Excellent Value for the Money

I love my Samsung Galaxy Watch, but the Amazfit Bip 6 surprised me with its feature-packed UI, fantastic battery life, and outstanding performance. In some respects, I preferred this budget-friendly option over my Galaxy Watch. Limitations aside, it’s an impressive, competitive option.

Price and Availability

The Amazfit Bip 6 smartwatch is available now. It currently sells for $79.99 at retailers like Amazon, Best Buy, and Amazfit’s website. My review unit was black, but it comes in four other colors: charcoal (dark gray with a silver frame), stone (light gray with a rose gold frame), blush (pink with a rose gold frame), and red (bright red with a rose gold frame).

A Comfortable Design With a Large Display

The Amazfit Bip 6 doesn’t stand out. Rather, it has a fairly standard watch design, with a comfortable, lightweight build.

The included liquid silicone sport band has plenty of ventilation holes along the sides and 16 adjustment notches to get the right fit for your wrist size. After adjusting the band where I needed it, I tucked the loose end of the strap neatly underneath the band through the slot, which kept it snugly on my wrist without the strap’s loose end getting in the way throughout my day.

The most attractive portion of the watch is undoubtedly the large 1.97-inch AMOLED display, which is bright, crisp, and vibrant. Those who prefer more compact watch screens may not like its size (it nearly encompasses the entire width of my wrist), but I love that I can easily read the watch’s notifications, health data, and menu options whenever I need to.

The display’s resolution is 390 x 450, which isn’t as high as, say, the Galaxy Watch 7 (480 x 480). But its resolution is higher than the Pixel Watch 3, which has just 320 x 320. The resolution is more than enough for me, and with up to 2,000nits of brightness, I can read the watch whether I am in direct or indirect sunlight.

The screen’s bezels are fairly noticeable, but they don’t detract from the screen. However, because the display is sizable and has a significantly square shape, I occasionally knocked the frame on the wall or furniture when I wasn’t paying attention. This resulted in some scuffing around the edges. Despite the tendency to scuff, the aluminum alloy frame feels incredibly durable, so a few whacks shouldn’t hurt the integrity of the watch.

The watch has two physical buttons on the right side: a voice assistant/menu button and a workout mode/power button. The buttons feel durable and low-profile, so accidental clicks are impossible.

Turning the watch over to the back reveals the fiber-reinforced polymer case, which houses the sensors, the charging contacts, the microphone, and the speaker. Included with the watch is the charger base, but Amazfit did not include a USB-C charging cable.

As for the bands, you remove them via quick-release spring bars, so it’s easy to take them off to clean or swap them out for some third-party bands in different styles.

The Zepp App and Software

Like any smartwatch, you can’t enjoy all the features of the Amazfit Bip 6 unless you download the companion app. For this watch, that’s the Zepp app (available on Android and iPhone). The app itself is relatively intuitive, though a tad bit cluttered. But I didn’t have a problem navigating it, and I was impressed by how intensive some of the health and fitness features were in both the app and the watch, especially at the price point.

The Zepp app reminds me of the companion app for the Oura Ring, but a bit less intuitive. The home screen has an Overview section, plus separate tabs for Readiness, Sleep, and Exertion. Diving into those sections gives me extensive insights into how well I slept, my physical readiness for activity, and how much I exert myself each day.

The app’s home screen also breaks down cycle tracking for women, plus calories consumed, weight tracking, overall steps, and stress levels.

The other tabs in the app cover your workouts, Zepp’s sleep and relaxation section (called Zepp Aura, which has some free features but costs $69.99 annually to unlock everything available), and the device settings, where you can change watch faces, download apps to the watch, and edit general settings.

The app, combined with the easy-to-navigate Zepp OS (which updated to the latest 5.0 version in the first couple of days of my review period), provided most of the insights I needed (and then some). The app also includes some helpful explanations for specific terms and charts, which was helpful since I occasionally ran into stats I didn’t understand. That said, there’s so much info that I occasionally forgot where I found a stat previously, and would have to tap through a couple of times to find it. It took me about a week to fully adjust to the app’s layout, but once I had adapted, I knew where everything was.

As an aside, the app spams my phone with the same notification multiple times a day, and I haven’t figured out how to mitigate this. Specifically, I get notified three to five times a day to “Keep running to ensure proper device functionality.” What is most frustrating about this is that this notification doesn’t swipe away from my Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra’s lock screen, so I have to physically unlock my phone and swipe down for notifications to get rid of the sucker. These notifications come everyday, whether I’m wearing the watch all day or not. If you hate notification clutter like me, this may also be an annoying pain point.

A Watch For Health and Fitness Lovers

For me, a smartwatch is all about health and fitness features, rather than phone connectivity. The Amazfit Bip 6 isn’t going to blow your mind if you’re looking for a smartwatch that integrates seamlessly with your smartphone (it doesn’t shine here as much as a Samsung or Apple Watch).

Despite this, I like the notifications from my apps, the text response and phone call options, and the voice assistant integration. The music control is also excellent, and comes in handy on long outdoor runs or at the gym when I don’t want to touch my phone. However, I don’t find the calendar integration particularly useful. I also can’t load the watch with music downloads, as the Amazfit Bip 6 doesn’t have music storage.

Where the Amazfit Bip 6 really shines is in its 140+ programmed workout modes. In my review period, I only regularly used about six of the workout modes: running, treadmill, yoga, walking, strength training, and stair-climbing machine. Nonetheless, the sheer number of options means any fitness fanatic will be able to track their sport.

The Amazfit Bip 6 seemed to accurately track my steps, running, yoga, strength training, and stair-climbing, either in line with the stats on machines or my manual counts. The workout data is detailed, too, with the watch providing stats for heart rate zones, pace, distance, training load, calories burned, aerobic and anaerobic stats, and primary and secondary muscle groups used in each workout.

The integrated GPS quickly boots up for runs and walks within a few seconds, and I can also download offline maps if I lose phone service.

I also appreciate the automatic alerts for my post-workout heart rate, because they give me some insight into how well I’m doing during my cool-down periods.

Where the watch fell short was a failure to track every machine during strength training (especially, for some reason, on leg machines), and its stats for treadmill runs were often inaccurate. The watch regularly measured a shorter distance on treadmill runs compared to my treadmill’s distance meter. This also happened on the newer treadmills at my gym. This seems to be a general problem with most fitness trackers I’ve tried, with inaccuracy in distance and max speed levels continually happening on treadmill runs. Luckily, I could easily edit the distance portion for more accurate records, though I couldn’t alter the max speed.

In the app, some stats are noticeably absent, including skin temperature, blood oxygen, and body composition. I wasn’t too upset about these missing metrics, but it’s something to consider if those are important to you.

One of the most glaring limitations of the Amazfit Bip 6 is that it doesn’t automatically track the flights of stairs you climb. This, for some reason, irked me more than any other missing feature. After a couple of days with the watch, I noticed I would regularly climb stairs, but flights climbed were nowhere to be seen in my stats. Instead, it would track stairs as steps (not flights). The only way around this was to start the stair-climbing machine workout mode, but nobody, and I mean nobody, is going to do this for a couple of flights of stairs in their home, doctor’s office, or otherwise.

Other Health Features

The Amazfit Bip 6 performed well when tracking my sleep, and I also enjoyed the “Readiness” score feature.

Every morning, the Zepp app gave me a breakdown of my sleep stages—light, deep, and REM—as well as total sleep duration and sleep consistency over time. Compared to my Samsung Galaxy Watch, the sleep tracking seemed just as accurate. The watch detected when I had a rough night’s sleep or woke up occasionally in the middle of the night.

The watch gives a quick breakdown of these stats, but the app provides more detail, including additional information such as respiratory rate and hypopnea risk while asleep.

To my surprise, the Readiness feature felt comparable to my Oura Ring. Using factors like heart rate variability, recent sleep quality, and physical exertion, the watch would then give me a number to represent my preparedness for activities that day. It seemed accurate to me, especially when I looked at the score following an abysmal night’s sleep. In this case, the Zepp app gave me a Readiness score of 68 with a signal to “Pay Attention.”

Other metrics showed that I scored low on both physical and mental recovery, which I certainly felt after a lot of physical activity and a lack of recuperative rest.

Fantastic Battery Life

In my experience, it takes about an hour and a half or two for the Amazfit Bip 6 to charge from empty. However, that charge gives me a long-lasting battery that I can’t sing enough praises about. One thing that bugs me about my Samsung Galaxy Watch is the terrible battery life—typically, it lasts about a day before I need to recharge it. So the Amazfit Bip 6’s battery life was, for lack of a better word, heavenly.

I used the watch moderately for about 12 days before I needed to charge it, which is close to Amazfit’s 14-day battery life benchmark for the average user. With heavier use, Amazfit quotes the battery life at about six days (which is still better than some competitors).

Should You Buy the Amazfit Bip 6 Smartwatch?

The Amazfit Bip 6 might not be as fancy or expensive as some other smartwatches, and it lacks some in-depth features like automatic stair tracking and skin temperature. But faults aside, this smartwatch delivers an experience comparable to more expensive competitors, thanks to its comprehensive health and fitness tracking.

Despite its budget-friendly price, I’d prefer to use the Amazfit Bip 6 over my Samsung Galaxy Watch, since its battery life lasts longer, and it measures most of the same things.

If you want a bang for your buck and hate the idea of spending over $100 on a smartwatch, this one’s for you. If you prefer more seamless smartphone integration and all the metrics other smartwatches offer, though, you might want to increase your budget.