The Amazfit T-Rex is the company’s first sports watch that’s built for the outside. The guarantee of military-grade sturdiness and big electric battery life can monitor activities like path running and open up water swimming. It’ll monitor those and more for not nearly as expensive it costs to buy a patio watch from famous brands Garmin and Suunto.
It joins a quickly expanding category of Amazfit watches built by Huami, the Chinese language brand also accountable for building Xiaomi’s Mi Music group fitness trackers. Using the T-Rex, the ambition is clear; Huami desires a bit of the outdoor watch action. At a sub-$140/£130 price, they have every potential for doing that.
From its sports activities watch skills, the T-Rex also delivers smartwatch staples, like looking at notifications and turning up watch encounters, to make it beneficial to have on your wrist when you’re not climbing up the medial side of a hill.
There’s room for an inexpensive outdoor watch, with famous brands like the Garmin Instinct along with Suunto’s durable options still to arrive at a significantly higher price. The T-Rex – in writing – gets the features to make it a fairly formidable adventure friend.
Amazfit T-Rex release day and price
The Amazfit T-Rex was announced in January 2020 at Amazfit’s CES press conference and continued sale on January 9.
If you’d like this watch on your wrist, it’s coming in at an extremely affordable $139.90 (around £110, AU$200), placing it above the Amazfit Bip S in price terms, but roughly good Apple Watch look-alike the Amazfit GTS.
That price also puts it well below the price tag on Garmin’s Instinct, the least expensive outdoor option in Garmin’s steady of watches. It’s also significantly cheaper than Suunto’s Traverse and Ambit outdoor watches, which were serving outdoor enthusiasts for a good couple of years now.
Design
- Chunky but feels toy-like
- Built to army standards
- Water-resistant to 50 meters
The T-Rex was created to withstand some serious rough and tumble, and that’s precisely what it appears like when you obtain it from the box.
What you’ll find is a chunky 47mm watch that steps in at 13.5mm solid, but somehow just seems bulkier than that. Those sizes suggest you’re obtaining a watch that fits the scale and stature of the Garmin Fenix 6, though it’s clear the Garmin watch bears that heft in a much nicer way.
The Garmin is of course within a completely different price bracket, even though the T-Rex feels a bit chunkier than we’d like, it doesn’t weigh heavy on your wrist. At 58g (like the strap and polymer case) you’re getting something very light to wear.
We’re used to praising pieces that keep carefully the weight down, but we’d almost choose some more grams here. The Amazfit T-Rex is nearly toy-like in its lightness with the lack of more high-grade materials.
The appearance is inspired by the Garmins and Suuntos of the world. There’s a large elevated bezel that surrounds the touch screen, along with four textured physical control keys that produce them simpler to locate and press with a set of gloves on, while those noticeable screws are an indicator of its tough build.
Huami says the T-Rex was created to army standards so that it can withstand freezing temps and intensely humid ones. It has additionally been slapped with a waterproof ranking which means you may take it going swimming up to 50 meters deep.
If you value colors, you can snap the Amazfit T-Rex up in five different tones. There’s gun gray, rock dark (the main one we examined), camo green, khaki, and military green. All include the same silicon watch strap, which is very smooth and intensely stretchy and experienced fine to wear night and day and during sweaty exercises.
Amazfit T-Rex Display
- 1.3-inch 360 x 360 AMOLED screen
- Shiny and high-quality
- Gets smudged easily
In the center of the T-Rex is a 1.3-inch, 360 x 360 resolution AMOLED touchscreen. The largest Samsung Galaxy Watch model supplies the same size and quality, so you’re obtaining a similar quality screen on the watch that costs around half the purchase price.
It’s also up there with Samsung in conditions of vibrancy and supplying a nice pop of color on those data displays. The viewing perspectives are strong as well, particularly if you merely need to quickly glimpse down at it on the treadmill or from a run.
Lighting is strong too, even at car lighting, which is invariably kinder on the electric battery life. If you wish to go directly to the maximum though, for those night-time activities, there’s a lot of luminance for your activities.
To in the toughness stakes, you’re also getting added safety with Gorilla Glass 3, and the T-Rex comes with an anti-fingerprint covering, though we did find the display still got quite smudged up between workout routines.
Fitness
- Includes reliable Gps navigation and heartrate monitoring
- Sleep monitoring also seemed accurate
- 14 different sport modes
The Amazfit T-Rex has just about everything you’d be prepared to find on the sports watch. There’s built-in GPS, a heartrate monitor, the sensors to monitor activities indoors along with additional outdoor metrics, and there’s swim monitoring support too.
You will find 14 sport modes altogether and which include core sports like running, cycling, pool swimming, and indoor cycling. For outdoor fans, it also offers dedicated settings for famous brands hiking, skiing, open up water going swimming, and monitoring triathlons.
Being able to access these modes is performed by pressing the very best right button on the watch and then swiping on the touchscreen to get the sports you want to monitor.
All profiles offer some basic configurations, letting you collection workout goals predicated on things such as mileage, time, or calorie consumption. You can even set up notifications for aspects like striking certain ranges or a heartrate area. Plus you can change on real-time graphs predicated on metrics like speed and heart rate.
As a sports activities watch, it stands up surprisingly well. Gps navigation pick-up time for outdoor activities was comparable to Garmin and Suunto sports activities watches we examined against. There is one occasion when the Gps navigation signal decreased for a couple of seconds throughout a workout. Notably, additionally, there is no on-watch mapping or navigation.
The info itself was easy to soak up and overall reliable. Throughout a run, for example, it offers you a good overview of your activity up to now when you’ve strike another mile or kilometer. While it’s a little fiddly to examine data on the watch, there’s a much nicer breakdown looking forward to you inside the partner phone app.
There is an optical heart rate monitor here too that’s used to provide at that moment measurements, showing your resting heartrate to offer an insight into your present state of fitness.
It’s also used for measuring work levels during exercises. It’s fair to state performance places it within the group of almost every other wrist-based heartrate sensor, which can be best for most activities, but falter for high strength workouts like period running and bicycling sessions.
In comparison to a heartrate monitor chest strap, the T-Rex tended to be decrease to get elevated and shedding heart rate, and frequently published higher readings. Those readings weren’t erratically high, but apparent enough that the upper body strap sensed more reliability.
The Amazfit T-Rex also doubles up as an exercise tracker, though those features play second fiddle to its sports tracking abilities. There’s an ardent watch screen to see tracker staples like step matters, which was generally within 100-200 steps of the Garmin fitness tracker we examined it against.
It also screens rest, automatically providing you a rest score, a breakdown of rest, and rest quality insights, which weren’t ground-breaking in conditions of what they suggested, but it was nice to see them nonetheless.
From an accuracy perspective, the Amazfit T-Rex tended to provide data very near to what we should measure with the Withings Sleep bed monitor. It regularly recognized the right rest duration, time is taken up to drift off, and also offered similar rest scores.
Software
- Works Huami’s own operating-system
- Smartwatch features are basic
- Companion apps pay to but cluttered
Amazfit uses its operating system to perform the program show and it feels very like the Tizen Operating-system utilized by Samsung in its appearance. From the primary watch display screen, you’re a swipe from your notifications, checking your step matters, and the configurations menu. It maintains things basic, there’s no steep learning curve and it’s easy to access grips with.
Smartwatch features are kept to the very least. Notification support works for both Google android and iPhones, though it’s very basic, as you can see the notifications for applications like WhatsApp or calendar visits, there is no way to do something on them.
There’s also no very good music player, payment support, or application support to talk about here. Though that’s barely surprising given the purchase price.
If you wish to do some tinkering or see what else the T-Rex is with the capacity of, you’ll need to mind the Amazfit friend telephone app. It’s here that can be done things such as change watch encounters, setup notification support, and check in on health data that you can’t take on the watch, such as rest data and relaxing heart rate measurements.
It’s not the best looking for apps. It includes a spot to drill deeper into data, monitor activities from your mobile phone, and change your watch configurations, but it might do with better arranging and separating these elements.
It could also be nice if something similar to changing watch encounters and environment alarms could be achieved on the Amazfit T-Rex itself. Without a deal-breaker, we were very disappointed never to see a solitary dinosaur-related watch face here either.
If you wish to pun intended, the app completely and you’re only thinking about poring over your sports activities data, the application does enable you to hook up to Strava too.
Battery life
- Lasts up to 20 times with all features active
- If you are using a great deal of GPS that drops to similar to a week
Huami has made offering big electric battery life a huge offer and it’s no different from the T-Rex. The business has also divided very how you can perform that great stamina.
There’s a 390mAh capacity battery which should deliver 20 times of life in what Huami phone calls ‘Daily’ setting. That’s when heart rate monitoring is defined as always-on, you’re monitoring sleep, pressing 150 communications to the display daily, increasing your wrist 30 times to wake the display screen every day, and, using the Gps navigation for 13 minutes each day.
In ‘Basic’ watch mode, this means not being linked to your phone via Bluetooth, you may expect 66 times. When you’re constantly using Gps navigation to monitor activities, it will manage 20 hours.
What we should found day-to-day was that whenever not using sports activities tracking, electric battery drop-off tended to be around 10% per day. Monitoring a 30-minute run knocked the electric battery by about 10%, and a 30-minute swim dented the electric battery by a comparable.
It’s clear you’re getting ultimately more than only a couple of times, but getting those 20 times with regular use of GPS-based sports activities track sounds a little ambitious. You should easily obtain a week or even more unless you’re an extremely heavy consumer, but you’ll have to be more sparing with a few of the power-sapping features to get 20 times predicated on our time with it.
When you do need to power backup, there’s a proprietary charging wire that magnetically videos onto the trunk of the Amazfit T-Rex. It keeps a good reference to the watch and can charge from 0%-100% in about two hours. So it’s not the speediest.
Verdict
The Amazfit T-Rex is a surprisingly solid outdoor watch debut from Huami. It’s cheap, provides a design that’s built for a few tough and tumble, and addresses those key sport settings.
Monitoring is reliable overall, the electric battery lives up to its impressive billing, even though smartwatch features are small, they are doing generally work very well.
There are a few outdoor watch staples it can miss out on, mapping and navigation. But when you can live without those features and want some outdoor data and insights for your journeys, then it’s got you covered.
Who’s this for?
The Amazfit T-Rex is for anybody who spends plenty of their time hiking or trail running, but can’t stomach spending hundreds on the watch to track those outdoor pursuits.
You’re getting a few of the same metrics that you will get on high-end Garmin and Suunto outdoor watches, and even outdoor smartwatches like the Casio Pro Trek WSD-F30. Unlike the second option, you’re also getting a lot of electric battery life to try out with.
In the event, you buy Amazfit T-Rex?
Buy it if you want the thought of owning a patio watch that won’t break your budget. As the Amazfit T-Rex’s design feels just a little on the cheap part, its monitoring skills succeed and it’s a simple-to-use watch overall.
If you’d like something with a much better design that can provide similar monitoring but can also add navigation into the blend, Garmin’s Instinct will be a much better fit. The Instinct will though cost considerably more. The important thing, there are few outdoor pieces at this price that really can match the T-Rex right now.
Image Source: Android Central
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