Amazfit Active review

The Amazfit Active, like many of the brand’s wearables, proves you don’t need to spend a fortune to get your hands on one of the best fitness trackers around. This $109 watch sits around the middle of Amazfit’s lineup price-wise, offering the brand’s signature expansive range of fitness and health tracking features alongside the styling and feel of a premium smartwatch.

After putting the Amazfit Active through its paces over the last couple of months, including cycling, running and strength training, I’ve been incredibly impressed with this budget smartwatch. It isn’t perfect, but at this price, its drawbacks are too minor to kick up much of a fuss about.

So, should you buy it? Find out in my Amazfit Active review.

Amazfit Active review: Specs

Amazfit Active review: Price & availability

The Amazfit Active costs $109 at Amazon U.S. or £100 at Amazon U.K., so around $50 cheaper than the Google Fitbit Charge 6 ($159) and less than half the price of the Apple Watch SE Gen 2 ($249). It also sits in the middle of the Amazfit range, between the Amazfit Active Edge ($149) and the ultra-affordable Amazfit Band 7 ($49).

The Active comes in three colors. Midnight Black features a matte gray metal bezel and black plastic base. Lavender Purple and Petal Pink both feature a rose gold bezel with purple or pink bases. Black and pink colorways come with a silicone strap, while the Lavender color comes with a leatherette strap. Amazfit offers a variety of replacement straps on its website, though, including leatherette and fabric designs.

Amazfit Active review: Design

The Amazfit Active looks much more upmarket than you might expect for its modest price. It’s essentially an Apple Watch clone without a digital crown, and it looks great. Its large 1.75-inch ‘always on’ AMOLED display is bright, colorful and sharp, and responsive to the touch. Around the side is a metal band, which lends a premium feel.

The only real giveaway that this is a budget watch is the default silicone strap, which looks a little cheap and scuffs easily versus the silicone straps on other watches I’ve used. While the strap is comfortable enough in general daily use and even for wearing while sleeping, it gets uncomfortable quickly during exercise when sweaty — this is something we also noticed in our Amazfit Bip 5 review.

The watch can be customized with hundreds of faces, both from Amazfit and community-made. You can swap between a few default faces on the watch itself, but most will need to be downloaded on the companion Zepp app before being uploaded to the watch.

The Active is waterproof to 50 meters, so you shouldn’t have any issue wearing it while working out in the rain, or even taking it for a swim (as you’d expect from a fitness tracker). Amazfit makes no mention of the watch’s dust-proofing, though, so I can only assume there isn’t any, meaning this is not one to take to sandy or dusty environments.

Amazfit Active review: Fitness features

The Amazfit Active can track 129 activities, from standards like indoor/outdoor running through to more gimmicky options, like chess. Naturally, there’s a step tracker to help keep track of your ambient daily activity levels, and the watch is compatible with several third-party services including Adidas Running, Strava, Google Fit and Apple Health.

I used the watch’s built-in activities to track my cycling workouts and strength training, and found the insights very useful. The heart rate and intensity tracking seemed to be pretty accurate – that is to say, when the watch said I was pushing myself and venturing into anaerobic or VO2 Max territory, I certainly felt it.

For outdoor activities like cycling and running, the app maps out your route and color codes it based on intensity and or speed. It also graphs out useful metrics for individual workouts showing time spent in various states of exercise, including VO2 Max, and displays daily, weekly and monthly graphs for exercise, steps etc, allowing you to track your progress in a decent amount of detail. You can also download different exercises and courses, which can then be uploaded to your watch when you want to undertake and track them.

But I did find the strength training activity rather annoying. Firstly, instead of tracking your entire strength workout in one go, it forces you to break your workout down into sets, then attempts to record your reps per set. You need to manually start and stop each set, which is annoying and easy to forget.

Secondly, when I said “attempts to record your reps per set” above, I was being generous. “Fails to record your reps per set” would be more apt. Not once during my time testing did the watch accurately record my reps, sometimes being as far as 10 reps out on an exercise as ubiquitous as the bench press, thus rendering it useless for actually recording your workout/set composition.

As we’ve pointed out in our Amazfit Bip 5 and Amazfit Active Edge reviews, the PAI system used by Amazfit watches is really rather baffling. The PAI system leans on the findings of a Norwegian study in order to improve cardiovascular health and prolong life. You earn PAI points by exercising, and the closer you are to 100 PAI per week, the longer you’ll supposedly live (exercise is good for you… who knew?!)

The thing is, these PAI points are unbelievably hard to earn: you could run a marathon a day and probably not hit 50 PAI. In one week, I completed several gym and cycling workouts, and walked upwards of 30,000 steps per day while away for four days in Chicago, yet I still only racked up a handful of PAI. It’s either broken, or so wildly unrealistic as to be effectively useless for layfolk like me.

Amazfit Active review: Extra features

The Amazfit Active features sleep tracking, displayed via the Zepp app, which worked well for the most part, giving me a detailed breakdown of the time spent in various states of sleep, evaluation of my results, plus advice on how to improve my sleep health. It didn’t always work flawlessly, sometimes telling me I’d slept through the night when I hadn’t, but in general it worked well and proved highly insightful.

There’s also a Readiness feature, like you’d find on a smart ring like the Oura Ring 4, which “reveals if you’re ready for the new day”. Readiness is probably the wrong word to describe this feature — after all, if I’m not ready, what should I do? Just give up and go back to bed?

This feature is more of a long-term holistic analysis of your state of wellbeing, based on various body and sleep measurements, which it then uses to give you high level advice for looking after yourself. I’ve found it to be creepily accurate: the watch could tell that I’ve been through a rocky period of mental health, but that my physical state and recovery rate was fine. Its advice was to “take it easy” and pay attention to my mental wellbeing through relaxation and sleep-aiding techniques.

There’s also a stress tracking feature, a pomodoro productivity timer and, while I couldn’t test this personally, menstrual cycle tracking. The Active also features a range of smaller features, like a wake-up briefing with a weather forecast, that generally make it a fun, useful little companion to wear.

Amazfit Active review: App

The Amazfit Active pairs with the Zepp smartphone app, which as companion apps go, is pretty good (believe me, I see a lot of cruddy companion apps in my job — like the Renpho app, which referenced Wikipedia for its health advice). It’s straightforward to pair watch and app: fire up the app, sign in and your nearby watch will automatically begin to pair. I actually changed phones halfway through testing, so it was a relief to have the app make re-pairing so simple.

The Zepp app is also reliable. It hasn’t crashed or lost connection with the watch once, even during a baptism of fire as I first paired the watch and updated firmware on a train with virtually no cellular signal. It also allows you to tweak the Active’s settings and customize your watch face.

There are a good number of secondary features too. Daily AI-generated insights are mostly useless, but do come in useful occasionally: one insight noticed my heart rate had risen after falling asleep, suggesting reasons for this, including stress, anxiety or caffeine — as it happened, I was pretty anxious at the time, and this got me thinking about methods I could use to stop that affecting my sleep. The app also gives some useful explanations about how it calculates various scores and metrics, plus pointers for how you can improve.

Amazfit Active review: Battery life

Amazfit claims that on a single charge, the Active will last 10 days under heavy usage, and 14 days under typical usage. I found those claims a little ambitious, but that isn’t to say the watch puts on a poor display. Using the watch regularly throughout the day, on moderately high brightness and tracking several workouts per week, the watch drank around 12% of its juice per day, netting me around 8 days.

I then tested it out on a 10-day trip to Chicago and New York. I charged the watch the day before I left, then stuck it on low power mode. It died just after I walked back through the door to my home, which was around 12 days later. I’ve been more than satisfied with its performance.

Amazfit Active review: Should you buy it?

If you want a premium-looking, feature-packed fitness tracker without spending big, look no further than the Amazfit Active. I was a little sceptical about the Active at first — how well would a watch this cheap really be able to perform? But I quickly found myself very pleasantly surprised.

While not perfect, its health and fitness tracking features perform extremely well and provide a high level of insight. The screen is bright, the interface slick, and the app well-polished with a decent level of information to help you reach your goals. For $109, it’s really hard not to recommend the Amazfit Active.