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Amazfit Bip 3 Pro smartwatch review: Shut up and take my money!
Offering many of the same core features of an Apple or Samsung watch, the Bip makes a great addition to your wrist.
There are things that make you question reality, like why some people choose vanilla ice cream when there's chocolate available. Similarly, why pay $249 or more for an Apple Watch when you can buy the Amazfit Bip 3 Pro for just $70? (Pro tip: It's often on sale for even less.) Well, obviously, the latter must be a feature-strapped toy of a thing that's barely worth the box it comes in. It must be the vanilla to Apple's vastly superior chocolate, right?
Not right. The Bip 3 Pro continues a long tradition of amazingly good, amazingly inexpensive Amazfit watches. Though not perfect, it's easy to recommend for anyone seeking wrist-based time, notifications, fitness tracking, health monitoring and much more. Oh, and its amazing battery life should leave Apple feeling very, very embarrassed.
READ MORE: Amazfit Bip 5 review: The best Apple and Samsung smartwatch alternative under $100
PROS: Low price; good screen; onboard GPS and heart-rate monitor; solid battery life
CONS: Not especially novice-friendly; some connectivity issues
VERDICT: The Bip 3 Pro puts a wealth of useful features on your wrist for a fraction of the cost of an Apple or Samsung watch.
Amazfit Bip 3 Pro design
From a distance you could easily mistake the Bip 3 Pro for an Apple Watch, as it's roughly the same rectangular shape and size. Granted, the former is all plastic and has a button instead of a crown, but they're clearly cut from the same design cloth.
Amazfit offers just three color choices: black, pink and the one I find most attractive, cream. Each includes a one-size-fits-all silicone band that can be swapped out for various other styles and colors available from the Amazfit online store. If you want a sports band for sweat-intensive activity, for example, or something leather for a classier look, you can have it. For what it's worth, I found the stock band very comfortable for everyday wear.
The Bip 3 Pro's color screen makes a solid first impression. It measures just a hair below 43mm, very close to the size of Apple's larger watches. There's a fair bit of bezel around it, but overall the display feels spacious and looks sharp. Plus, although it uses TFT technology and not AMOLED, I found it reasonably easy to see outdoors, even under direct sun.
As noted, there's just one button on the Bip. Pressing it activates the screen or returns you to a previous menu; a long-press can be set to any number of functions, like starting a workout, activating sleep mode or running a quickie meditation session. Although the button can rotate, crown-style, turning it does nothing.
Amazfit Bip 3 Pro features
The Bip offers all the basic smartwatch features you'd expect, including a selection of over 50 watch faces, some of which can be customized with your preferred widgets (and/or photos). It will notify you of incoming calls and text messages, share alerts from various phone apps, remotely control your phone's camera shutter and music playback, display local weather, run a stopwatch, find a misplaced phone and much more.
Unfortunately, a few these options are fairly buried in watch menus. To access Find Phone, for example, you have to scroll to the bottom of the rather lengthy app list and then tap More. However, Amazfit's companion app (which is called Zepp for reasons I won't bore you with) lets you customize that app list, meaning you can put your most-used apps up top for faster access.
On the fitness front, the Bip 3 Pro can track over 60 activities (alas, pickleball isn't among them), while keeping tabs on both your heart rate and blood-oxygen level. Onboard GPS means it can precisely record your run routes and other outdoor exercises. (By the way, skip the non-Pro version of this watch, which is $10 cheaper but lacks GPS.) For swimmers and divers, it's water-resistant to 5 ATM, meaning about 50 meters.
As noted previously, the watch's battery life puts the Apple Watch to shame. It's good for up to 14 days on a charge, though your real-world results will vary depending on which features you use. Anything you do involving GPS, for example, will reduce battery life, as will enabling full-time heart-rate monitoring. Even choosing a watch face with an active second-hand can make a difference. In my testing, the battery usually lasted anywhere from 6-9 days — still a vast improvement over the Apple Watch's 1-2 days.
Amazfit Bip 3 Pro cons (see what I did there?)
That's good, because the magnetic charging dock (which must be plugged into a USB port) is kind of a pain. The cord is short, just 18 inches, and the watch must be seated in a specific, non-obvious orientation; it won't dock if reversed.
As for those 60-plus activities the watch can track, finding the one you want can be difficult, as they're not alphabetically organized (and can't be re-ordered like the aforementioned app list). Unfortunately, the Bip doesn't automatically detect your workouts the way Fitbits and Apple Watches can; you'll have to start and stop them manually. (For what it's worth, every Apple Watch I've owned has done a fairly poor job of workout-detection anyway. Fitbits are much better at this.)
Meanwhile, the Bip 3 Pro doesn't have an always-on option, and I found its raise-to-wake capability a little laggy: There's a tiny-but-noticeable delay before the screen lights up. The Zepp app is fairly easy to navigate, but on several occasions it failed to connect to the watch; I had to restart the app to get it working again. (Note that my tests were conducted with the iPhone version; things might be a little different with Android.)
Novices, be warned: Amazfit's multi-language product manual is a joke, with just three pages in English and not a single word about charging the watch (literally the first and most important thing to do after unboxing) or dealing with issues like connectivity. I found a slightly more detailed version of the manual online (though it took some searching), and the Zepp app has a fairly detailed help section. But if you're a first-time smartwatch user, plan on a lot of experimenting to learn the Bip 3 Pro's features and operation. The lack of decent documentation is a definite downside.
Amazfit Bip 3 Pro: Who should buy it?
Speaking of first-time smartwatch users, the Bip 3 Pro is a great place to start, learning curve notwithstanding. The big benefit, aside from the obvious one (telling the time), is notifications: A vibration and/or beep alerts you to phone activities, whether it's a call, text message, reminder or the like. That means you're less likely to miss something important when your phone is tucked in a pocket or purse.
I think notifications alone make this worth the price of admission. Sure, you can start tracking your daily steps to see if you're hitting that key 10,000 metric, and check your heart rate as needed to make sure you're "in the zone." But don't feel like you need to leverage every single feature here to make this a worthwhile purchase.
Indeed, with its big screen, great battery life, built-in heart-rate monitoring and more, the Bip 3 Pro offers a tremendous value at $54.
The Bip 3 Pro puts a wealth of features on your wrist. It's not very novice-friendly, but it's hard to argue with this much bang for the buck. Wait for a sale and you'll spend even fewer bucks.
