Amazfit Bip 3 Pro Review: Bang For Buck

Best Prices Today: Amazfit Bip 3 Pro

$69.99

Amazfit is starting to build a reputation for making cheap smartwatches that pair well-made hardware and feature-packed software for less than the big name competition.

‘Bip’ is the budget line in Amazfit’s smartwatch range and with the Bip 3 Pro, you have the promise of a smartwatch that can do things like dish out notifications, track exercise and offer weeks as opposed to days of battery life.

It sits well below the $100/£100 price mark and is only slightly more expensive than the Bip 3, which mainly misses out on the built-in GPS you do get on the Bip 3 Pro. The original Bip and the Bip U Pro were budget smartwatch beasts, so the Bip 3 Pro comes with similarly high expectations.

Design & build

• 44mm case 
• Weighs 33g
• Waterproof up to 50 metres

There’s currently eight different Bip models available on the Amazfit website and like previous Bips, the 3 Pro offers a pretty simple square case with a watch crown-style button and a touchscreen display.

You’re getting a 44mm sized plastic case with a matt finish that comes in black, cream or pink colours. I had the black version to test and while it’s a pretty understated look, it certainly didn’t feel cheap.

Mike Sawh / Foundry

It measures in at 9.65mm thick, so you’re getting something that’s thinner than the latest Apple Watch and at just over 33g, it’s lighter as well. Granted though, Apple is dropping more high grade materials on your wrist in comparison.

That case is matched up with a 20mm silicone strap that’s removable via a simple pin mechanism, making it easy to swap in a similar sized strap in its place. The strap has a nice, soft touch finish to it and I’ve had no issues wearing it day and night and during exercise on land and in the water.

Up front is a 1.69-inch, 240 x 280 resolution TFT display. It’s not an AMOLED like you will find on pricier Amazfit watches, but it’s definitely a step up in vibrancy and colour from the original Amazfit Bip’s transflective display. It’s responsive to touch with some minor screen lag, but it’s certainly not as bad as some watches available at this price.

You get a good level of brightness and visibility is fine indoors and outdoors but with some struggles in bright outdoor light. It doesn’t support an always-on mode, so you’re relying on a raise to wake gesture that isn’t super slick, but is good enough not to irritate.

Mike Sawh / Foundry

Amazfit has slapped the Bip 3 Pro with a 5ATM water resistant rating, which is an upgrade from the IP68 rating on the original Bip and matches the Bip U for giving you something to swim with in the pool and open water up to 50 metres depth.

Amazfit isn’t offering anything groundbreaking in terms of the design with the Bip 3 Pro, but I’ve been wearing Garmin’s square Venu Sq 2 smartwatch on my other wrist, which costs considerably more and higher quality AMOLED aside, isn’t a whole lot different in terms of the look it offers.

Health and fitness tracking

• Built-in GPS
• 60+ sports modes
• 24/7 blood oxygen and heart rate monitoring

Amazfit’s smartwatches have in general offered a really strong sports tracking performance. It’s not perfect, but there’s definitely been more good than bad and I’d argue that it betters what the likes of Samsung and Fitbit offers on this front in many ways.

The original Bip made a surprisingly good running watch with accurate GPS and core running metrics and this Bip 3 Pro isn’t just a watch for someone who’s into running. There are more than 60 sports mode covered and that includes cycling, swimming (pool and open water) as well as indoor workouts like the Elliptical and indoor rowing. There’s even dedicated modes for fishing and skateboarding.

Many of those 60+ modes will only track workout duration and heart rate, but there are a fair few other non-core activities, like indoor rowing for example, where you will get activity-specific metrics like stroke rate and stroke counts.

Mike Sawh / Foundry

There’s a dedicated workout screen to track exercise and a workout history menu to offer a breakdown of your stats post-workout. For runs, you have the control to edit data fields and there’s a new target pace mode to tap into too. Elements like distance tracking weren’t too bad against a significantly more expensive Garmin GPS running watch, though there was one instance where the Amazfit stopped tracking a run a quarter of the way through, which seems to have happened due to the watch sitting underneath a wet jacket sleeve.

Where things aren’t so great is with heart rate monitoring where average and maximum readings were at times 20bpm out from a Garmin HRM-Pro Plus chest strap monitor and that was just on steady paced workouts. You don’t have the option to pair up an external heart rate monitor to improve things here either.

I also took the Bip 3 Pro swimming in the pool, in the gym for some HIIT time and on the indoor rower and found the performance and metrics it dished out solid overall compared to tracking from a Garmin watch and the very accurate Form smart swimming goggles, so core tracking seems good in general, but is definitely let down by the heart rate tracking performance.

It’s not just about tracking fitness here either. It’ll track steps and inactivity time with a dedicated widget to show off your progress on the watch. There’s sleep tracking here too and you get a nice overview of the previous night’s sleep with more data inside of the Zepp companion app on your phone. I wore it alongside the Oura Ring 3 and found data such as sleep duration was generally 20 to 30 minutes longer on the Bip 3 Pro as it seemed to take longer to recognise when I’d fallen asleep. Sleep stage data for elements like deep sleep were actually quite similar and resting heart rate was around 2bpm of the Oura Ring 3. 

Mike Sawh / Foundry

Amazfit lets you monitor heart rate continuously and choose the rate it measures that heart rate 24/7. You can also take on the spot blood oxygen measurements and those measurements are taken using Amazfit’s BioTracker 2 PPG optical sensor. That’s not actually the latest version of the biometric sensor you can find packed into an Amazfit watch currently.

Real-time heart rate readings and resting heart rate readings again weren’t great and were at times 20bpm higher than Garmin’s reliable continuous monitoring for average daily readings. On the spot blood oxygen readings were within 2% of a pulse oximeter, so while it’s not a feature designed for health uses, the data seems to be generally reliable.

You do additionally have stress tracking powered by heart rate variability measurements and guided breathing exercises where you follow a simple animation to know when to inhale and exhale. There are also women’s health tracking features included that can offer the ability to track menstrual periods.

It’s really not a bad showing at all from the Bip 3 Pro on all fronts in this department. It’s comfortable to wear during exercise, it serves up a good amount of data and a surprising amount of customisation and crucially, dishes out what seems to be pretty accurate information too, outside of the very sketchy continuous and exercise heart rate data.

Mike Sawh / Foundry

Smartwatch features

• Works with Android and iOS
• View notifications
• Music controls and camera remote

Like previous Bip watches and most cheaper Amazfit watches, the Bip 3 Pro runs on a simpler RTOS operating system as opposed to the more fully fledged ZeppOS featured on the likes of Amazfit’s GT series and latest T-Rex smartwatch.

That does give you something that works with Android phones and iPhones and you’ll use the Zepp companion phone app to set things up and to check in on your health and fitness stats. That app does also offer the ability to share data to Google Fit, Strava and Relive, so data isn’t totally closed off.

What it won’t get you is access to an app store, some more sophisticated UI flourishes and something overall that doesn’t feel as mature. That’s not to say it won’t serve most well and there’s a nice array of smartwatch features that have worked without any major issues.

I’ve been using it with a Samsung Android phone and had no problem getting it set up with the Zepp app or syncing data and keeping a regular connection with the watch.

In terms of those smartwatch features, you can view notifications and while you can only delete those notifications, they’re easily identifiable and actually pretty well optimised to the dinky touchscreen. Sometimes of those old notifications can get stacked up, so you may need to occasionally go in and delete ones you’ve already dealt with.

Mike Sawh / Foundry

There’s plenty of watch faces available to choose from, but you can only store a maximum of two on the watch. You can add widgets to some of those faces to make it easier to quickly glance at data from your watch face. If you like the idea of having a watch face built from your own photos, you can do that here as well.

Unsurprisingly, you don’t get a built-in music player, but you do get some music playback controls that jump into action whenever something is playing away on your smartphone. You’re also getting features like the ability to set alarms, fill in a to-do list, use the find my phone mode, check the latest weather reports and use the watch as remote from your smartphone’s camera shutter.

You’re not getting payment features, access to apps as mentioned or the online and offline smart assistant support you do get on pricier Amazfit watches, but I didn’t really expect to see those features here. The Bip 3 Pro’s software is very easy to get around though and for features like notifications, music controls and weather reports, the Bip 3 Pro serves those up nicely.

Battery life and charging

• Up to 14 days battery life 
• 7 days in heavy usage 

If you go back to the first Bip, Amazfit promised anywhere from 30-45 days of battery life. It’s not quite the same story for the Bip 3 Pro, but it has the potential to go for weeks as opposed to days.

Like a lot of Amazfit’s watches, getting those maximum battery numbers requires disabling features like the advanced sleep tracking, all-day stress tracking and sampling continuous heart rate data at less frequent intervals. If those features are in use and you’re using features like GPS-based workout tracking regularly as well, then you’re going to get closer to week.

Mike Sawh

Thankfully, that daily battery drop-off doesn’t sink in a really significant way. On heavier usage days, it can be 10-15%. When putting indoor workout tracking to use, it goes pretty light on consuming battery. A 20-30-minute indoor row saw battery drop by 1%. When you venture outside and use the GPS, battery drop-off is a few percent for 30-40 minute runs.

Amazfit doesn’t offer any sort of power saving modes here, and it’s not necessarily the snappiest of chargers when you do hit 0%. Amazfit uses what has become a pretty standard design for its charging cradles that clips discreetly onto the back of the watch case and can go from 0-100% in around 2 hours.

So while overall battery numbers have come down over iterations of the Bip, the 3 Pro is still more than capable of lasting a week or two weeks, which is not a bad showing at all.

Price and availability

Budget is what the Bip is all about and the Amazfit Bip 3 Pro comes in at $69.99/£69. The regular Amazfit Bip 3 is priced at £49.99/$44.99, which is really only missing the built-in GPS you get on the 3 Pro.

You can buy the Bip 3 Pro in the US direct from Amazfit and Amazon. Handily, in the UK you can also get it direct from Amazfit or Amazon.

If you look around that sub-$100/£100 price range from other smartwatch makers, you’re looking at things like the TicWatch GTH and the Poco Watch with the former lacking GPS and the latter matching the Bip 3 Pro for accurately tracking outdoor activities. 

Verdict

The Amazfit Bip 3 Pro is a smartwatch that because of the price, you expect to make some big compromises. While you do have to do that in terms of getting a really memorable design or the best Amazfit has to offer in smartwatch features, what does make the cut performs pretty well on the whole.

Heart rate monitoring aside, its abilities as a fitness and sports tracker are not too shabby at all and the experience of getting to grips with the app and the evolving Zepp companion app is pretty straightforward. 

It’s another example of an Amazfit smartwatch where the design and features don’t really match the price. If you’re looking for a cheap smartwatch that you can use for tracking your fitness, checking in on your notifications and you don’t have to charge it constantly, then you have a good option in the Amazfit Bip 3 Pro.