Zepp Health has announced a massive overhaul of its smartwatch technology, with a new chipset, smartwatch OS and health features all in the pipeline.
Announced at its annual developers conference (which also saw the release of the Amazfit PowerBuds Pro), the company announced the Huangshan 2s chipset. It's an upgrade over last year’s Huangshan 2, and uses a new dual-core RISC-V chipset that reduces power consumption by 56% and dormant power consumption by 93%.
The company says it will roll out on its third generation of smartwatches, which surely means Amazfit GTS 3, which we should see this year.
And the company also announced its new Zepp OS, which it says will also boost battery life and bring new features to the company’s smartwatches.
Zepp OS requires just 55MB of space, which the company claims is 1/10 the size of the company's previous Amazfit OS, and is 1/28 the size of watchOS 8.
But even more importantly, Zepp OS itself is 65% less power hungry, which when combined with the power-savings from the new Huangshan 2 chipset, could mean staggering battery life on future Amazfit smartwatches.
Zepp OS will replace Amazfit OS
And that brings us onto the final major piece of news. Amazfit has developed PumpBeats, a new cuffless blood pressure monitoring feature that uses smartwatch optical heart rate sensor to take blood pressure readings.
In an interview with Mike Yeung, Zepp Health COO earlier this year, he confirmed to Wareable that the company was working on blood pressure monitoring.
It’s not clear whether the feature needs to be validated by a cuff – but it seems not. The company has also confirmed it's working on continuous blood pressure monitoring.
Of course, this type of feature will require FDA clearance for a release in the US and that may mean we won’t see the feature come West any time soon.
But this is a major step forward for Zepp Health and Amazfit, which has impressed us with its smartwatch range over the past two years. With what looks like bigger health features and battery life in excess of the 14 days offered on most of its smartwatches, it looks like the next year could see more success for the Chinese brand.
How we test
James is the co-founder of Wareable, and he has been a technology journalist for 15 years.
He started his career at Future Publishing, James became the features editor of T3 Magazine and T3.com and was a regular contributor to TechRadar – before leaving Future Publishing to found Wareable in 2014.
James has been at the helm of Wareable since 2014 and has become one of the leading experts in wearable technologies globally. He has reviewed, tested, and covered pretty much every wearable on the market, and is passionate about the evolving industry, and wearables helping people achieve healthier and happier lives.