I Lived With The Amazfit Balance Ultra For One Month, Garmin Should Be Worried
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The $600 Balance Ultra offers a premium build and features, making it ideal for the chronic runner, gym rat, or Spartan competitor. For everyone else, grab the similarly featured Balance 3 for hundreds less.
There are your everyday smartwatches, such as an Apple or Pixel Watch, and then there are tried-and-true GPS running smartwatches, like Garmin or Polar wearables. While both wearable categories can support walking, running, and other fitness activities, the latter is designed for precise location tracking, multiple physical buttons, training metrics, and longer battery life. Amazfit’s latest $600 Balance Ultra smartwatch is the company’s newest high-end GPS running wearable.
The Ultra was announced in early June; we left the announcement event with one and have been wearing it ever since. I was already acquainted with Amazfit’s hardware and its Zepp software, having used the company’s original Balance smartwatch for nearly two years. So I didn’t face much of a learning curve when moving to Amazfit’s top-tier wearable. I’ve slept, walked, run, exercised, and even gotten in a pool with it over the course of four weeks. I’m ready to share my findings: what worked, what could be better, and whether it’s worth the lavish price tag.
The Balance Ultra is armed with a titanium body and sapphire glass and is a noticeably large smartwatch whose massive case completely engulfs my 7-inch (6.96 mm) wrist. However, thanks to its durable yet lightweight titanium build and included silicone straps, its 57-gram (0.12 lb) watch face, minus the straps, is lighter than it looks and is comfortable to wear for days or weeks at a time.
The Balance Ultra is tough, yet lightweight, while being a large smartwatch.
Amazfit levels up against the competition with a bright and responsive 1.5-inch AMOLED display that reaches up to 3,000-nit peak brightness and is covered in sapphire glass; a capability of up to 330ft of water resistance; 64GB of storage; a built-in flashlight that shines in both red and white colors; and a treasure trove of workouts, including native Hyrox training built into the Zepp software. I’ll divulge more on the latter shortly.
The company also utilizes its latest BioTracker 6.0 sensor, which consists of 5PD (five receivers) that measure your metrics by capturing reflected light and 2LED (two LED lights) that emit light and detect metrics via your blood vessels. This is in addition to a dual-band antenna that pulls data from six satellite systems to determine precise location and the usual suspects: an accelerometer, altimeter, gyroscope, and temperature sensors.
The Balance Ultra can measure your stress, sleep, heart rate, and activity (walking and running), and it includes over 180 hybrid workouts. Amazfit’s latest does all of those things quite well. While I didn’t cover all 180 of the built-in workouts during my testing, I did spend the past four weeks doing a combination of running, walking, and weightlifting.
Running:
Once you select one of their various running modes of outdoor, track, trail running, treadmill, track run, or ultramarathon, you can adjust several settings before starting. I found everything, from the GPS path and accuracy to the number of miles run, to be spot-on. In comparison, the Galaxy Ring undercounted a few steps, while the Fitbit Air occasionally overcounted by a few steps. Once completed, you’ll get a vast amount of data from your run, including average heart rate, average cadence, average pace, calories burned, elevation, stride, ground contact time, details per mile, additional workout notes provided, and more.
Weightlifting:
While working out wasn’t a priority, it was more of an accessory to running to protect my knees. So I opted for the free-weight strength training option with a pair of dumbbells, doing a few sessions once or twice a week. The app showcases everything from average heart rate and training load to calories burned and targeted muscles used. The latter wasn’t wildly inaccurate, as I completed a multitude of full-body workouts, and it recorded them as 119 overhead triceps extensions. Definitely a weak spot for the watch, but not something I would expect a watch to get right.
Sleep:
It provides daily sleep insights, summarizing your previous night’s rest along with tips to improve. The watch also measures your overall sleep duration, sleep regularity, resting heart rate, deep sleep, REM sleep, respiratory rate, and time spent awake. I took its findings as relatively accurate, although I didn’t take any unplanned naps, so I can’t report whether it recorded them properly.
Amazfit quotes a variety of battery life ranges depending on your usage. Typical use will get up to 30 days, heavy use up to 15 days, Always-On Display mode up to 10 days, highly accurate GPS mode up to 50 hours, and power-saving GPS mode up to 97 hours. I averaged about a week and a half with it before needing to charge its 780 mAh battery. As Always-On Display is a smartwatch necessity for me. My testing included three weeks of light workouts, one day of outdoor running, and one week of just some light walking.
I averaged around 10 days on a single charge, as Always-On Display is a necessity for me.
Amazfit’s Zepp app on the Balance Ultra operates like any other smartwatch OS. Swipe down from the top to access notifications and quick settings, swipe right to access workouts, swipe left for apps, and swipe up for your metric summaries. Alongside its responsive touchscreen, the Ultra offers five physical navigation buttons: three on the left side, a crown, and an additional button on the right. The top left button accesses your notifications; the middle left button opens your LifeLoad or health logging feature; the bottom left pulls up Zepp Flow (Amazfit’s AI assistant) and your metric summaries; pressing down on the crown pulls up the many included exercise tracking modes; and the right button doubles as the back button and opens the watch’s built-in apps.
Its smartphone companion app is also available for both Android and iOS, which is ironic, as you can’t add apps like Google Maps, Spotify, or other apps from either app store. Despite not having access to Apple’s App Store or Google’s Play Store, Amazfit comes with a built-in array of apps to handle all your essential needs. These apps include Map, Weather, Activity, Heart Rate, Golf, Training, Phone, Music, Alarm, To-Do List, Calendar, Voice Memo, and more. However, Amazfit offers two proprietary apps: HybridCharge, which combines energy, training, and stress into a single readiness system, and PAI, or Personal Activity Intelligence, which measures your physical activity over seven days and translates it into a score, with 100 or higher as the goal. HybridCharge is a new addition to Amazfit watches, as the latter is a returning feature.
I can clearly say the Amazfit Balance Ultra was made for the chronic runner, the Hyrox athlete, the hybrid trainer, or those whose fitness is a larger part of their daily or weekly lives. The Ultra is durable, delivers high accuracy thanks to its array of sensors, and offers an effective, robust suite of software features even without access to Apple’s or Google’s respective app stores. But the $600 price tag might be too much for the casual runner or trainer to justify.
However, if you’re interested in something similar to the Ultra, Amazfit offers another wearable. Particularly, the $370 Balance 3, which is similar to the Ultra in its capabilities, costs over $200 less. But if you need a solution focused solely on running at a lower price, look into the Amazfit Active 2, which currently retails for $100. Also, like nearly every fitness wearable, you can apply your FSA or HSA funds towards your purchase to reduce the cost.
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