Amazfit GTR review: Stylish smartwatch with classic look, long battery life

Xiaomi-backed Huami's latest offering the Amazfit GTR comes in three versions: aluminum alloy, stainless steel, and titanium. We reviewed the GTR 47 mm stainless steel version

DESIGN

 

With its brown hybrid leather strap and round dial, Amazfit GTR looks more like an elegant, classic analog watch than sportswear, which I loved. Should you prefer a sportswear look, changing the watch face helps. The straps are easily detachable. The watch has a premium build with a stainless steel casing, and is comfortable, light, and rather slim for a smartwatch. The screen is a 1.39-inch AMOLED display with 454x454 pixels resolution protected by Gorilla Glass 3 panel. The 326ppi pixel density means the display is colourful and vibrant and you should have no problem even in bright daylight. To turn on the screen, just tap on it or lift your wrist. All in all, you get a responsive touchscreen display.

FEATURES AND PERFORMANCES

 

The watch can detect and keep track of up to 12 exercise modes, including outdoor running, treadmill, walking, outdoor cycling, indoor cycling, open water swimming, pool swimming, elliptical trainer, climbing, trail running, skiing, and regular workout exercises. It has an optical heart-rate sensor for continuous heart rate measurement, I found the readings convincing.

You get your phone notifications, reminders, incoming calls (with the option of putting them on silent mode or rejecting them), alarm, music control, and built-in compass directly in the watch.

For a detailed analysis of the stats, you need to download the Amazfit app. The watch is compatible with both IoS and Android devices. It has a built-in GPS. The watch also has a sleep tracking feature so you can get insights on the quality of your sleep which is condensed into something called sleep score. The heart rate sensor seems to work fine, but the GPS was slightly off at times, especially in terms of tracking my runs. Hopefully, further updates will fix that. The step counter seems accurate too.

 

Another put-off is that you can download watch faces only one at a time and they take a long time to download. Moreover, you can really just choose one downloadable watch face at a time with the two default ones.

The watch is water-resistant up to 5ATM, so you can take a shower, swim and sweat with the watch strapped on your wrist without too much of a problem.

But the biggest takeaway of the watch is its seemingly inexhaustible battery life. Xiaomi claims the 410 mAh battery can give almost 24 days of battery life and in my experience of over two weeks, I didn't need to charge the watch except in the last couple days when I turned on almost every available feature for continuous monitoring that dried the battery in around 20 hours. But you can charge it fully in 90 minutes or so. To charge, you get a USB magnetic charger.

VERDICT

Despite some of its shortcomings, at Rs 10,999, Amazfit GTR is a budget-friendly and accurate fitness smartwatch with a classic analog watch look and a superb battery life, and is packed with features generally found in premium smartwatches.