A sleek smartwatch exterior doesn't mask some software bugginess
With the Amazfit GTR 3 Pro, Zepp Health proves once again that it knows how to make an attractive smartwatch and how to pack it with software features aplenty. What it also shows is that it still has got a thing or two to learn on the software front because what's here is buggy. The promise of a proper smartwatch OS hasn't been truly realised here as yet either, though we're sure that things will improve on that front. Until it does, this is another Amazfit watch that looks good and works well, but still has a way to go to match the major smartwatch players.
Pros
- Great-looking design
- Lots of features
- Easy to use
Cons
- Software buggy
- Fitness/wellness accuracy issues
- App store lacking
The Amazfit GTR3 Pro is a new smartwatch at the top of the Amazfit range – and an attempt to push itself beyond the budget smartwatch category.
Joining the Amazfit GTS 3 and the Amazfit GTR 3, the GTR 3 Pro seeks to offer a fuller smartwatch experience.
It goes big on high-grade specs, minus the high price. It also sees the introduction of Zepp OS, which brings among other things, an app store to an Amazfit watch for the first time.
That puts it in and around smartwatches like the Apple Watch SE, Huawei Watch GT 3 , and the Fitbit Versa 4
We’ve been living with it to find out. Here’s our comprehensive verdict on the Amazfit GTR 3 Pro.
GTR 3 Pro v GTR 3 specs compared
GTR 3 Pro | GTR 3 | |
Case size | 46mm | 45mm |
Screen shape | Round | Round |
Screen size | 1.45-inch AMOLED | 1.39-inch AMOLED |
Resolution | 480 x 480 | 454 x 454 |
Water resistance | 5ATM | 5ATM |
Temperature sensor | Yes | No |
GPS | Yes | Yes |
Sports modes | 150+ | 150+ |
Battery size | 450mAh | 450mAh |
Quoted battery life | 12 days | 21 days |
Price | $229/£179 | $179/£159 |
Design and screen
If there’s one thing you can’t knock Zepp Health for it’s that it’s pushing the boundaries of how good affordable smartwatches can look.
The GTR 2 was a svelte, sleek number, and that approach has been retained with the GTR3 Pro.
It’s a really beautiful smartwatch, but now in a more classic watch way. You’ve got your pick of two case looks with the option of a 22mm removable fluoroelastomer strap or a brown leather strap. That’s matched up with a 46mm aluminum alloy case, so you lose the option of the stainless steel case you do get with the GTR 2.
It’s probably too big for many female wrists – and a 46mm case size pushes out of being a true unisex device for our money.
We had the brown leather matched up with a silver aluminum case to test and it’s fair to say that’s a classic color combo you’ll find on a lot of watches.
It works well here and we had plenty of compliments on how good it looked too. It’s simple. minimal, nicely weighted, and a watch we liked wearing.
Completing that case look is a rotating crown, which sits at the top of the case, and a physical button, which gives you a shortcut to the exercise tracking screen. So, nothing groundbreaking here in smartwatch terms, but they’re in keeping with the overall sleek look of this watch.
Front and center is a 1.45-inch, 480 x 480 AMOLED touchscreen display, which means you’re getting a larger screen than the GTR 2. It’s a high-quality display with the kind of deep blacks and vibrant colors you’d expect to find on a good AMOLED screen. There’s a good top brightness and you do have the option to use it in always-on mode too.
The screen isn’t entirely devoid of a black bezel, but Zepp does a very clever job of hiding it with the way the screen meets the case and with most of the watch face designs. You’re getting strong viewing angles indoors and it handled bright outdoor light well enough for us too.
If you want to take it in the water, then you do have some protection for that here too. It carries a 5ATM water resistance rating, so it’s safe for showering and swimming up to 50 meters in depth.
Zepp OS and usability
Amazfit watches run an in-house built operating system, but it hasn’t quite been as fully formed as Apple’s watchOS or Google’s WearOS. That’s now changing with the GTR 3 Pro, which runs on what Zepp Health is calling Zepp OS.
Zepp OS works with Android and iOS devices and brings a UI with more dynamic animations and most notably, an app store. In the future, an app developer kit will be launched for Zepp OS, offering the ability to create watch faces and apps.
There is also the promise of access to third-party apps like Spotify and Strava, though it’s likely to be a similar case to the way Huawei smartphones tried to plug gaps when it moved away from Google’s Android, providing access to web-based versions of apps.
Right now, Zepp OS feels like a platform that will need to do some evolving. More so of the watch than on it. The on-watch experience is good on the whole.
The new animations and the full-screen widgets look great. Swiping right from the main watch screen gets you to access shortcut cards, which give you a nice glanceable stream of data that we found most useful for checking the weather or accessing Alexa.
You can swipe down to see quick settings and swipe up to see your notification stream. Tap the top physical button to see the app menu, while the bottom button offers a shortcut to exercise tracking.
These are the kind of UI elements we’ve already seen on other smartwatch platforms, so there’s nothing new here.
It does though at least feel slick to get around and it doesn’t take long to get to grips with how things work.
A simple toothbrush timer is one of the first apps available in Zepp Health’s app store
Off the watch, you need to spend time in the Zepp app, which we used a beta version of initially before moving over to the full version. Since then last GTR, things have certainly been cleaned up, particularly on the homepage, where the card-based UI feels a lot less cluttered than in previous versions of the app.
A Health tab is where you’ll now find records for your exercise and your target activity tracking goals. Jump into your device settings and things haven’t changed a great deal from previous versions of the Zepp app. It’s here where you can access the watch faces store and the App Store.
That App Store currently has just over ten apps and that’s largely made up of health apps with apps additionally for controlling third-party smart home devices, turning your watch into a flashlight or a calculator. Don’t expect a range of big-name third-party apps any time soon.
As mentioned, these are native apps only right now. We tried a sample of the apps out and can’t say we were hugely blown away by what we found. The BMI app for instance calculates your BMI in a very simple manner while the toothbrush timer is pretty basic too.
Outside of the App Store, there isn’t a huge deal new to find here.
The Zepp app feels like it’s in transition as it moves from old to new. There are still a lot of settings and menus to explore, which will undoubtedly still feel overwhelming for anyone using an Amazfit watch for the first time.
Smartwatch features
You can view notifications, and weather forecasts, control music playback, and stream music, though it doesn’t work with third-party music streaming services. You can sync calendars, record voice memos, handle calls over Bluetooth, remotely control your smartphone camera and use a Pomodoro timer to aid your productivity.
Zepp offers not one, but two smart assistants too. There’s access to Amazon Alexa when you’re online, and a further offline voice assistant where you can find a list of commands in the Zepp app, which include basic things like asking to view heart rate, or asking to find your phone.
As far as how well the GTR3 Pro works as a smartwatch, we’d say it’s still a bit of a mixed bag.
Some software bugginess meant we encountered some problems with the notification support, which isn’t the actionable kind but is easy to absorb and well-optimized for the watch screen.
We did have issues with notifications appearing on some days, and not appearing on others, despite being connected to our phone and set up in the Zepp app.
Music controls work fine and did work with third-party apps like Spotify with no issue.
While it’s nice to have an onboard music player, the lack of securing a streaming music service makes it a bit of a half-baked feature unless you have lots of music packed onto your phone already.
If you do like smart assistants, then you’re well served here. We found interactions with Alexa and the offline voice assistant responsive on the whole, so those are plusses here.
If you compare it to the smartwatch experience you get from something like the Fitbit Versa 3 or an Apple Watch Series 3 though, then we’d say the GTR3 Pro still has some catching up to do on this front.
Fitness and health tracking
When it comes to tracking your fitness or health, the GTR3 Pro comes jam-packed with the features to do just that. You’ve got 24/7 activity tracking including sleep monitoring for starters. You can track blood oxygen levels and heart rate thanks to the onboard optical BioTracker 3.0 biometric sensor.
You can also track things like breathing rate, and body temperature and monitor stress, and women can track their cycles. Those health features haven’t been approved by any regulatory bodies to make them suitable for serious medical insights, and it’s easy to see why, based on our experience using them.
Step tracking compared: Amazfit GTR3 Pro (left) and Garmin Enduro fitness tracking (right)
For those core activity tracking and sleep monitoring, we had a mixed experience with the kind of data the Pro captured.
On many occasions, we had missing data despite having worn the watch day and night. From the watch, you can track daily steps, active minutes, and hours of the day you’ve remained active from a dedicated screen.
On good days, step counts were nicely within the ballpark of a Garmin fitness tracker. There were also plenty of days where no data was captured and there seems to be some software bugginess to blame for this.
It was a similar story for sleep tracking too. You can expect to get a breakdown of sleep stages, and duration, track breathing quality, and also receive recommendations on how to help make you get enough sleep.
Again, we were met with another software quirk where the watch tracked a night’s sleep and it was viewable on the watch, but it failed to sync it over to the app.
Sometimes it did sync over and other times it tracked no sleep at all. When it did, the data seemed pretty reliable in terms of capturing duration and when we fell asleep and woke up the following day.
Continuous HR tracking compared: Amazfit GTR3 Pro (left) and Fitbit Charge 5 (right)
The GTR 3 Pro comes with a temperature sensor – but we certainly wouldn’t put too much focus on it.
Skin temperature readings are different from your core temperature – but changes can show signs of illness or changes in the menstrual cycle. However, there’s zero education about what reading means. A core temperature of 29.7 degrees (as seen above) would likely mean you’ve already died.
However, it’s key to have an established normal baseline – not just a temperature reading. Everyone’s temperature is different – and it’s changed that is useful to know. The implementation is effectively useless.
Zepp continues its push to make its heart rate-driven PAI Health assessment scores a way of better keeping track of your current state of health and raising your heart rate regularly. Again though, it doesn’t feel hugely part of the fitness and health tracking story on the GTR3 Pro.
A new health feature Zepp is making a big noise about is one-tap measurements, which capture four metrics from one reading to give you a quick but more comprehensive overview of your wellness.
The 45-second measurement captures heart rate, blood oxygen, breathing rate, and stress. It’s not the first watch to offer this type of feature. The Garmin Venu 2 does something similar as well. As far as how reliable those metrics are, well, we’ve had our say on heart rate and stress.
Blood oxygen measurements were largely tallied up with a pulse oximeter we tested against while breathing rates were similar to the data recorded on a Garmin. The problem here is that it seems some if not all of these metrics tracked by this one-tap measurement are stored inside the Zepp app.
Sports tracking
Amazfit watches have always gone big on offering exercise tracking features. In our experience, it’s lacking in comparison to what you can get from a Garmin, Apple Watch, or Huawei Watch on this front.
Everything you could probably want is here though. There’s support for the five key satellite systems including GPS to promise accurate outdoor exercise tracking. There are all the standard motion sensors to track indoor workouts and an altimeter to track elevation. There are over 150 sports modes that cover the likes of running, cycling, swimming, climbing, hiking, and indoor workouts like rowing and the Elliptical.
There’s also automatic exercise recognition for eight activities, which include running (indoor and out), pool swimming, and walking.
New PeakBeats insights are a take on Garmin-owned Firstbeat’s heart rate-based training analytics, letting you measure training load, VO2 Max, and recovery time from exercise time.
Run tracking compared: Amazfit GTR3 Pro (left) and Garmin Enduro (right)
The bottom line, the GTR3 Pro isn’t a sports watch great, but it’s certainly not the worst we’ve used to track exercise.
For runs, the watch is comfortable to wear, the screen is easy to view and you get those core metrics like pace, and distance along with some more advanced ones like heart rate, cadence, stride, and even a breakdown of elevation.
We found distance tracking compared to a Garmin Enduro generally came up a little short. Heart rate accuracy was anywhere from 2-5BPM out from a chest strap on steady-paced runs, so it held up well on that front.
Heading indoors for rowing and HIIT workouts on the app Fiit, there’s good and bad. For indoor rows against Garmin’s row tracking it matched up for average stroke rate, but the maximum heart rate was 15bpm higher than a chest strap monitor.
For HIIT workouts, the heart rate average and maximum readings weren’t great either. Maximum heart rate was significantly higher than a chest strap monitor as illustrated below.
Heart rate at high intensity compared: Amazfit GTR3 Pro (left) and Garmin HRM-Pro (right)
In terms of those PeakBeats training insights, they’re presented as workout status on the watch showing your training load from the past 7 days, VO2 Max, and recovery time.
VO2 Max scores were off a couple of points from exercise tracked using a heart rate monitor chest strap.
A very light week of training suggested we were at optimal training load, while a short run suggested we needed to spend 49 hours to recover, which didn’t seem accurate based on the intensity of the workout.
One big plus here is that Zepp does let you sync data over to third-party fitness apps. That currently covers Strava, Google Fit, and Relive. So you do have some flexibility as far as where your data can live.
As far as how reliable that data is on the whole, you’re not getting supreme levels of accuracy here. But there’s loads of data to get stuck into, and it’s a fitness experience to grow into. Unless you’re super invested in your training and performance, it’s more than good enough.
Battery life
The GTR 3 Pro features a 450mAh capacity battery, which is smaller than the one packed into the GTR 2 (471mAh), and as a result, those quoted battery numbers for different levels of usage have dropped largely across the board.
Zepp Health says you can expect up to 12 days in typical use, up to 30 days in battery saver mode, up to 6 days in heavy usage, and the promise of 35 hours of GPS battery life.
We’d say based on our time, we got around 5-6 days with a mix of anywhere from 10-15% daily drop-off. That was with the screen brightness set pretty high, notifications enabled, sports tracking for 30 minutes to an hour a day, and with continuous heart rate monitoring and stress monitoring enabled.
For an hour of running, the battery drop-off was generally 5%, which feels similar to what we’ve experienced on Amazfit watches previously.
Put the always-on display into play and that battery will noticeably take a hit and you’re getting a few days as opposed to a week of watch time.
Like previous Amazfit, getting those big battery numbers relies on you being smart and thoughtful about the features you turn on and deciding whether you need them daily.
When it comes to charging, the Pro uses a similar-style charge to the previous GTR and takes around two hours to get from 0-100%, which means it’s around half an hour quicker than the GTR 2, but still not that zippy at charging.