Amazfit Active 3 Premium review: A budget smartwatch for beginner runners

Zepp Health is swelling the smartwatch ranks and the Amazfit Active 3 Premium brings the Active line up to four watches.

It’s a smartwatch made for entry level runners with features designed to add structure to your running time, introduce more features to better understand your progress and also make sure you don’t get lost when you’re out getting your run done.

It’s still a smartwatch and the Active 3 Premium lets you pay your own way, download apps and watch faces, make calls whether you have an iPhone or Android phone paired to it. There’s the hallmarks of another affordable Amazfit smartwatch the competition will take notice of. Does it perform and cut it as a smartwatch for runners?

Price and competition

The Amazfit Active 3 Premium costs $169.99 making it one of the more affordable smartwatches in the extensive Amazfit range. The Amazfit Active Max costs the same $169.99 and mainly offers a bigger screen and bigger battery life in comparison.

That sub-$200 price puts it cheaper than smartwatches like the Apple Watch SE 3 ($249) and the Garmin Vivoactive 6 ($269).

It’s worth mentioning similarly-priced running watches, as the Active 3 Premium is being billed as a running smartwatch. The Garmin Forerunner 70, Garmin’s entry level watch costs $249.99. The Coros Pace 4 also sits at $249.99 while the Suunto Run sits at $199.

Design and display

If you like your smartwatches compact, the Active 3 Premium fits the bill. The 45mm stainless steel case is technically larger than other entry level smartwatches like the Garmin Forerunner 70 (42mm) and the Coros Pace 4 (43mm), but certainly feels small and pretty petite when it’s on your wrist. At 38g, it’s nice and light too.

The screen is a 1.32-inch, 466 x 466 resolution AMOLED where the black bezel separating it from the edge of the case is a little thicker than we’d like. It doesn’t detract from a screen that hits a peak brightness setting of 3,000 nits. The Apple Watch Ultra 3 hits that level of brightness. While it’s not the best AMOLED available on an Amazfit smartwatch, it’s certainly up to the task for presenting features like notifications and real-time stats and can be set to stay on at all times.

There are two aspects of the Active 3 Premium’s design that shows this is a smartwatch with runners in mind. The first is the decision to include four physical buttons. This instantly helps make the Premium operate more like a sports watch. The second is including sapphire glass to protect the touchscreen from scratches. You usually find sapphire glass on premium smartwatches like the Garmin Fenix and Apple Watch Ultra. It’s a bit of a win to find it on a watch that costs significantly less.

The strap paired up to the watch case 20mm silicone kind that can be removed. It’s a nice feeling silicone band that’s exactly the sporty kind you’d want to find on a smartwatch built for exercise.

While it’s primarily built for runners, the Active 3 Premium can track other sports including swimming. You’re getting a 5 ATM-rated water resistant design, which means you can go swimming with it up to 50 metres depth.

Smartwatch features

Generally one of the biggest compromises you’re making going for an Amazfit smartwatch is that its performance as a smartwatch isn’t quite there with the best. While it can tick off the basics, more advanced features like payments, music streaming and app support have been lacking behind the competition.

The good news is that it can be paired to both Android phones and iPhones. The Zepp Health app you need to download to set things up is much improved and is getting closer to where it needs to be to make it an app you want to spend time in.

On the watch, it’s nice and easy to get around and see what this smartwatch is capable of. It’s a nice watch to view your phone notifications on, there’s good music controls and it handles weather forecasts well too. The Morning Update summaries clearly inspired by Garmin’s reports do a nice job of getting you set up for the day.

If you want to make calls with the Active 3 Premium, you can do that. It’s done over Bluetooth where you’ll enjoy calls with good volume and a level of clarity that makes handling calls on the move a nice thing to do.

Zepp Health does now offer contactless payments, bringing up to speed with rival smartwatches. You can sync music to the watch to stream music on the move. It can just be slow syncing a big selection of your own music to make use of the available 4GB of storage.

Then there’s the app store, which is also a store to download watch faces. You do get a good array of faces already available on the watch with a mix of static and dynamic faces on offer if you don’t want or need to hunt out more. Most faces are free, but paid options have started to crop up.

With the App Store, it does feel like Zepp Health has opted against trying to match Google and Apple’s app store and focus on offering a mix of apps, add-ons and data fields. This is something Garmin also does. So you can find an unofficial controller for Spotify as well as apps to help you boost productivity and even play games. There are some useful things in here, you just might need to do some browsing to find them.

Sports and fitness tracking

The Active 3 Premium appears to be the ideal running watch on paper. Among the over 170 sports profiles, you’ll find tracking running modes covering trail running, ultramarathons and hitting the track. There’s built-in GPS, except there isn’t the latest available dual-band GPS available on Amazfit smartwatches like the T-Rex 3 series and the Cheetah line.

There’s built-in running workouts that offer introductions on some of the staple sessions you’ll find in most running training plans. You also have access to free colour maps and training insights to monitor your training load and put aside enough time for recovery.

As a running watch, the Active 3 Premium does a pretty solid job of it. From a tracking point of view, the GPS support as mentioned isn’t the best on offer. When we took it out for runs with a dual-band GPS running watch, distance tracking wasn’t always impeccable, with metrics like average pace and a little inaccurate in places. Overall, the run tracking performed well on most runs and we felt confident it could do a good enough job in most scenarios.

Tracking heart rate during runs isn’t top notch either. It’s good enough for easy to steady paced runs. As soon as you tackle something at a higher intensity or interval-style training, the BioTracker PPG sensor begins to falter. Fortunately, you can pair external Bluetooth heart rate monitors to it and we had no issue pairing Garmin and Polar monitors to the Premium.

The training features for runners covers both beginner runners and more seasoned ones. The built-in workouts are nicely presented on the watch and can clearly show if you’re hitting your target paces in your session. It’s good to see warm-ups factored in. Especially if you’re about to tackle an interval-style session.

Runners will be happy to see that the watch is compatible with Strava, TrainingPeaks and Runna. That means you can push data outside of the Zepp Health app and also follow training plans built from the likes of Runna.

After the running is done, you’ll be able to delve into insights like VO2 Max estimates, review training load and see the effect of the training session. You’ll also be given a recommended suggestion around recovery time. These have become staple training insights on most running watches that might need a bit more context for beginner runners to put the data to best use.

Zepp Health is now making a big deal about its HybridCharge metric, which is basically an energy level or readiness insight. If your score is high, you’re ready to go hard. If it’s low, you should consider taking it easy as your recovery data suggests you’ve not given yourself ample recovery time.

If you’re tackling other activities outside of running, the Active 3 Premium is more than up to the task. We used it for pool swims and indoor workouts like rowing and the tracking for reps or lengths matched up well to rival trackers. This is one of the few smartwatches that comes equipped with dedicated Hyrox training and race modes. It can also automatically track 25 strength training movements to keep a better record of your gym sessions as well as your running ones.

Health and sleep tracking

This is a smartwatch that does let you continuously track data like heart rate, stress and blood oxygen saturation levels. If you do the latter 24/7, that will severely hamper the battery life you’ll enjoy. The continuous heart rate monitoring seems a touch more reliable than it is during exercise time. The compact and snug fit seems to have a positive impact on getting reliable readings.

There aren't any regulatory approved health tracking features included. You can take multiple measurements at once for a quick overview of metrics like stress and breathing rate. It’s largely up to you to interpret that data. You can also set up alerts if metrics like heart rate and blood oxygen levels become too high or low. You’re not going to be grabbing the Premium for its health features, but there’s enough to help you pay a bit closer to attention to some of your vitals data.

Taking the Active 3 Premium to bed is a comfortable thing to do thanks to its lightweight and compact watch body and comfortable strap. When you take it to bed, it will go to work monitoring your sleep duration, sleep stages and data like heart rate variability. That measurement is strongly related to analysing recovery. You’ll also see sleep scores in the Zepp Health app and it’ll even capture your naps during the day.

We wore it alongside the Oura Ring 4, and for data like sleep duration, and time spent in deep and REM sleep stages, the Active 3 Premium tracked similar numbers. It often took maybe about 20 minutes longer to recognise when we’d fallen asleep and woken up. The core data was good. You can additionally view graphs based around sleep regularity and receive daily sleep insights. These insights aren’t very engrossing and could benefit from being a bit more punchy and insightful.

Battery life

Like pretty much most smartwatch brands, Zepp Health likes to shout about the big battery numbers that you might not necessarily enjoy if you’re using big features on a regular basis. Zepp Health states that you can get up to 12 days of battery life on the Active 3 Premium with typical use. In heavier use, that drops to 7 days. Add in keeping the screen on at all times and that becomes 4 days.

If you want a smartwatch that can comfortably last a week, the Active 3 Premium will do that. Especially if you can live with the raise to wake display mode in play. It can absolutely go further, but like other Amazfit watches, you’ll need to forgo some of the more advanced health monitoring to do it.

GPS battery life is important here too. After all, the Active 3 Premium is being pitched at runners. Zepp health says you have anywhere between 24 to 76 hours of GPS battery life to play with. Going longer requires sacrificing the frequency of sampling GPS data and turning off features like heart rate tracking. For an hour’s worth of running in the best GPS accuracy mode the Premium dropped on average around 5-6%. That’s not quite the 24 hours promised. Will it still get you through a good week’s worth of running and make it through a marathon? We’d be pretty confident it would.