in the day I had a Bodyspace profile on Bodybuilding.com (I hear you laughing, stfu). One of the things I kind of liked about it was that every week it would give you a report of how much you trained each muscle. It was kind of cool to see the diagram of the body lit up red because I went apeshit that week. I feel like this is just a simple algorithm, and something that the Zepp app could very easily implement.
I also wish the strength training feature would track burnt calories better. As it stands, the only way the watch tracks burnt calories seems to be by heart rate. Again, I feel like a simple algorithm could be implemented that gives a rough idea of calories burnt for each exercise based on things like reps, rest time, weight, etc. I wouldn’t mind taking the time to log my workouts after the fact if I knew the watch would be showing me useful information by doing it.
I saw some posts from Bryce in the Amazfit subreddit that said the dev team is going to be prioritizing the weight training feature soon, and I’m kind of interested to see what improvements they can implement to this. It has some potential, but for now I’ll just keep relying on pen and paper like the caveman I am.
Themes
The watch also has themes to choose from.
This is what the default theme looks like:
With a few customization options, like font and color, the default theme wouldn’t be too bad. I hate the font used for the time, it looks like it has Down Syndrome. I also wish I could get rid of the “Stand” tracking. Who the fuck needs to be told how many times they’ve stood up throughout the day?
You can change the display through the Zepp app, but most of the available themes suck, both free and paid. I wouldn’t mind dropping a buck or two for a nice clean display with some color customization, but I’m not spending money on shit like this:
What a cluttered mess.
I’m willing to chalk this one up to personal preference, and I was surprised at how many different themes they had. They even had a Fallout theme:
I can’t ever see me rocking something that looks this stupid, but I’m sure somebody out there would like this.
The watch has only been out for about six months, so maybe more themes and better customization will be added over time. As things stand the options we have now feel either kind of underwhelming or cluttered and overstimulating.
The Takeaway
The Amazfit Bip 6 is a pretty decent entry-level smartwatch with a reasonable price point, and simple features that an active person would find useful. While things like sleep tracking or the readiness score don’t really work as good as they could, the other features work reliably and accurately enough to justify paying the $80. This company seems like it wants to make a solid product, and I think that if they continue being as responsive and receptive as they are to user feedback they’ll eventually become another heavy hitter in the smartwatch game alongside companies like Samsung or Garmin.
If you’ve never owned a smartwatch before and just want to get a good feel for what they can do, then definitely buy the Amazfit Bip 6. I think you can also get the Bip 5 for a bit cheaper, and from what I see it’s pretty similar to the 6, so if you want to save a few bucks that’s always an option.
I give the Amazfit Bip 6 smartwatch a 6/10. It’s good, but there’s plenty of room for improvement. I’ll be keeping an eye on this company, I’m expecting great things from them.
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