in all Of all the fitness trackers I’ve tested, none has taken a bigger leap in hardware development than Amazfit. The first iteration I tried in 2018 was malleable and scary. Wearable devices are steadily becoming more wearable every year. Recently, a colleague asked me if my tester, the Balance, was the Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 (7/10, recommended by Wired). This is high praise!
The Balance is Amazfit’s universal fitness tracker designed to promote “mental and physical health.” It looks… well, it looks like the Galaxy Watch 6, with slightly different top buttons, and ideally it would work the same way, tracking your sleep, heart rate, and activity, as well as taking calls. It also comes with a range of optional AI tools to help you sleep, meditate and exercise. But right now, it still has too many issues, which is especially noticeable on my tester Garmin, which runs seamlessly on my other wrist.
red flag
As with most fitness trackers, I checked the company’s privacy policy to see how it would use such private information. It’s usually easy to find and often looks similar to Google – no data used for ads etc. Balance’s privacy policy is very difficult to find. According to the Amazfit website, this privacy policy specifically does not apply to Amazfit trackers, nor does Zepp Health’s policy. There is also no privacy policy in the product manual. I asked Amazfit for a link to the privacy policy applicable to the smart device, but received no reply.
Even if everything yes On the face of it, the company makes it very difficult to understand what’s happening to your data. If this is important to you, you should probably stop reading here.
That being said, the Balance is a very lightweight, beautiful, and low-profile fitness tracker. Even though the case is so large – 46mm wide and 10.6mm deep – it doesn’t feel too big or obtrusive on my 150mm wrist. The frame is made of stylish gray aluminum, and there are two control buttons on the left side, as well as a tempered glass AMOLED touch screen.
Photography: Adrienne Su
The screen is clear, bright, and responsive—perhaps a little too responsive. Every time I fiddled with the cuffs of my jacket in the cold, gray weather here in Oregon, it would start and stop working out unexpectedly. Battery life is theoretically good for 14 days, but I did have to charge it once in the past two weeks due to some daily tracking activity (dog walking, running, indoor workouts). It charges relatively quickly, though—it went from 15% to 65% in the 45 minutes I spent waiting for my flight at the airport.
It’s waterproof to 5 ATM, which means you can use it while swimming (it would be weird if it couldn’t be used in the shower). (By comparison, my favorite Garmin Instinct 2 has a 10 ATM waterproof rating, and I snorkeled and surfed with it without issue.)
Like most high-end fitness trackers today, it comes with an array of sensors and tools. These include an onboard GPS with dual-frequency positioning that helps the tracker filter out environmental noise; an accelerometer, a gyroscope, an ambient light sensor, a temperature sensor, and several biometric sensors for measuring heart rate and blood oxygen, among other things. It also comes with a microphone and incredible speakers, and my favorite, most comfortable nylon strap.
add it
Amazfit is owned by Zepp (formerly Huami), and the app Balance uses is Zepp Health. Zepp Health used to be almost boring, but the app’s homepage has been cleaned up quite a bit. Zepp Health now has a readiness score, similar to Fitbit’s Daily Readiness or Garmin’s Body Battery, but you can still view the company’s previous common metric, called PAI. The company developed the PAI score using the research of Ulrik Wisløff, a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. It uses your age, gender, resting heart rate, and heart rate data from the past seven days to calculate how much activity you should do.
Photography: Adrienne Su