Amazfit GTR 2 review

Introduction

Over the past few years, Amazfit products have successfully ascended from being an intriguing curiosity on our radar to somewhat of an important mainstay in our regular smart wearable coverage. Rightfully so, since the company continues to deliver a selection of great-looking and feature-rich wearables, with a clear focus on great battery life and tantalizingly competitive pricing.

The new Amazfit GTR 2 fits right into that description. It is a smart wearable that builds upon the original GTR and its already impressive hardware and feature set. It adds things like a microphone and speaker for voice commands and Bluetooth calls, 3GB of independent music storage, and a lot of polish inside the UI and the watch face selection. All of this while still maintaining a solid battery endurance promise of 14 days on a single charge. Plus, as affordable price point of $180.

Amazfit GTR 2 specs

• Body: 46.4 x 46.4 x 10.7 mm; Sports edition - aluminum alloy - 36g., Classic edition - stainless steel - 39g.; 22mm strap; 5 ATM water resistance (up to 50 m); 3D Corning Gorilla Glass, with an anti-fingerprint coating and optical "Diamond-like Carbon (oDLC) coating front
• Display: 1.39" AMOLED, Resolution 454x454, 326 ppi
• OS: Proprietary; Support for Android 5.0 and above, iOS 10.0 and above (Zepp companion app)
• Memory: around 3GB - user accessible for storing MP3 files and watch faces
• Battery: 471mAh (14 days typical use); Magnetic charging base (2.5h for a full charge)
• Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.0 + BLE; Wi-Fi 6; GPS+GLONASS; NFC (for AliPay)
• Misc: BioTracker 2 PPG biological tracking optical sensor, 6-axis acceleration sensor, 3-axis geomagnetic sensor, Air-pressure sensor, Gyroscopic sensors, Ambient light sensor; Speaker and microphone for calls, music playback and voice assistant (Offline commands available at launch, Amazon Alexa integration coming in OTA update)

Amazfit is a brand of the Chinese company Huami Technology. Huami is probably best known as an exclusive provider of smart wearables for Xiaomi. As such, it is the company behind the popular Mi Band line of products. That should be enough of a pedigree in itself, yet Huami has a lot more to "flex," like the fact that it is listed on the New Your Stock Exchange (NYSE) and is the first Chinese smart hardware company to have its stock traded on the US capital market. Last year the cumulative global shipments of Huami's smart devices exceeded 100 million units. And after Apple, Huami is probably the world's second-largest smart wearable manufacturer.

The watch we are reviewing today does not have a full-blown OS with third-party apps like Apple's Watch OS, Google's Wear OS, or Samsung's Tizen OS. It doesn't have an app store with third-party apps. Still, it occupies a niche that is experiencing a renaissance of sorts. If you can live without features like notification replying or the ability to order a pizza or call a cab right from your wrist, going for one of these dumber smartwatches saves you money, and you can enjoy a battery life that's miles better than a real smartwatch.

The Amazfit GTR 2 offer pretty much every modern hardware feature out there sans a powerful enough chipset to make third-party app development viable. It's got a heart rate sensor, gyroscope, accelerometer, air pressure sensor, ambient light sensor, speaker and microphone, GPS receiver, Wi-Fi 6, and Bluetooth 5.0, all sitting behind a 1.39-inch AMOLED display is vibrant, power-efficient, and comes with always-on features. Building on years of activity tracking experience and general UX improvements, the GTR 2 also has all of the typical smart features well covered.

Unboxing

The Amazfit GTR 2 ships in a very similar box to the one we got the Amazfit T-Rex a few months ago. It is a solid two-piece box, complete with a silky-smooth finish.

The charging cradle you get in the box is like the one for the Amazfit T-Rex, which is a departure from the one shipped with the original Amazfit GTR. It's a slimmed-down magnetic "snap-on" charging attachment rather than a full circle. It uses a pair of pogo pins to connect instead of something fancier like Qi wireless charging. The downside of this cheaper approach is that you can't just use any other wireless charger, and placing the charger onto the watch is a bit fiddly despite the magnetic connection. Still, you charge these wearables so rarely that it never becomes a burden.