Amazfit Pace Review : the affordable smartwatch

Software Features and Performance

The Amazfit Pace comes charged from the factory, however we performed a full charge before starting any operation on the watch. We have had the Pace for around a month now and many of the quirks we encountered early on have been addressed fully or to some extent over this period resulting us having to revise this review many times.

Initial setup of the Pace is straight forward. Press and hold the button on the side and the unit comes to life. The boot process initially takes around 3-4mins due to setting things up and consequent boots takes no more than 30 seconds to boot.

The Amazfit Pace can track the following activities. Indoor/Outdoor Running, Walking , indoor/outdoor Biking, Trail Run, and Elliptical. (Some of these weren’t available in the original release and were added on with a software update recently).

When it comes to fitness, easiest path to success is my moto, hence I resorted to testing out the Amazfit Pace through its walking activity mode. While the steps taken weren’t 100% accurate, the unit averaged at 95%, which isn’t that bad at all. No device will be 100% accurate and the Amazfit Pace certainly does a good job. The cool fact with the Amazfit watch is that it shows a graphical view of your travel path thanks to the built in GPS. However the fun stops there as the path diagram is shown on the watch and not on the app itself and unless you got bionic eyes it doesn’t help much. It would be nice if the route map can be integrated to something like Google maps; now that would be really cool.

The Amazfit Pace does give out some decent matrices of your workout. Heart Rate, Calories burnt, distance traveled etc and also alerts if your heart rate exceeds the threshold set. The Pace vibrates for any notifications and while the vibration is felt it’s not too strong. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing but something that can be improved.

With the recent app update a lot of the activity data can now be viewed on the Phone’s Amazfit app itself. You can track history of workouts, calories burnt, sleep patterns which were previously only visible on the watch only which we believe is a huge leap forward with regards to its software.

You can also sync your data with the Strava app, however I don’t see the reason for doing that now if you’re comfortable with the basic information provided by the Amazfit app.

You can change the watch faces with the designs provided or you could upload a background of your choosing to embed with one of the watch faces provided. Depending on your choice you can opt for a detailed watch face or go for a more subtle look. All these can be changed through the phone app ones connected through Bluetooth. Due to the resolution of the watch however most of the faces don’t appear as colorful as they do on the phone.

Battery Life

Battery on the Amazfit Pace lasted us between 3-4 days on average. The Amazfit website says the battery will last upto 5 days on a single charge on normal usage, however we could not replicate this. Still 3-4 days on a single charge is pretty decent I’d say.

Areas for further improvement

Phone notifications are shown on the Amazfit Pace, however say you’re in a dark environment and you double tap the Pace to enable to backlight, the notification goes away preventing you from reading the message. Also if you get multiple lines on the message, it doesn’t have an option to scroll through the whole message, which defeats the purpose of having this function on the watch. I guess we could expect further refinements to the software as they have done in the past to rectify these minor issues.

The heart rate monitor also proved to be bit unstable in its readings. We found that the readings could be off by around 30-40bpm which can be significant. Also the placement of the watch needs to be exactly right to get a proper reading and if you’re even slightly off, the results can vary significantly. I couldn’t say if this is more of a software glitch or due to a inferior sensor, but it came to a point where we wouldn’t rely on its reading with much significance.

There are a few extra apps that’s provided with the watch. The music app being an important one. You could pair the watch with a Bluetooth headset and use its internal 4GB storage to store music. This is ideal if you’re used to listening to music during workouts. Amazfit offers a bundled offer which comes with MONSTER earbuds for US$180 or you could simply pair it with any existing earphone set.

There’s also a compass and stopwatch as well as a training app to customize a training routine for yourself. One way or the other these apps came in handy at some point of time during our testing period so kudos on Xiaomi for including them.