Amazfit GTR 2
A stylish smartwatch with solid fitness tracking skills.
The Amazfit GTR 2 is an Android and iOS-friendly smartwatch that costs significantly less than buying the newest Apple Watch or Samsung Galaxy Watch.
It offers many of the features you’d expect to spend more money for. That includes a design made from high grade materials, a high quality AMOLED touchscreen display and straps that you can remove to swap out and find new ones.
It comes in two design options with both offering the same features across both for fitness and non-fitness features. You’ll get built-in GPS and a sensor that will track heart rate 24/7 and during exercise. It can also take blood oxygen measurements for an additional hit of fitness data. It also works as a fitness tracker and ultimately that’s where one of its biggest strengths lies. It’s a good fit for step tracking and sleep monitoring than it is for serious sport tracking.
For smartwatch features, it does basic notification support well and it’s optimised for its great touchscreen AMOLED display. There’s two smart assistants in the form of Amazon Alexa and Huami’s own offline voice assistant. Though we only got the latter to work properly. You also get a built-in music player with 3GB of storage to transfer over your own music. It doesn’t however work with streaming services.
As a smartwatch it’s a competent performer. While it’s not the most complete experience, it does those basics well enough. Hopefully improvements can be made with the music features and Alexa is up and running properly and it will be an even better smartwatch companion.
To power all of those features it has the capability of going for 14 days and as long as 38 days in more basic use. You’re likely to get closer to seven days if you’re regularly using everything that’s available. Switch off things like the always-on display and heart rate monitoring and it will certainly go further.
That basic mode involves ditching the Bluetooth connection used to pair it to your phone as well as things like heart rate monitoring and using other features like GPS more sparingly.
It offers a good mix of fitness tracking and smartwatch features wrapped up in a stylish round watch design with better battery life than its closest priced rivals.
The Amazfit GTR 2 gives you a lot of smartwatch for your money. It looks good, offers decent fitness tracking and has now bolstered its abilities to perform outside of tracking steps or sleep with two smart assistants and a music player. It will also give you more battery life than its closely-priced rivals. It’s certainly not perfect, and its sports tracking is for casual workout folk only. If you like the idea of a good-looking smartwatch that does the basics right, it’s one to check out.
Michael Sawh