Xiaomi’s sub-brand Huami launched its budget smartwatch Amazfit Bip in India last month. Priced at Rs 5,499, the Amazfit Bip is exclusively available online to order through Flipkart. It comes in four color options on Flipkart – Onyx Black, Cinnabar Red, White Cloud and Kokoda Green.
Huami specifically notes that shoppers purchasing Amazfit products from other e-commerce platforms will not be entitled for the product warranty and after-sales services. The company says it can also be purchased offline via select stores across tier I and II markets. The Amazfit Bip is claimed to be one of Huami’s most responsive smartwatches till date. I got the Onyx Black variant of the watch for review and here’s what I think about it.
Great design, Light Weight and Beautiful Always-On Display
At first you might confuse the Amazfit Bip it for an Apple Watch. It is quite lightweight at 31 grams and comfortable to wear. The polycarbonate body for the square display dial has a matte finish to it. The square 1.34-inch capacitive touch display gets 2.5D Corning Gorilla Glass for protection. Under the hood, it gets a 1.2GHz dual-core processor paired with 512MB of RAM and 4GB internal storage. The watch also has an IP68 water and dust resistance rating. The company claims that it can withstand up to 5 feet of water for 30 minutes.
The good part about Amazfit Bip is that it gets standard 20mm straps, which is soft rubber material, so you need not worry about skin rashes. What’s more, thanks to the standard strap size, you can purchase more choices from the market, and they don’t have to necessarily be made specifically for this watch.
The always-on 1.28-inch color touch display works well under direct sunlight, in fact, it gets even better with direct light on it. You need not worry about accidental touches too, as it doesn’t work until you light it up by pressing the side crown button. In dark conditions, you might need to press the crown button every time to view screen. There is no auto brightness, but you can adjust it from watch settings. In my review time, i always kept it to the maximum brightness level and it worked quite well for me.
Notifications and Calls
The Huami Amazfit Bip doesn’t get rich notifications like Apple’s watchOS or Google’s Wear OS, which means these are not actionable, and you’ll only be able to view the notification on your wrist. To check back on notifications, you first need to press the side crown button and then swipe up to see what notifications you have. Once you’ve connected the Bip to your smartphone through the Mi Fit app, you can select what apps you want to get notifications from. In my case I usually preferred WhatsApp, Messenger, Slack and Android Messages to keep me notified, while deactivating other apps that I didn’t necessarily need to see notifications on my wrist from.
Coming to calls, the app gives you an option to delay a call alert by 5 seconds. Although you’ll get the call alert on you wrist, that’s about it as it’ll give you an option to ‘Ignore’ or ‘Hang up’ a call, but during our review time the ‘Hang up’ feature didn’t work at all. You do obviously need to pull out your smartphone to take a call, with the Bip only giving you the alert.
Activity, Heart Rate, and Sleep Monitoring
The Amazfit Bip comes with three essential sensors: built-in GPS to track your location, a heart rate sensor, and a 3-axis accelerometer to track sleep, step counts and movement during exercise. The sleep monitoring was fair in our review time. It gives a nice break down between deep sleep, light sleep and awake time in the Mi Fit app. It will also tell you how your sleep ranks in comparison to other Mi users.
When you tap ‘Status’, it shows the current steps, heart rate, distance traveled and calories burnt. You can set alert for milestones that you’d like as distance for a day to be covered. You also have an option to set idle alert, in case if you sit for too long at one place, then it will give you a reminder to get up and stretch your legs a bit.
To start an activity you can also simply long-press the side crown button for quick access. We had issue with the watch picking up the GPS location signal automatically, although the company claims GPS+GLONASS dual-mode positioning. The good part is that the watch records your pace with or without GPS, so it wasn’t a deal breaker for us. However, GPS naturally gives you a more accurate figure.
The Amazfit Bip can take continuous heart rate readings as well as periodic monitoring while sleeping. I’m not entirely sure how accurate the heart-rate readings are, but they seem to be close enough in terms of getting it right.
Amazfit’s Amazing Battery Life
The best thing about the Huami Amazfit Bip is its battery life. The company claims over 30 days of battery life with regular use, and up to 45 days with minimal notifications on a single charge. I used the smartwatch for almost two weeks and in my review time the battery drained by just 57 percent with regular notifications, call alerts, daily activity monitoring and standard heart rate readings. There is only one drawback to it; the watch doesn’t alert for low battery. However, this isn’t a huge problem, since you’re likely to be keeping track of how the battery is dropping anyway.
Verdict: The Bottom Line
In my opinion, the Huami Amazfit Bip is a great value-for-money product right now in the Indian market. Priced at Rs 5,499, the Bip is a definite head turner on you wrist when it comes to looks. The always-on display and excellent battery life is something that makes Bip the best option in this price bracket.
The watch gets most things right when it comes to design, feel, fit and acticity tracking. But the downside of the Amzfit Bip is that it cannot respond to notifications, and in our review we found it difficult to keep it connected to our phone all the time. Also if you like to style it up with watch faces, the Amazfit Bip has very little in terms of in-built options, and no support for third-party faces either. The Mi Fit app isn’t the best either, but it’s acceptable enough. But having said that, Amazfit Bip is the best option around right now at its price, and if you can catch hold of one through Flipkart then we recommend you go ahead with the purchase.
from BGR India https://ift.tt/2wwj1kK
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment