Amazfit Neo Fitness Retro Smartwatch with Real-Time Workout Tracking, Heart Rate and Sleep Monitoring, 28-Day Battery Life, Smart Notifications, 1.2" Always-On Display, Water Resistant, Orange

Product Information

It doesn't feel badly made, but it's what you'd expect to find from a watch that costs in the region of . It's paired up with a 20mm polyurethane strap that has been comfortable to wear in general. It's not the removable kind however like you find on so many Amazfit watches. The straps of the Neo are made of Polyurethane (PUR) and have a width of 20mm. These aren't detachable but are of good quality, and I didn't have any issues with the straps during the testing period. So what does a very affordable hybrid smartwatch that looks like a retro Casio watch get you in the way of smartwatch features? Well, not a massive lot, but there's a few surprising things that do make the cut.

The Zepp companion phone app collates that data along with showing when those steps happened over your day plus weekly and monthly step goals.Huami launched many smartwatches this year under its Amazfit brand, but the Amazfit Neo stands out from the rest because of its design. The wearable comes with retro looks, but has a few features up its sleeve which make it quite modern. It's also the cheapest smartwatch the company has launched this year, but is it a worthy addition to your wrist or has Huami cut one too many corners? Read on to find out. Amazfit Neo specifications In general, it was within 1-2bpm for resting heart rate readings compared to a Garmin watch and a chest strap monitor. Though it had a habit of posting some rather excessive heart rate readings too. As much as 40bpm more. The retro-looking smartwatch also supports incoming calls and app notification alerts, but I didn't find the latter useful at all, because the smartwatch doesn't show the notification contents on the screen and all you get to see in the name of notification alerts is the notification count.

You'll get a sleep score and breakdown of sleep stages in percentages. There's additionally some trends insights that usually told us fell asleep too late on most occasions. We'll start with notifications, where there is support for native and third-party apps. You can't read notifications on the watch, instead getting pinged with an envelope or message icon popping up in the corner to let you know it's come through on your phone. Manual heart rate measurement is fast enough but automatic monitoring isn't reliable, because there were times when the Neo did not detect any pulse at all, and sometimes it recorded heart rate data when I wasn't even wearing the smartwatch and kept it on a table. What we found was that heart rate data displayed was generally much lower than what we recorded with a heart rate monitor chest strap. It simply wasn't very insightful data to use.You can see heart rate during sleep, but there's no REM sleep recorded so it's not as detailed as Fitbit's or Amazfit's GTS/R watches.

Before I wrap up this part of the review, I want to point out that the Amazfit Neo takes long to reconnect with the smartphone at times and data syncing is also slow. Not too much to be a deal-breaker, but enough to hamper the overall experience. We believe this is something Amazfit can fix with a software update. Battery life This makes Huami's PAI Health scores a little redundant here as well. It relies on good heart rate data to tell you whether you've been getting your heart rate rising regularly with exercise over the week to generate those scores. Based on our experience however, those scores probably aren't the most reliable. Moreover, the smartwatch doesn't vibrate for incoming calls and app notification alerts, but relies on different sound tones. This applies to alarms as well, which makes the feature less effective compared to the vibration alerts. From an accuracy point of view, we pitted it against the Fitbit Sense and found actually that it did a pretty reliable job. It roughly recorded the sleep duration and breakdown of deep and light sleep stages. It even served up largely identical sleep scores. Those buttons control a display that's broken up into three sections. The biggest section shows off the time with the space up above displaying data from current smart function in use. There's also a small circular section that displays an icon to indicate that feature.You can set a maximum of 10 watch display settings at any one time, which means you can pretty much get access to everything the Neo is capable of. The Neo comes bundled with a charger that Amazfit says can fully charge the smartwatch's battery from flat to 100% in 2.5 hours, but it actually took less time and filled the cell in just a little over two hours. And once the battery is full, you get notified with beep tones, which is nice. You can tinker with the display settings in the Zepp companion phone app where you'll also find features like locating your watch and turning hourly chimes on or off. Amazfit has a metric it calls PAI, which stands for Personal Activity Intelligence, which is a proprietary fitness metric that takes into account heart rate data in conjunction with daily activity intensity and other physiological measurements to generate a score to measure your overall fitness. The idea behind PAI is to boil down all the health data the watch is collecting into a single, understandable number. Personally, I don't find these efforts like Garmin's Body Battery very helpful, though it may be useful for others.