Amazfit's rival to Garmin has been working out
It’s been one of the worst kept secrets in wearables this year, but the Amazfit T-Rex Pro is fully official – and it’s going global from launch.
As expected there’s no real design change, but a healthy dose of new features that brings the year-old T-Rex in line with Amazfit’s current wearables and will retail for when it goes on sale this week.
The original T-Rex launched in March 2020, and is Amazfit’s Garmin alternative. It’s a sport focused wearable designed for the outdoors, with military toughness and long GPS battery life for outdoor adventures.
Think of it more as a T-Rex 1.5, as nearly every aspect of the ensemble has been improved.
The list of tracked sports has increased from 14 to over 100, matching the line-up from the likes of the Amazfit GTS 2. And workouts are analysed by Garmin-owned Firstbeat algorithms, which will show recovery time, training load, training effect and VO2 Max scores.
Water resistance has been doubled to 10ATM (100m) and there are more military toughness certificates.
The T-Rex Pro supports more GPS standards for better accuracy and faster lock-ons, and it now boasts the same BioTracker 2 core as Zepp Health’s newest devices. That means that blood oxygen tracking is now supported, as well as stress monitoring.
A barometer has also been added for tracking of elevation, which fixes one omission from the original.
The only thing to suffer is battery life, which has been reduced from 20 days down to 18. However, heavy usage is quoted at 9 days, and Amazfit says you’ll get 40 hours continuous GPS tracking. One of Amazfit’s strength is how granular its features are, and most things can be turned off in the name of battery life – however, the result is that “normal use” can be a little wide of our definitions.
There are some notable “pro” features that don’t make the cut. The Bip U Pro introduced Alexa but that’s been left off here. An Amazfit spokesperson told Wareable the outdoor remit of the T-Rex Pro wasn’t suited to Alexa, which is fair in our eyes.
But we’d have liked to have seen support for mapping features – but this also hasn’t made it, which may disappoint outdoors adventurers and leaves Garmin with a major advantage.
But Amazfit still holds the biggest trump card. The Amazfit T-Rex Pro will cost when it goes on sale on 23 March. The UK will have to wait until 31 March.