Amazfit X Smartwatch Review

While lovely to look at, the display is so tall you sometimes have to tilt your wrist up and/or down to take in all the information. What’s more, because the screen is so narrow, it necessarily relies on small fonts. I found text hard to read, especially while exercising.

There’s a lot to like about the Amazfix X, including its robust health- and fitness-tracking capabilities and an assortment of fancy, colorful watch faces. But at similar pricing (or higher) as the top smartwatches from brands like Apple and Samsung, it's a tough sell.

About the Amazfit X

There’s only one configuration available, a one-size-fits-all X that comes with a matching fluoro rubber wristband—plus an interchangeable shorter one for those with slender wrists. You can get this in Eclipse Black or New Moon Gold, though at press time only the former was available for purchase from the Amazfit site.

• Display: 2.07-inch flexible AMOLED, 206 x 640 pixels
  
• Processor: Not specified
• Sensors: Accelerometer, Gyroscope, GPS, Heart rate sensor, Blood oxygen sensor
  
• Water resistance: 5 ATM
  
• Battery: 205mAh, up to 7 days (depending on features)
• Storage: N/A
  

What we like

A gorgeous screen

This is, quite simply, one of the most eye-catching smartwatches I’ve ever seen. Credit the 2.07-inch AMOLED screen, which curves gracefully around your wrist and measures barely half an inch at its thickest part (which is dead center; it tapers from there).

It’s bright and razor-sharp, too, though I wish visibility was a bit better outdoors. Under direct sunlight, there’s too much glare off the shiny surface, and only at maximum brightness could I see the screen without cupping my hand over it.

Always-on display (for days)

Like the Apple Watch Series 6 and other premium wearables, the Amazfit X display offers an always-on option. Instead of the screen going fully dark after a designated period, it can switch over to a minimalist clock (with the day and date in tiny letters above it). Unsurprisingly, this puts a hit on battery life; instead of around seven days, always-on knocks it down to around five.

Fair trade? It’s not hard to dock the X on its charging stand (which, cleverly, is part of its circular packaging), and the watch takes only about two hours to fully recharge. Plus, even its lower battery life is quite impressive compared to the 18 hours or so we clocked with the Apple Watch Series 6.

Watch face selection

Using the Amazfit app, you can choose from 25 different watch faces to download to the X (which, alas, can store only two at a time). They’re all different degrees of beautiful: sharp, colorful, and in some cases packed with info.

There’s one, for example, that shows not only the day, date, and time, but also battery life and your PAI (personal activity intelligence) score. And that’s just in the upper section of the watch face; in the lower, you get step count, heart rate, and calories burned.

Most of the faces are digital in aesthetic, but a handful lean into more of a Rolex look, with analog hands and elegant, night-on-the-town layouts.

Health and fitness features

It’s almost disingenuous to refer to this as a smartwatch and not a fitness tracker, as it’s stocked with just about every health tool you can imagine. In addition to the usual ones—step counter, full-time heart-rate monitor, sleep tracker—you get a blood-oxygen sensor and stress detector.

What’s more, the watch can automatically detect four different activities (outdoor walking, treadmill, jogging, and biking) out of the nine total activities it can track. So if you sometimes forget to start logging your runs, for example, the X will kick in on your behalf.

It’s hard to say just how accurate some of these sensors are, though. Although my step counts seemed pretty accurate (at least relative to the daily averages logged by my Apple Watch), I noticed that heart-rate numbers varied quite a bit, even when I was just sitting at my desk. As with many wearables, if it’s not positioned just so on your wrist, readings can get weird. Glancing down from time to time, I might see 56 bpm and I might see 90.

What we don’t like

Slow GPS

I wore the Amazfit X during a variety of activities, including walking, jogging, and cycling. Onboard GPS means I have the option of leaving my phone behind while still enjoying satellite-powered tracking. Just one problem: Every time I started a workout, I had to wait at least a minute or two for the watch to lock onto GPS signals.

In fact, on a few triathlon-training excursions, I’d end one activity, then start another just a minute later only to find myself waiting once again for GPS lock. That’s unacceptable.

Lots of usability quirks

To keep the lines as clean as possible, Amazfit opted against a side button. Instead, to engage a specific feature or return to the home screen, you squeeze both sides. It works, as long as you hit the squeeze dead-center, but it’s weird.

There’s a very useful find-my-phone option accessible from the swipe-down menu, but when you actually find your phone, there’s no obvious way to make it stop pinging. I had to open the Zepp app to get it to stop.

Similarly, if I receive a call and happen to decline it on my phone instead of on the watch, sometimes the watch will start buzzing a few moments later, as though the call had just come in and was still active. (I’ve encountered this same bug on other Amazfit watches, meaning it’s almost certainly an issue with the Zepp app.)

Weather readings—shown on some of the watch faces—often don’t get updated day-to-day, not unless you open the Zepp app on your phone. And when you do that, the app sometimes takes a minute or two to sync with the watch.

These and other quirks are minor nuisances and may not be deal-breakers—but they’re not new, either. Amazfit is long overdue to fix these bugs and give the Zepp app an interface overhaul.

Should you buy it?

No, good looks alone don’t justify the high price

There’s no question the Amazfit X offers premium features to go along with a unique design that few other wearables can match. Whether that design really makes sense is another question. Though it needs to be charged far more often, I suspect most iPhone owners would be happier with an Apple Watch. While it may look fairly plain in comparison, it offers better readability, better overall performance, and exceptional integration with iPhone features.

On the Android side, it’s mostly the same story, but with Samsung’s Galaxy Watch lineup, such as the Active 2 or the Galaxy Watch 3. If I have $300-plus to spend on a smartwatch, I’m almost certainly going to choose one of those. And if fitness is my main goal, a Fitbit Versa 3 is probably the smarter option, as it’s bolstered by its companion app, not hampered by it.

If you’re still drawn to the Amazfit X’s sexy stylings, I can’t say I blame you—but do suggest waiting for a sale. Amazfit frequently offers discounts, and I’m quite sure the X will see one in the not-too-distant future.