I didn't know what to expect from a $99 smartwatch. I certainly didn't expect a GPS or a heart rate monitor. I also didn't expect it to look much different from a traditional fitness tracker, since those devices come in closer to the $99 price point than most smartwatches available today.

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But the Amazfit Bip challenges even the lowest of expectations about what an affordable smartwatch might be. It promises a full smartwatch experience, including features like a heart rate monitor, onboard GPS, a touchscreen, multiple watch faces, full smartphone connectivity, and up to 45 days of battery life—all at the nearly unbeatable price of just $99. Its elevator pitch will be enticing to those searching for a comprehensive wearable that won't set them back hundreds of dollars, like most Android Wear, Tizen, and watchOS devices will.

But after spending a little over a week with the Amazfit Bip, it's clear that this affordable smartwatch doesn't come without compromises. While it does offer a lot wrapped into its $99 price tag, the experience of wearing the Bip day in and day out isn't as polished as that of other popular smartwatches.

Design

Manufacturer Huami may not want to admit it, but the Amazfit Bip looks so much like the Apple Watch that it's hard to believe the company didn't deliberately make it so. But with the chasm between their prices, the Bip doesn't have the same design quality or abilities as Apple's wearable. The Bip has a rounded-off square case made of plastic, with a crown on its right edge and an always-on, 1.28-inch color touchscreen.

The display is smaller than the area on the top of the case, so it's surrounded by a chunky black border with the Amazfit logo at the bottom edge. The quality of the display is akin to old-school Pebble smartwatches, with low-res-looking icons, numbers, and letters—nowhere near the quality of the Apple Watch's OLED display or similar wearables.

I like how compact the case is, and at 1.1 ounces, it's quite light as well. Its 20mm bands are interchangeable, and the entire device has an IP68 water- and dust-rating. Inside the device are a surprising number of sensors: a three-axis accelerometer, GPS/GLONASS, barometer, and compass. We'll get into the efficacy of these in the fitness section, but that's an impressive list of sensors to include in a $99 device this thin and light.

The Bip almost feels like a smartwatch prototype, not a device you'd expect a company to mass produce. Compared to the high-tech smartwatches we're used to seeing today, the Bip is basic. This could work in Huami's favor, however; some people don't want to pay for the extra bells and whistles that come standard on a smartwatch, like fancy graphics, NFC, music storage, and standalone apps.

But what's truly killer about the Bip is its estimated battery life—up to 45 days on a single charge of its 190mAh battery. That's a pipe dream for traditional smartwatches, but for a device as simple as the Bip, I understand how it could be achievable.

How often you use the GPS and heart rate monitor will affect battery life, and the Mi Fit app has two different heart rate monitor settings to choose from. You can set the device to take continuous heart rate readings, which will shorten the battery life significantly, or you can have the heart rate monitor on periodically only during sleep. That also decreases battery life, but not nearly as much as continuous pulse readings would.

I kept my Bip on the latter setting, and I took random heart rate readings during the day by going to the status page on the watch itself. After seven days of all-day, all-night wear, my Bip's battery life was only down to 71 percent.

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Smartwatch features

On-watch programs

Like most smartwatches, the Amazfit Bip has a number of screens you can swipe between to access data and apps. Swiping to the left from the watch face screen brings up the status, activity, weather, alarm, timer, compass, and settings pages. Since the Bip doesn't have an app store or any downloadable, third-party made programs, these are the options you're stuck with.

Daily activity stats populate the status page, including steps taken, current heart rate (the Bip takes a measurement every time you open the status page), distance traveled, calories burned, and how many times per day you've moved at least once per hour.

You won't find any fancy, rich graphics on this screen (or any others), but the tiny heart icon next to your current BPM pulses subtly when the device measures your heart rate. After using the Bip for several days, I started to miss the graphics on my Apple Watch and even those on the Fitbit Ionic—both devices make good use of their high-res (for wearables) displays by using inky, gif-like graphics and full-color photos to show activity options, fitness data, notification alerts, and other information. But the Bip's no-frills display is likely one of reasons why Huami can keep its price so low.

All trackable exercises live in the activity page, and we'll dive deeper into those skills in the fitness section. The remaining programs are all straightforward: weather shows you the current weather conditions and the next four days' worth of forecasts when the Bip is connected to your smartphone (no data will appear if the device isn't connected); the alarm and timer pages let you keep track of daily reminders and alarms (I use the timer function a lot, on any smartwatch, while I'm cooking or doing laundry); the compass page lets you position yourself in space a bit better; and the settings page lets you change the watch face as well as the function of the side button. You can also adjust screen brightness.

Notifications

I'm happy that you can essentially save more than one watch face to the Bip and change them out whenever you want. That's something even the Fitbit Ionic can't do (but most high-end smartwatches can). Granted, all of the Bip's watch faces are fairly basic, pixelated pieces of art, some of which are crowded and messy because they include glanceable activity data on the watch face. I mostly stuck with the default watch face, which puts the time in the center of the screen, anchored by two data fields that show your last heart rate reading and number of steps taken that day. It's irritating that you can't change the time format from 24-hour to 12-hour, though—unwillingly, I got really familiar with military time while wearing the Bip.

You can get to two more pages from the watch face: swiping down from the top of the screen reveals the Do Not Disturb (DND) pages, along with a tiny battery indicator icon. Do Not Disturb mutes the watch's vibrations when you get alerts, and you can choose to manually turn on DND or put it in "auto" mode, which will automatically disable alerts after you fall asleep. Since the Bip can track sleep, it's useful to put DND on auto mode so late-night emails don't wake you up.

Swiping up from the bottom of the screen brings up your most recent notifications, and you can keep swiping up to scroll through the lot of them. The Bip can receive smartphone call and text alerts, along with all app notifications. However, Huami's device favors some apps over others—in the Mi Fit app, you can choose to enable or disable app alerts from specific apps, including Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, and YouTube. All other apps (any apps that Mi Fit hasn't specifically sanctioned) get siphoned into the "App—other" toggle. Turning this on will let all enabled alerts from all other apps installed on your smartphone come to the Bip.

This is a confusing way to categorize smartphone alerts, but it's not uncommon. Some wearables let you turn individual app alerts on and off, while some disregard individuality and take the all-or-nothing approach to wrist-bound notifications. I believe some personalization is better than none, so I'm glad you can turn off alerts for at least a few apps (many of which are the most popular and most used apps by many users).

Smartphone alerts are unsurprisingly basic: messages appear in plain text regardless of where they come from, and only sanctioned apps have their own icons at the top of each alert. All of the non-sanctioned apps that fall into the "App—other" category get an "App" label at the top. While you can probably tell which app an alert comes from most of the time from the alert's details, the Bip won't help you distinguish the vague ones. You can't respond to messages from the smartwatch, either, making it like many basic wearables that are only good for alert delivery rather than alert action and management.

But there is an argument to be made for notifications like these, since many activity trackers feature the same level (some, even less) in their smartphone alerts. Some users don't want to be distracted by options to respond to alerts from the device on their wrist. Delivery is enough, allowing users to glance at the information and either choose to go about their day or pick up their smartphone to complete further action. By removing options to respond to a text message, open an article on your smartphone with just a tap on your watch, or even dismiss an alert, you remove the secondary distractions that lead to people staring at their wrists as if their smartphone were strapped onto them.