Amazfit’s partnership with Hyrox, the newest trendy CrossFit competitor, is also front and center, from ads within the app to a top suggested workout on the tracker. I paid extra money for a subscription to Wild.AI ($6 per month), the program that lets women optimize their workouts according to their monthly menstrual cycles. Cycle tracking on the watch is free, although Amazfit doesn’t work with Natural Cycles, one of the most popular period-tracking apps. Zepp Coach, which offers you a daily suggested workout, is also now free. (Its previous iteration was Zepp Fitness, and it cost $30 a year.)
Another big difference is that with the last Amazfit watch I tested, the company seemed to have deliberately hidden its privacy policy. Now it’s front and center on the product page, along with notes that it has data protection via Amazon Web Services and is GDPR compliant.
The battery life is touted as up to 10 days, but with all the 24/7 health monitoring turned on—the sleep breathing monitor, low blood oxygen alerts—I got more like five. Like a Garmin, it does wake you up with a cheerful morning report, although Zepp’s is laughably inaccurate. The weather app in Zepp is sometimes as much as 20 degrees off the actual temperature outside. It also shows you Zepp’s PAI fitness metric, which totes up your heart rate, age, and gender and bears little to no relevancy to the real world. It slides further and further into the app as its irrelevancy becomes more pronounced.
Screenshots courtesy of Adrienne So
Finally, the automatic strength-training exercises don’t work quite as well as advertised. I’ve been strength training a lot lately, and it is incredibly annoying to have to click on your watch whenever you switch from one series of reps to another. The Active 2 can purportedly auto-recognize 25 strength-training exercises, but of these, it failed to recognize me doing pull-ups, bodyweight squats, and push-ups, among others.
With all that said, it defies belief that Amazfit has somehow managed to squeeze all this functionality into a tracker that costs only $100. For years, one version or another of the Fitbit Charge has topped my list of the best fitness trackers because it’s affordable. But the Active 2’s functions blow the Charge 6’s out of the water, and it looks nicer. It almost doesn’t matter that it doesn’t work quite as well and isn’t quite as reliable. Almost.
We’ll have to see if Amazfit is capable of mopping up trivial problems like turning your neighborhood into the Dead Sea. When all the features on the Active 2 finally, uh, work, it will be over for the rest of the cheapos.
