Amazfit GTR 3 Review
If you’re looking for a smartwatch that will fit all your needs and you don’t have hundreds of pounds to spend on the latest big-brand ‘wearable’, but still like the idea of being able to monitor your health and fitness, receive phone notifications and more, on the go? Enter Amazfit. Check out our Amazfit GTR 3 Review below.
Amazfit GTR 3
The Amazfit GTR 3 is a great value smartwatch that offers all the health and fitness tracking you need, without compromising on style or functionality. The Amazfit GTR 3 is a no-nonsense smartwatch with an impressive battery life that bridges the gap between a lifestyle watch and a fitness tracker.
The Amazfit GTR 3 is a good-looking smartwatch perfect for beginners. For its modest price tag, it delivers an impressive performance.
The Amazfit GTR 3 is one watch that can really go the distance with you. In normal use, it lasts 21 days. In GPS mode – 35 hours. That means you could run over 17 world-record marathons back-to-back. But maybe train first. Good thing the watch supports 150 activities and even tracks your heart rate while swimming. Best to check your health before the marathons… the GTR 3’s all-day health tracking will ping you about any irregular breathing patterns, heart rate readings or blood oxygen levels. Right, see you at the finish line!
Design & display
Slim and stylish with a classic round clock face, the Amazfit GTR 3 is made from lightweight aircraft aluminium alloy with curved glass (it weighs 32g without the strap). The watch interface itself is on the larger side (1.39”) so this is not for those who like a minimalist look. But it has a design more akin to a classic watch, so suits someone who likes their fitness tracker to blend in with their outfit rather than make a statement.
We love that the watch has just two side buttons, including a classic navigation crown or ‘scroll wheel’. This means you can twist the button to scroll through menus and longer notifications, which adds to the watch’s minimal and elegant look.
With over 100 watch faces to choose from, you can store nine on the device itself which we found is more than enough. The animated watch faces look good but can be a little distracting.
The display features tempered glass with an anti-fingerprint coating, but it’s the Amazfit GTR 3’s high-quality screen that has really impressed us.
The 1.39” AMOLED display (454 x 454 pixels, 326 PPI) has excellent brightness – up to 1000 nits (for reference, mobiles and laptops are usually 200-300 nits). This means it has great visibility outdoors even in bright sunlight – as well as awesome touch sensitivity and vivid colours. If you like the screen on all the time, there’s an ‘always-on’ option but it does rinse the battery life.
App & compatibility
In order to connect your phone and experience everything there is to offer with the GTR 3, download and install the Zepp app to your phone. The Zepp app is a very comprehensive application that supports connecting and managing all of your Amazfit products.
Amazfit appears to have been listening to customer feedback and along with improvements to its smartwatch user interface, it also improved the smartphone application. Three main pages of information are presented the home page, health, and profile. There is an amazing amount of information, watch settings, and more in this application and we recommend you spend a few hours going through it all and setting it up for your specific needs.
The application launches with a home page with a possible 15 data cards that appear. These include PAI, sleep, stress and blood oxygen, bodyweight analysis, ECG, body temperature, and more. Some of this data is not collected by the GTR 3 but can be collected elsewhere and entered manually so that you can track all of your health data in a central location.
The Health page shows several cards, including walking, running, cycling, target settings, and friends. You can also tap these various exercises and then use your phone and the Zepp app to track your activity.
The Profile screen is where you see the status of your devices and can also control and completely manage specific devices. Your goals, records, friends, third-party connected accounts (We Chat, Google Fit, Strava, Relive, and Amazon Alexa), and other settings are present here.
Tap on the Amazfit GTR 3 in the list and then you will find access to the Store (watch faces), App Store (Zepp-developed apps like water time, brush teeth timer, and more), notifications and reminders, health monitoring, watch settings, app list management, shortcut cards, app settings, find watch, activity heart rate sharing, lab, system update, and more. Tapping on each of these opens up more areas to explore in the Zepp application to fully customize the experience for your needs.
Back on the main home page, tap the four-leaf icon in the upper right corner to view All Data. Here you can see categories for exercise data, status data, health signs, and body measurements. Much of this data is entered manually as the GTR 3 does not track all of this, but this data may help determine the accuracy of the coaching features.
There are some health tips and summary reports, including charts, for the exercise and health data that are interesting and helpful to understand your health and wellness. You can use some of the tips for motivation to improve your health and it is a comprehensive application.
Features
The Amazfit GTR 3 offers 4-in-1 health measuring powered by BioTracker 3.0, which is impressively accurate.
Features include all-day heart rate monitoring, menstrual cycle tracking, ovulation prediction, sleep and stress tracking, blood oxygen levels and breathing rate, as well as a wide variety of sports.
It comes with a Personal Activity Intelligence (PAI) score – a science-backed health score, which measures the heart health impact of physical activity.
The Amazfit GTR 3 is water-resistant at 5 ATM – which means you can swim or take a bath with it on and it won’t break. It’ll even measure your heart rate underwater. You can also set up alerts on the GTR 3 for when you have abnormal heart rate readings.
The Amazfit GTR 3 now has blood oxygen tracking which happens automatically via a SpO2 sensor; this is an improvement from earlier models which could only do this on demand. You need to enable the Auto Blood Oxygen Monitor for this to work, which can be done from the watch itself or via the app.
The sleep statistics are also very detailed, and you can now track your sleep both overnight as well as daytime naps.
A new feature on the GTR 3 that we love is the one-tap measurement. Thanks to the BioTracker 3.0, it takes just 45 seconds to read your heart rate, SpO2, stress and breathing rate – all at once.
The Amazfit GTR 3 supports a wide range of activities, including eight workouts that can be set for auto-detection so overall the fitness and health-tracking functionality is substantial. GPS tracking is also much more accurate than on previous models.
However, if you want a watch to answer texts or calls, the Amazfit GTR 3 doesn’t have this feature. Another downside is that the Amazfit GTR 3 doesn’t allow you to listen to music and has no capacity for MP3 storage. If you need onboard music and a speaker, you can upgrade to the Amazfit GTR 3 Pro.
Should you buy the Amazfit GTR 3?
The Amazfit GTR 3 feels like an overachiever in the budget smartwatch department. It’s hard to believe a £140 smartwatch can be this good! Its battery life can last days beyond other well-known brands, its display is just as good as more premium smartwatches, and it’s all done while keeping the price under £150.
You’ll have to accept some sacrifices, likeless refined software, fewer app choices, and an uninspired design, but none are so frustrating that they ruin the experience. Despite feeling a little rougher around the edges, the GTR 3 still manages to serve as a great display for notifications, and its workout tracking is reliable enough to keep you on your game.
If you’re willing to forgo all the fit and finish that a premium smartwatch offers, Amazfit’s GTR 3 features nearly all the key components of a good smartwatch while maintaining a surprisingly low price tag.
