Even if your idea of exercise is moving your elbow across the table, it’s hard not to be inspired by the Amazfit Bip ($79.99/£63). While it does not pretend to have the kind of health-related functionality offered by the Apple Watch or the Fitbit Versa, if you’re looking for a low-priced, feature-rich fitness tracker with notifications and long battery life, the Bip is the best smartwatch under $100. What is Amazfit BIP features 2020? Is Amazfit BIP waterproof?
There are more appealing fitness trackers out there if you’re looking for a media and notification-savvy option. The Samsung Gear Fit 2 Pro, for example, offers a curved AMOLED display with support for offline Spotify streaming. Sure, the battery life pales in comparison, but if you have the money, bigger and better features lie just beyond the Bip’s asking price.
That being said, the Bip is nevertheless an impressive offering from a relatively unknown company. It’s smart, comfortable, capable, and best of all, it’s a cheap way to get into effective fitness tracking.
It gets notifications on iOS and Android
Two clear vibrating pings, and I know I’ve gotten a Twitter notification. Messages come through clearly, with small text, but totally readable. Another nice touch is that notifications can be toggled by app, so you can get Twitter but not Instagram, text messages but not LinkedIn. I can’t respond to messages, but that’s fine. Swiping up shows old notifications I might have missed.
Design and Comfort – Amazfit BIP features
With its Apple Watch-inspired design, the Bip is fairly attractive for the price and a pleasure to wear. Its soft silicone band fits both beefy and petite wrists superlatively.
At 1.1 ounces, the case is so lightweight that the watch almost feels like a toy, and its square display — surrounded by a thick, black bezel — does nothing to refute that impression. The display is reminiscent of that of the Pebble, in that its 1.28-inch, 176 x 176-pixel color screen is low resolution and always on. The crown has a satisfying tactile feel and sound.
But don’t let the watch’s featherweight fool you; its polycarbonate, matte-plastic build and 2.5D Corning Gorilla Glass capacitive touch screen hold up to plenty of wear and tear. Plus, the watch has an IP68 water and dust rating, which means it’s protected from dust and can be submerged in up to 5 feet of water for 30 minutes.
The Bip comes in four colors: black, gray, green and orange. While hardly a dress watch, the Bip’s black model easily integrates with dressier outfits. Mostly, I consider it a fun, useful everyday sporty watch. The strap is a standard 20 millimeters, so you can swap it out for different bands.
During the day, I liked to brighten the face backlight to its fullest and then lower it to the dimmest setting at bedtime; there’s no auto brightness. But if you enable the raise-to-wake feature in the settings, you can illuminate the face with just a flick of the wrist.
A three-axis accelerometer, GPS/GLONASS, barometer and compass round out the Bip’s slate of sensors.
Amazfit Bip features 2020 at a Glance
| Screen Size | 1.28 inches |
| Resolution | 176 x 176 pixels |
| GPS | Yes |
| Heart Rate Monitor | Optical |
| Water Resistance | 5 feet/30 minutes |
| Battery Life | 45 days |
| Weight | 1.1 ounces |
Amazfit BIP Interface features
The Bip runs on its proprietary OS in conjunction with the Mi Fit companion app for iOS and Android. Mi Fit syncs with the watch, takes control of tracking and record keeping, and even links to the Apple Health app. Unlike the Fitbit Versa or the Apple Watch, however, the Bip has no app store and few compatible third-party apps.
The Bip’s interface is pure simplicity. First, you click the crown to unlock the watch. Starting with the main face, you just keep swiping to the left for the major operations, tapping the one you want for more details.
Swiping up on the main face lets you access your email, calls and messages. You can read each email on the watch (but not respond) and decide how to dispose of the message. Swiping down lets you toggle a “do not disturb” mode that disables notifications.
The Status pane lets you access current stats for steps, heart rate, distance traveled and calories burned, and see whether you’ve been sitting on your butt too long. The Weather pane gives you current conditions, and swiping up reveals the five-day forecast. The watch also integrates Alipay, the China-based third-party mobile payment platform.Advertisement
You can set alerts for milestones like distance or have the watch alert you if your pace is too fast or too slow. And by long-pressing the watch crown, you can set the watch to quickly access your most used activities.
The watch has a haptic sensor that vibrates when a message comes in, but it is very subtle, so as not to disturb your sleep. The strength of the vibration is not adjustable, but it suited me just fine.
My watch automatically, and without prompting, paired with my iPhone via Bluetooth, but you have to keep your watch within about 30 feet of your phone to main the connection.
Amazfit BIP fitness features
The Amazfit Bip is built for those who want a wearable that can handle a lot, whether it consists of trudging through the elements with you on a tough run, or just staying alive for days on end without needing to be recharged. Thankfully, it excels at both of those things, though it isn’t the absolute best option if you’re looking for the most amount of activity support.
At a similar price point, affordable Wear OS watches equipped with Google Fit support more activities, as do options like the Fitbit Charge 2 and Samsung Gear Fit 2. From an activity tracking perspective, the Bip is sorely lacking in swim tracking capabilities despite its IP68 waterproof rating – something that the Samsung Gear FIt 2 Pro handles just about the best of any smart tracker that we’ve tested thus far.
The Amazfit Bip’s list of abilities could expand with future updates but even at this price, it offers a decent amount of options. If you enjoy walking, biking or running outdoors, it comes with built-in GPS to map your progress, as well as accelerometer, barometer and compass, to track your pace and altitude. Otherwise, the only other trackable option is the treadmill.
We’ve tracked numerous outdoor workouts with the Bip, and in our experience, finding a GPS signal takes a bit of time – about 15-20 seconds based on the density of your location. The NYC skyscrapers could have elongated the search, whereas scanning in a rural area might have quickened things up a bit.
After each workout, we checked our progress on the Mi Fit app, which is one of the better tracking apps in terms of how far your can drill down into your metrics. While your GPS-tracked routes are way too difficult to find, it’s dizzying how many bits are tracked, and fun to see how Xiaomi spins them. When it comes to sleep tracking, which the Bip does well, I enjoy knowing that I get more deep sleep than 88% of others in my city, according to data gathered from anonymous users who use the app.
Mi Fit App
The Mi Fit app is essentially a phone-based sports app that measures outdoor activities like running, cycling, walking and treadmill. Mi Fit syncs and stores location, steps, distance and other information your watch gathers.
The app also lets you activate alerts specifically from Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram and YouTube, while a general control enables delivery of notifications from all other apps for which you have enabled notifications. Communication happens in only one direction on the Bip: inbound. You cannot respond to alerts on this watch as you can with higher-end smartwatches. If you get a notification and must respond, you will have to fetch your phone.
Heart Rate, Steps and Sleep
With the watch’s GPS, pedometer and heart rate monitor paired with the Mi Fit app, you can track your activities and set progress goals. The watch records your pace with or without GPS.
The Bip’s GPS — which can be used to track your distance when walking, running and cycling — proved accurate. The watch automatically picked up a location GPS signal (or advised me to go outdoors or step to a different location to catch the signal) and then recorded my route as I walked or ran.
You can set the device to take continuous heart rate readings (at some cost to the battery life, which is hard to quantify) or have the heart rate monitor run periodically while you’re sleeping. How accurate is the heart rate monitor? Let’s just say I would not substitute it for an EKG, but after my bout of running, jumping jacks, stair climbing and working around the house, the Bip proved reasonably accurate.Advertisement
A comparison with the Garmin Forerunner 25 and its companion strap-on heart rate monitor confirms the Bip’s slightly fast or slow — but mostly accurate — performance. With both the Forerunner and the Bip strapped to my wrists at the same time, the metrics of my runs were similar — within a margin of 2 or 3 points.
The Bip tended to hit the maximum heart rate faster than the Forerunner, but within the minute, the Garmin also beeped warnings. Often, the Bip took more time to drop its heart rate readings as I slowed my pace, but by the time I paused to make notes, the readings on both watches were largely identical, or so close as to be statistically insignificant. When we compared the Bip with the Garmin Forerunner, we found that both recorded the same number of steps in a day.
The Bip told me I slept 4 hours with 1 hour of deep sleep and 3 hours of light sleep, and that only 8 percent of the population slept less than I did. That I can believe.
The Bip offers about a dozen watch faces, but as with the Pebble, a cottage industry has arisen to supplement that rather paltry selection. Most of the Bip’s digital watches display military (24-hour) time, as opposed to 12-hour time — something that cannot be adjusted in the settings. Some third-party watch faces are available via Android apps like Amazfit Watch Faces and Amazfit Bip WatchFace.
On iOS, AmazTools provides a huge selection of new watch faces. It also lets you export your stats to Strava or as .gpx files, as well as remotely control your camera, flashlight and even your Spotify music player (Pro subscriptions only). On Android, the feature-rich Notify & Fitness for Amazfit, in addition to offering more watch faces, tracks steps, sleep, heart rate, calories and weight data, while the Tools & Amazfit app, designed to work with Mi Fit, expands the Bip’s functionality with detailed notification features and configuration options.
Amazfit BIP features long lasting Battery Life
One of the Bip’s huge selling points is its battery life. The Bip’s 190-mAh lithium-polymer battery promises to last as long as 45 days under regular use, which includes activity and sleep monitoring. Continuous use of GPS and constant heart rate monitoring will diminish that battery life much more. After two weeks of use, with GPS and the heart rate monitor on intermittently, the Bip’s battery meter was at 44 percent.Advertisement
When your battery does eventually conk out, just use the two contact pins on the charging dock for a couple of hours to juice your watch back up.
Is Amazfit BIP waterproof?
The Amazfit Bip is equipped with the IP68 standard which makes it fully waterproof (Amazfit BIP waterproof). So you can use it under the rain or even when you swim because it can resist to 30m underwater. The watch has a color LCD display which shows info with a resolution of 176 x 176 pixels. It is a reflective panel which will allow you to save battery while it is in stand by, as it will still be able to show you what time is it. It has a heart rate sensor and a GPS + GLONASS module, as well as Bluetooth in the version 4.0, which can allow you to pair it with your phone.
The Amazfit Bip can also show notifications from the phone as every good smart watch. It has an accelerometer and a barometer sensor as well. Its battery has a capacity of just 190 mAh but it has an outstanding battery life. The watch can last 45 days of daily use if you set the brightness to 10 percent. It supports the monitoring for the following activities:
- running
- walking
- cycling
Is it worth buying?
The Amazfit Bip is for someone who wants a fitness tracker that looks like an Apple Watch, but doesn’t want to pay Apple prices. Digging beyond surface level observations, the Bip is an excellent match with those who appreciate amazing battery life and a ton of features loaded into a small, affordable package.