AmazFit Active 2 Hands-on: $99 Sportswatch with Mapping!

AmazFit has just announced the new Active 2, a smartwatch at $99 (or $129 for the Premium model with a sapphire screen and [vegan] leather strap). Otherwise, both watches feature identical software features – and for $99, as is usually the case with AmazFit, the feature list is impressive.

The 1.32” AMOLED display-laden watch includes 164 sport modes, full mapping (with ski maps), barometric altimeter, voice control, NFC Payment via Curve, and plenty more. Many of these features mirror what are seen on their high-end watch, the AmazFit T-Rex 3 (for $234USD), that I just reviewed a few days ago. Of course equally, some of those features seem a bit unpolished once you start digging into them. But at $99, that lack of polish can probably be overlooked.

Now this isn’t a review at this point, just a quick hands-on look at things. While AmazFit has just unlocked being the first company to correctly send me a package from the US to Mallorca without customs jail, it unfortunately got sideswiped/delayed by Spanish holidays on this end, so Mr. FedEx just came this morning. Nonetheless, I figured I’d give you the details for now.

What’s New & Specs:

Ok, so here’s what’s notable/new on the AmazFit Active 2 compared to the existing Active 1:

– Switched from rectangular design to a round/circular design
– Increased display brightness to 2,000 nits (that’s very high)
– Increased display resolution/size to 1.32” & 466x366px
– Added terrain maps, ski maps
– Added support for Bluetooth sport sensors (including power meters, heart rate sensors, cadence/speed sensors)
– Added barometric altimeter
– Added ambient light sensor
– Added strength movement & rep counting
– Added 40 new sport modes including skiing, stair climbing, golf swinging (total 164 sport modes)
– Added NFC payments via Curve (Zepp Pay)
– Smartwatch battery life claim of “up to 10 days”
– GPS battery life claim of “up to 21 hours”
– 5ATM/50m water resistance level
– Touchscreen with two dedicated buttons
– Microphone for voice commands
– $99 for the base model, $129 for the premium model

And that’s just the new stuff, at a quick high-level, it supports basically all of the typical AmazFit/Zepp features, including:

– Daily Activity Tracking
– Sleep tracking (with phases/stages)
– Structured workout creation/execution from app
– On-demand interval creation via watch
– Track Running recognition
– Virtual Pacer
– 164 sport modes including Bobsled, Checkers, and Tug-of-War (Wingsuit is not in this model)

Got all that? Good. If not, the full list of 164 sport modes are located here.

Hands-On Quick Look:

First up, the box. No big surprises here. This box is the Premium edition for $129, which includes both the vegan-leather strap as well as a secondary sport strap.

I actually quite like the feel of both bands, kudos on this. Not sure how a company can get this right for $129, yet plenty of others charge 5x that much for lesser plastic straps.

The bands do appear to use standard band attachments, so you can swap out to whatever you want, as usual. Meanwhile, the charger is just an adapter for your own USB-C cable. This is different than the T-Rex 3, and I presume also different from the rectangular Active 1.

Ok, looking at the UI basics, it has two buttons and the touchscreen. Long-time followers know I’m a button guy, so while I’d much prefer 4-5 buttons, these work. The upper right button acts as an escape/back button, and the lower right is confirmation (basically opposite Garmin). However, the touch screen is very much needed for many operations, such as tapping ‘Go’ on a workout.

Backing up though, here’s the watch face:

If you swipe down from the top, you’ll find all your settings.

If you tap the upper right, you’ll get a list of all the apps you can finger around in:

And then equally, if you tap lower right, you’ll get a list of all the sport modes:

You can tap open a sport mode to start it, such as Run, which will fire up the GPS.

As with their other watches, you can customize data fields for that sport mode on the watch itself (though not on the smartphone app), up to 6 data fields per custom page. Very solid.

This area is also where you’d load up a route to follow (either imported file or Komoot, though that’s kinda messy, as I showed in my T-Rex 3 review a few days ago).

As noted, the device supports maps, and I was able to download my map pretty easily, though, it took a little bit via Bluetooth. There is no WiFi on this device, and somewhat oddly, you can’t load an area smaller than 30KM x 47KM. Like, you can’t make the box smaller (just bigger).

So to download the above map took about 3-4 minutes. Not horrible.

Unfortunately, like the T-Rex 3, the maps in this area are all wonky. Some portions of dry land show as water, albeit water is usually water, and…thus well…the maps are mostly useless for me. This seems to be a problem with more than just me, as others have been reporting it in various areas for months.

That said, assuming the maps in your area load correctly, and you’ve sent a route to it, then you’re good to go for basic turn-by-turn route following.

Pivoting slightly, in the settings you can pair up Bluetooth sensors, including power meters. This is new to the Active 2 compared to the Active 1.

Setting sports side, here’s a few more pretty pictures of the watch. The look and feel is nice, and gives off a solid polished vibe. Not too heavy, but not too light.

Again, if you want to see how the rest of the features work, check out my T-Rex 3 video/post from two days ago, since everything else is identical and quite current given that was all filmed/shot in the past few days on the same app/platform.

Wrap-Up:

As I said in the intro, the features here are super impressive for the price. If we compare it to other things in that price ballpark, such as the Fitbit Charge 6 (usually floating around $99), this obviously has a boatload more features and functionality. Like, cargo-ship vs paddle-boat level more functionality. And since the Fitbit Charge 6 requires you to choose between accurate GPS or accurate HR, this almost certainly wouldn’t do that based on my other AmazFit testing, assuming they didn’t solidly break anything. Of course, sometimes companies do – so more testing is ahead.

Still, the fact that AmazFit can deliver all of these features is mind-boggling. Especially the mapping pieces (setting aside the water rendering quirk). That’s something that’s missing from the $500 Garmin Instinct 3 that just launched yesterday, a fact that can’t easily be overlooked for an endurance sports watch. Whereas this very-not-endurance sports watch has it.

Nonetheless, as I said in my T-Rex 3 review, I hope that AmazFit understands that if they can spend a bit more time on polish of the software features, it’d go a long way. In a quick ‘Hands-on’ piece like this, the AmazFit units tend to be super impressive. But once you start using those features, the quirks are endless. No cycling power data to Strava, weird understanding issues with the voice assistant, cumbersome navigation process, etc… The list goes on.

So again, if AmazFit can focus on that a bit, then they’ll very quickly start to make inroads against multiple companies in this space. But software details matter just as much as incredible hardware specs. Here’s to hoping!

With that – thanks for reading!

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