The Amazfit T-Rex 3 is an even better outdoor companion and cheaper than the competition.
The Amazfit T-Rex 3 marks more progress for Zepp Health's answer to watches like the Garmin Fenix 8 and the Apple Watch Ultra 2. is it better than those watches? No, but it offers plenty of what the the best outdoor watches offer for less money and does delivers a great performance in the key places. You won't be making as many compromises as you'd think — and if you're looking for an outdoor smartwatch that's affordable, feature-packed, has an improving software and ecosystem with solid battery life to boot, this is a great outdoor watch irrespective of the price. And arguably, it's the best Amazfit watch you can buy right now.
Pros
- Solid mapping and navigation support
- Crammed with modes
- Long battery life
Cons
- Might be a bit bulky for skinnier wrists
- Not the best in class AMOLED screen
- Heart rate tracking at high intensity
The Amazfit T-Rex 3 is Zepp Health’s latest budget outdoors watch — and its latest attempt to prove that you don’t need a Garmin or Apple Watch Ultra to get a fully-featured outdoor smartwatch.
The T-Rex 2 finally felt like a T-Rex ripe for adventuring and now in its fifth installment (when you factor in the T-Rex Ultra and T-Rex Pro), the T-Rex 3 offers notable upgrades with free offline maps, a boost in smartwatch smarts, and a revamped companion app. That’s all while keeping the price more affordable than the competition.
So, is it a great fit for the great outdoors? This is our comprehensive verdict on the Amazfit T-Rex 3.
Price and competition
Price is ultimately one of the most appealing aspects of the T-Rex series as it significantly undercuts the competition and that doesn’t change here.
The T-Rex 3 costs £279/$279, making it more expensive than the T-Rex 2, which is currently available to buy for £219/$199.
In the context of the outdoor watch competition though, that’s a fraction of the price you’ll need to pay for AMOLED outdoor watches like the Garmin Fenix 8 (From £949/$999), Apple Watch Ultra 2 (£799/$799) and the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra (£599/$649).
Design and display
The T-Rex 3 is as rugged as its predecessors, and it’s designed to withstand extreme cold and hot temperatures and take some knocks and bumps. We haven’t put it up against those more extreme conditions, but we can say it’s survived our outdoor adventures without any signs of damage.
It still features a polymer case that’s grown to 48mm (up from 47mm) and is matched up to a design-dominating stainless steel bezel. Those with slimmer wrists may find it a little on the hulking side, but we found it largely comfortable to wear. That case now features a hexagonal case, so you can’t say it’s ripping off the design from rival outdoor watches.
The case is partnered with a 22mm liquid silicone strap which has a nice stretchy feel — and is also removable via the swap removal kit Amazfit includes in the box.
Weight-wise, it tips the scales at 70g, so it’s heavier than an Apple Watch Ultra 2 (61.4g) and roughly the same weight as a 47mm Fenix 8 (73g-80g). It’s got some heft, but we can’t say it felt cumbersome to wear — aside from taking it to bed to track sleep.
Like Apple Watch Ultra and the latest Fenix 8, the new T-Rex goes strong on water protection offering 10ATM protection (100 metres depth.) It also carries the necessary certification to make it work for recreational dives up to 40 meters.
You’ve got a set of four textured physical buttons in each corner of the case along with a 1.5-inch, 480 x 480 resolution AMOLED touchscreen to take care of interacting with the T-Rex 3.
That’s covered by Gorilla Glass to guard against scratches, so it’s not giving you the strongest Sapphire screen protection available. The T-Rex 2 featured a smaller 1.3-inch, 454 x 454 screen, so you’re getting a jump in size and resolution. That display can be set to stay on at all times and has a peak brightness of 2,000 nits.
Pit the T-Rex 3’s display against other AMOLED outdoor watches and it’s not quite as sharp or as high quality which is a sign of its more affordable status. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad screen, however. It’s responsive to swipes and taps, offers good overall brightness, and is nicely viewable in brighter outdoor conditions. It just doesn’t feel best in class.
Battery life
One of the highlights of using a T-Rex and Amazfit’s smartwatches in general is the staying power. That doesn’t change with the T-Rex 3, whether you’re out on a trail run or when you’re just checking your notifications.
The numbers across the board certainly sound impressive. That larger case brings a larger 700mAh capacity battery that promises 27 days of battery life. That drops to 13 days with heavy usage. You have additional, more restrictive modes that give you 81 days of battery. Turn on the battery saver mode and you’ll get up to 40 days.
Daily battery performance without factoring GPS tracking into the equation, when using the T-Rex 3 with the raise to wake support and no GPS tracking, the daily battery drop was roughly 5%. Opt for the always-on screen mode with similar usage and the drop was unsurprisingly more severe and closer to 10%. That means 10 days of battery life, slightly shy of Amazfit’s heavy-use options.
The GPS numbers don’t disappoint here either. In the top, dual-frequency GPS tracking mode, you’ll get up to 42 hours, which is more than what a 47mm Fenix 8 promises with its top dual-band GPS and is also more than the Apple Watch Ultra 2. You can push that to up to 180 hours in a max GPS battery life mode.
Those numbers didn’t quite stack up in our real world testing. I mainly used the T-Rex 3 with its best dual-frequency mode and the drop for an hour’s use was less than 5% with the raise to wake in use. That means at least 20 hours GPS tracking, perhaps edging to 25-30 hours at a push.
Battery drain edged up closer to 10% when I set the screen to always-on mode, which feels like a no-no.
When it did eventually hit 0%, it’s disappointing to find that the T-Rex 3 isn’t the snappiest of chargers. Around 3 hours is stated to get it back to 100% from flat and there’s no fast charging mode on offer from the pretty standard proprietary Amazfit charging cable.
Mapping and navigation
The first T-Rex lacked any sort of mapping and navigation support and was then upgraded to letting you upload routes and use breadcrumb-style navigation on the T-Rex 2. Now you’re getting full maps to view on screen. Those maps don’t come preloaded and do need to be downloaded from the device tab in the Zepp companion smartphone app. You can download base, ski, or contour maps, with the latter enabling you to get a better sense of elevation in your terrain.
You can view maps in supported modes once you start tracking, letting you pick from dark or light viewing modes with details like bodies of water and greener areas all easily identifiable. You can use the touchscreen to move around the map and to zoom in, which while not super smooth, is pretty much in keeping with similar mapping modes on map-packing watches from Polar and Suunto.
When you need to put its navigation skills to use, you’ve got familiar modes like back to start, the ability to save your current location, alter your navigation view, adjust route color and receive alerts when you deviate off course by 20, 50 or 100 meters.
You can still upload routes via GPX file formats as well as export routes tracked in GPX, TCX, and FIT formats. You also get support for the route-building app Komoot to make it easier to find new routes.
I found the navigation support here works well and will display prompts on screen or through audio when you pair it with headphones. Thankfully, those navigation features can now be accessed without having to pause a workout.
GPS and heart rate accuracy
In true Amazfit fashion, there’s a dizzying number of sports modes available on the T-Rex 3, even outside of its more outdoor-centric ones. It’s listed as 177 modes in total and that includes everything from running, snowboarding, strength training, spinning, and Muay Thai.
On top of tracking you can build and follow training plans and lean on an AI-powered coach for advice, though doesn’t feel hugely useful in its current form. You can also send data to third-party apps like Strava and Apple Health. This is primarily a watch for going outside and when you’re doing it’s time to bring GPS into play. The GPS performance across Amazfit smartwatches can vary, with the T-Rex 2 particularly put in a good showing and it’s pretty much more of the same with the T-Rex 3.
You’re still getting a watch that offers a dual-band GPS mode with support to tap into the six main satellite systems. There’s also a range of GPS accuracy modes, including an automatic mode that switches your settings based on signal strength to conserve battery.
I used the T-Rex 3 mainly in its most accurate GPS mode up against other strong-performing dual-band watches from Garmin and Apple. The screens above and below are from sample outdoor runs against the significantly more expensive Garmin Fenix 8. You can see Garmin’s watch produces more stable tracked routes.
The T-Rex 3 doesn’t do a terrible job against it and the Garmin wasn’t immune to some wobbles either while distance tracking and metrics like average pace in general weren’t wildly off from other dual-band watches.
When tracking your heart rate there’s a PPG optical sensor to cover that as well as support to pair external heart rate monitor sensors. That Bluetooth connectivity additionally opens up support to hook up action cameras and cadence sensors.
The optical sensor served up some pretty standard results in our tests. For steady-paced workouts, the data and graphs largely matched up with an external heart rate monitor. For a higher intensity test, the maximum readings were out as much as 10 bpm compared to an external sensor.
The smart move is to pair it up with an external sensor if you care about heart rate data during exercise, which we were able to do fine with both Polar and Garmin monitors.
Continuous heart rate tracking in contrast to its troubles at high intensity seemed fine overall. Resting heart rate data felt nicely in line with Garmin and Apple’s pretty reliable continuous monitoring, while the ability to take a glance at your resting heart rate and heart ranges from a single watch screen makes it a nicer experience to keep an eye on changes bduring the day.
Smartwatch features
Using the T-Rex 3 as a smartwatch is fine and represents an approach that’s still finding its way. It operates like a lot of smartwatches where you swipe from the main watch face to get to where you mainly need to go.
You’re a swipe away from the quick settings, notifications, the app list, or the stream of widgets that shows recent workout history, weather forecasts, or readiness insights.
The AI-powered Zepp Flow voice assistant was at times flaky at picking up queries for things like adjusting screen brightness and fine other times when doing things like checking heart rate or readiness scores.
This is a watch that offers a music player with 26GB of available storage to upload music via the companion app but doesn’t support syncing audio from streaming music services. There are also music controls along with some Android and iOS-only features. For iPhone users, you can remotely take pictures with it while Android phone owners get the ability to send quick responses to messages.
There is a watch face and app store, which is only accessible through the revamped Zepp app. If you’re expecting this to be the answer to Google’s Play Store or the Apple App Store, that’s not the case here. That’s not to say there aren’t some apps you will find useful and can enhance support for some third-party services.
There are controllers for Sonos speaker systems and Spotify that worked fine and didn’t take long to download and get set up. It mirrors Garmin’s Connect IQ Store with access to workout extensions, which are a lot like Garmin’s data fields.
Some of what’s here does cost money, though we’ve not spotted anything that’s felt extortionately priced. It might not be as fully fledged an app store as rival smartwatches, but there’s some useful things that’s worth heading there for.
There are some instances where the experience needs to improve. Zepp Health includes contactless payment support, which is powered by Curve, though in the UK offers a small number of supported banks.
The more playful look and feel of the interface will be fine for some, but we’d like to see things get a little more grown-up. There’s plenty that’s good here — and the good outweighs the bad.
Health and wellness features
While it might be primarily built for outdoor pursuits, the T-Rex 3 does have the ability to keep tabs on your health and aspects like sleep, without making any promises that’s it’s going to detect serious health conditions or offer medical-grade tracking accuracy.
As already mentioned, it will track your heart rate from the onboard optical sensor and also support monitoring for blood oxygen saturation, stress, and skin temperature. Metrics like overnight heart rate variability, which is tied to stress, produced similar data to Garmin, Coros, and Oura devices we pitted it up against.
You also have the ability to take on-the-spot readings of those same metrics. You can set alerts for abnormally high or low heart rate readings or low blood oxygen levels, with a new blood pressure monitoring feature recently added that allows you to take readings alongside dedicated blood pressure monitors. This currently only works with select Omron and iHealth blood pressure monitors.
It also takes a leaf out of Garmin, Oura, and Fitbit’s book with its readiness scores and insights, which are fuelled by a range of metrics including sleep, heart rate, and heart rate variability.
Our testing time also coincided with a pretty substantial update to the Zepp companion app, which has cleaned up the user interface, made it easier to navigate to key metrics, and has also moved where some data lives.
That includes a new dedicated section for sleep tracking where you can see insights, core metrics, and naps recorded all in one place. The core sleep tracking performed well for us. Sleep duration and metrics like sleep heart rate and respiratory rate were similar to sleep tracking data captured on two smart rings as well as the sleep tracking on the Apple Watch.
Readiness scores also have their own dedicated section on the app making scores very visible with insights and individual metrics powering scores below. We’ve been comparing scores to similar scores provided by Oura and Samsung smart rings as well as Garmin’s training readiness ones and all were roughly saying similar things. The readiness insights are nice to have offering some simple yet easy-to-follow advice on why you might not be feeling in tip-top shape.
