

When paired with your smartphone, you can use the watch to play, pause, and skip music playing on your phone, meaning you don’t have to dig around in your pocket or backpack mid-hike. There’s a weather widget, which allows you to see the day’s predictions at a glance, and you can add widgets like your calendar, menstrual tracking, and breathing to the watch. Amazfit T-Rex 2 review: Smartwatch featuresįrom a smartwatch perspective, the watch allows you to see your smartphone notifications, although you cannot yet respond to them - when enabled, you can see your notifications at a glance by swiping left from the home screen. Again, this isn’t a complete deal breaker - it didn’t happen very often, but it would be a deal breaker if it happened at the start line of a race. On a couple of occasions, the watch seemed to get stuck when loading the sports mode. Like most watches, the heart rate isn’t anywhere near as accurate as it is on my chest strap, and if you can’t connect the two, I’d argue this is a serious drawback for anyone putting any serious training in for a race.ĭuring testing, I predominantly used the watch to track my marathon training runs, rides, and strength training sessions. After much searching, I contacted Amazfit, who confirmed this wasn't an option.
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However after weeks of testing and googling, I could not work out how to connect a third-party sensor, such as my Bluetooth heart rate strap, to the watch. The watch has triathlon and multisport modes, which is also impressive for a watch at this price point. At the time of writing, you cannot upload GPX maps on the watch - you can only use the breadcrumb functionality to navigate back to the start of your run or trail. If you are buying this watch for a multi-day trail running adventure, or even a long hike, it’s worth noting that some of the mapping features mentioned on the website are not yet available on the watch. During testing, I found the GPS to be as accurate as my Garmin Fenix 7, which was ever-so-slightly crisper, but still, very impressive. There’s sleep tracking, a built-in barometer and compass, and a multiband GPS, which is seriously impressive for a watch at this price point. The watch also has "training templates," which are pretty much workout plans on your watch. When it comes to tracking different workouts, the watch has all the metrics you’d expect - from simple time, distance, calories burned, and heart rate, to the more technical, such as training load, anaerobic capacity, and VO2 max.

Eight sports, including running, swimming, outdoor cycling, and walking, can be automatically tracked on the watch once you’ve enabled its ExerSence algorithm. There are more than 150 sports modes available on the watch, all of which can be customized to show different data screens during the activities. Of course, one of the main reasons you buy a sports watch is to track different activities, and the Amazfit T-Rex 2 has bucket loads of options. With solar capabilities, however, the Instinct 2 has an unlimited battery life. The basic Fenix 7 model without solar charging capabilities lasts up to 18 days in smartwatch mode and up to 57 hours in GPS-only mode. The Instinct 2 without solar charging capabilities lasts 28 days in smartwatch mode, and up to 30 hours in GPS-only mode. Garmin’s Epix Gen 2 lasts for up to 16 days in smartwatch mode and up to 42 hours in GPS-only mode. As we’ve seen with watches like the Fenix 7 and the Forerunner 955, the screen also has touchscreen capabilities, although, like Garmin, you can still navigate around the watch via the buttons should you have sweaty, or wet fingers.Īgain, this battery life stacks up well when compared with its main competitors. It really is vibrant and crystal clear, and is easy to view on the move, even in direct sunlight. Size aside, one thing that really stands out when it comes to the design of this watch is the bright, 1.39 inch AMOLED screen, with a resolution of 454 x 454 pixels. Of course, the look of the watch is purely personal preference, and some users are bound to prefer to wear a large, hefty sports watch - if you’re going to spend your weekends scaling El Capitan, why not let everyone in the office know with your accessories? As someone with pretty petite wrists, while I did feel the watch looked pretty bulky (this definitely isn’t a watch I’d wear with a summer dress in the evenings), it felt remarkably lightweight. For context, the basic 47mm Fenix 7 weighs 79g. Yet thankfully, all that heft doesn’t come with too much baggage - the watch weighs in at 66g.
