Review: Amazfit Balance

Of all the fitness trackers that I’ve tested, none has made a bigger leap in hardware development than Amazfit. The first iterations that I tried in 2018 were plasticky and horrible. Every year, the wearable has gotten steadily, well, more wearable. A coworker recently asked if my tester Balance was a Samsung Galaxy Watch6 (7/10, WIRED Recommends). That’s high praise!

The Balance is Amazfit’s general purpose fitness tracker, aimed at promoting “wellness of body and mind.” It looks … well, it looks like a Galaxy Watch6, with a slightly different top button, and ideally it would work in the same way by tracking your sleep, heart rate, and activities, as well as taking your calls. It also comes with a bevy of optional AI-powered tools to help you sleep, meditate, and exercise. Right now, though, it’s just still too buggy, which is especially obvious with a seamlessly functioning tester Garmin on my opposite wrist.

Red Flag

As with most fitness trackers, I check the company's privacy policy to see how it will use such intimate information. It's usually easy to find, and it usually looks similar to Google's—no data used for ads, et cetera. The Balance's privacy policy is unusually hard to find. According to Amazfit's website, the privacy policy explicitly does not apply to Amazfit trackers, nor does Zepp Health's policy. There's no privacy policy in the product manual, either. I asked Amazfit for a link to the privacy policy that applies to this tracker and got no response.

Even if everything is aboveboard, the company has made it very difficult to find out what's happening to your data. If that matters to you, you should probably stop reading here.

With that said, the Balance is a very light, good-looking, and low-profile fitness tracker. Despite having such a big case—46 mm across, 10.6 mm deep—it didn’t feel large or obtrusive on my 150-mm wrist. The bezel is sleek gray aluminum, and it has two buttons on the left hand side to control it, as well as a tempered glass AMOLED touchscreen.

Photograph: Adrienne So

The screen is clear, bright, and responsive—maybe a little too responsive. It started and stopped workouts accidentally whenever I fidgeted with my jacket cuffs in Oregon’s cold, gray weather. The battery life theoretically lasts 14 days, but with a few tracked activities per day (walking my dog, running, indoor workouts), I did have to charge it once in the past two weeks. It charged relatively quickly, though—it went from 15 to 65 percent capacity in the 45 minutes that I was waiting for a plane at the airport.

It has a water resistance rating of 5 ATM, which means that you can use it while swimming (if not while taking a shower, weirdly). (By way of contrast, my favorite Garmin Instinct 2 is rated to 10 ATM, and I have used it snorkeling and surfing without issue.)

Like most higher-end fitness trackers these days, it comes with a bevy of sensors and tools. These include onboard GPS with dual-band positioning that helps the tracker filter out environmental noise; an acceleration sensor, gyroscope, ambient light sensor, temperature sensor, and a couple of biometric sensors for measuring your heart rate and blood oxygen and so forth. It also has a microphone and an incredibly loud speaker, and my favorite, most comfortable nylon strap.

Add It Up

Amazfit is owned by Zepp, formerly known as Huami, and the app that the Balance uses is Zepp Health. Zepp Health used to be almost unusably annoying, but the app’s homepage has been cleaned up quite a bit. Zepp Health now features a Readiness score, which is similar to that of Fitbit’s Daily Readiness or Garmin’s Body Battery, but you can still check the company’s previous general purpose metric, which was PAI. The company developed its PAI score using the research of Ulrik Wisløff, a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. It uses your age, sex, resting heart rate, and past seven days of heart rate data to calculate just how much activity you should be getting.

Photograph: Adrienne So

I’ve always found PAI to be a slightly ridiculous measurement. Every other company has a 1 to 100 readiness scale. Using PAI, you just accumulate points with little context. It's like budgeting software that just congratulates you on how much money you make instead of telling when or where to spend it.

Despite that, I cross-checked the Balance's metrics against a Garmin and a smart ring, and the numbers generally matched up. For example, when it comes to tracking sleep, it tracks my time falling asleep within the same few minutes as the Garmin, even if the Zepp algorithm is slightly more generous in its interpretations—to Zepp, seven hours of sleep is great, while in Garmin Connect it’s just OK.

The heart rate sensor can be a bit wonky. It does induce panic to look down and see that a gentle walk has raised my heart rate to 150 bpm. But that's maybe due to the case being so big on my small wrist. Adjusting the watch usually clears up the trouble. The Body Composition measurement—where it tells you your body fat percentage—appeared to be within a normal range. I didn't cross-check it against a caliper test, but it didn't error out, and it did tell me that I'm a normal, healthy woman, which, you know. I agree!

I also didn't find Zepp’s personalized AI-powered tools to be useful. Each one, like Zepp Aura ($50/year to help you sleep) or Zepp Fitness ($30/year to help you maximize your workouts) requires its own separate subscription. That really adds up, and I made sure to cancel all the trials once I checked them out. I also found the advice to be mostly unhelpful. You would think adaptive health and wellness advice would be the perfect application for AI, but I got tired of coaching my AI coach to give me actionable advice. If you don’t already know which specific questions to ask for the specific results, you’re not going to get good answers; if you already know what questions to ask, you probably don't need an AI coach.

Finally, the contrast in functionality between the Garmin on my right wrist and the Amazfit on my left was just too great. Both come at similar price points, but the Garmin is much easier to set up. I can pair the wearable to my phone, and the smartwatch functions simply … show up.

Theoretically, you can use the Amazfit to take calls and see your messages, but you have to set these up manually in the app. I followed the instructions to connect my phone and check my texts, and it simply did not work. There’s a limit to how much time I’m willing to spend troubleshooting, especially when the process is just so much easier with other trackers. The Balance is supposed to make your life easier, not harder. Also, to play music, you have to upload MP3s. What. I repeat: What.

Still, since Fitbit was bought by Google and has become more and more tied to Google products and services, there's a clear need for wearables that are not solely tied to iOS or Android. Garmin is just one of the companies making wearables that work with both; there's plenty of room for more. The company is purportedly releasing a smart ring soon, which looks interesting, and the Balance is already so much better than the last iteration I tried.