Fitness bands have been around for a while. They are affordable and you can buy one for as low as Rs. 1,500. Smartwatches on the other hand, are expensive and are considered premium. A few brands have made progress on that front, by launching affordable smartwatches while maintaining the features of any other decent fitness band. Possibly, the most popular one is a smartwatch called the Amazfit Bip Lite. It’s cheaper than the Amazfit Bip variant, but just a bit more expensive than the average, affordable fitness band. You get a lot more for your money though.
It is priced at just Rs. 3,499 and it’s now available at www.reliancedigital.in. The price is not the only interesting bit about this device. It looks and feels as good as any premium smartwatch. It even has an in-built heart rate sensor. It’s lightweight but it is study. The strap has a rubberized finish and it’s quite flexible. You wear it like you wear any other watch too. Charging is particularly easy, since you need not detach the straps. It’s cleverely designed!
When we pulled our watch out of the box, it showed a 76 per cent charge. It still held most of that after a week of thorough use. Amazfit claims the Bip Lite has a 45-day battery life. That’s longer than most smartwatches that last no more than a week at most. This means you can charge it fully in two and a half hours, and not worry about it for the next month and a half. Amazfit even claims an idle standby time of 120 days.
The watch body feels robust for a few other reasons. It’s designed to be swim-proof, which means you can submerge it under 30 meters of water. Getting wet in the rains or sweating a lot is no issue either. The screen is even reinforced with Corning Gorilla 3 glass so it doesn’t get scratched easily. The strap is detachable too, so you replace it with some colourful options if you like.
The Bip Lite’s screen is a 1.28-inch TFT one, and it runs a rather low resolution of 176 x 176. This is perfectly fine since it helps maintain the battery life, and most of us aren’t going to use the Bip Lite to view photos or play games. The artwork and colours chosen for the watch faces make all the difference. They are elegant, funny, geeky for the most part. The screen is quite dim when it’s idle, but it’s bright enough to see the time. When active, it’s a lot brighter and you get the option to increase it further from the watch settings. Even the interface is simple and learning how to navigate it takes a few minutes.
There is a single physical button on the right. It is used to turn the screen on from its idle state and it lets you interact with the device. The screen is left on idle all the time, and it lets you see the time, without having to turn it on. Pressing the button lets you interact with the touch screen. Swiping from the top to bottom brings up the Do Not Disturb mode toggles. Swipe from the bottom to the top and you can see the notifications, that arrive from your phone. Swiping from the right to the left brings up the list of activity recording and settings. It’s all very intuitive and easy to use. The notification from mobile apps on the smart phone come through very nicely. The fonts are somewhat small but that lets you see a large portion of the message in one screen.
The watch communicates with the phone using Bluetooth and it supports Android devices, as well as iPhones. The mobile app is easy to use and it lets you control the watch better. The Amazfit app lets you send notifications from several pre-set apps and you can add custom ones. There are several watch faces to choose from and these can be enabled once you download the first firmware update. In fact, there are third-party watch faces websites with more than 22,000 options to choose from.
The accuracy of the heart rate sensor is good. We compared it with another watch from a competing brand and found that the heart rates matched. One could assume this is accurate. Even the sleep tracking is nicely done, with details available on the phone as well as the smart watch. There are a bunch of exercise presets to pick and they can be enabled from either device. You can even assign your favourite activity to the physical button. That way, you can simply press down the button and it starts recording that activity.
You don’t need to carry the phone with you, but you won’t be able to track your movement in your activity. This is the difference between the Bip and the Bip Lite. The Bip Lite does not come with a built-in GPS. You need to carry your phone for that purpose. This is a minor inconvenience, and it won’t affect everyone.
The Amazfit Bip Lite is a very good value-for-money product because it does a lot of things you typically find on smartwatches priced several fold. It does nearly as much as some products that cost ten times as much. The thing that makes it so appealing is that it does all the things you really need from a smart watch. That along with the insanely good battery life makes the Amazfit Bip Lite a no-brainer smartwatch for anyone.
