Amazfit Neo Fitness Retro Smartwatch with Real-Time Workout Tracking, Heart Rate and Sleep Monitoring, 28-Day Battery Life, Smart Notifications, 1.2" Always-On Display, Water Resistant, Orange

Product Information

The Zepp companion phone app collates that data along with showing when those steps happened over your day plus weekly and monthly step goals.

You can tinker with the display settings in the Zepp companion phone app where you'll also find features like locating your watch and turning hourly chimes on or off. Perhaps the most impressive feature of all is the Neo's battery life. Amazfit says that you should expect at least 28 days on a single charge under everyday use. That estimate jumps to 37 days if you activate the power-saving mode. I haven't had the watch for quite long enough to test these claims, but after a week of heavy use, I still had 75% battery life, so it seems spot-on. Moreover, the smartwatch doesn't vibrate for incoming calls and app notification alerts, but relies on different sound tones. This applies to alarms as well, which makes the feature less effective compared to the vibration alerts. What we found was that heart rate data displayed was generally much lower than what we recorded with a heart rate monitor chest strap. It simply wasn't very insightful data to use.

Hybrid smart watches

Moreover, the fields that aren't related to the smartwatch are visible without any data and no way to enter any value, which may confuse some users. Long story short, Amazfit's official app remains a mess and needs a design overhaul. The Neo comes bundled with a charger that Amazfit says can fully charge the smartwatch's battery from flat to 100% in 2.5 hours, but it actually took less time and filled the cell in just a little over two hours. And once the battery is full, you get notified with beep tones, which is nice. The Idle Alert feature on the Amazfit Neo worked as advertised most of the time. It shows a human figure on the smartwatch along with the word "UP" if you haven't moved for an hour.

You can see heart rate during sleep, but there's no REM sleep recorded so it's not as detailed as Fitbit's or Amazfit's GTS/R watches. Of course, to offer this aspect you have to eliminate the screen so that it has a totally traditional design. And this is where limitations come in. This type of smartwatches are capable of monitoring your steps, calories burned, have a notification alert system through vibration …It doesn't feel badly made, but it's what you'd expect to find from a watch that costs in the region of . It's paired up with a 20mm polyurethane strap that has been comfortable to wear in general. It's not the removable kind however like you find on so many Amazfit watches. The truth is that the offer of smart watches with a retro look is very limited if you want to keep absolutely all the functions of this type of wearable. But, if you are willing to lose some of them, the most reasonable option is to go for a hybrid smartwatch. In case you did not know these gadgets, say that they offer the appearance of a traditional watch, which makes them especially interesting for many people.

Those buttons control a display that's broken up into three sections. The biggest section shows off the time with the space up above displaying data from current smart function in use. There's also a small circular section that displays an icon to indicate that feature.

There are few smartwatches of this type

This makes Huami's PAI Health scores a little redundant here as well. It relies on good heart rate data to tell you whether you've been getting your heart rate rising regularly with exercise over the week to generate those scores. Based on our experience however, those scores probably aren't the most reliable. Manual heart rate measurement is fast enough but automatic monitoring isn't reliable, because there were times when the Neo did not detect any pulse at all, and sometimes it recorded heart rate data when I wasn't even wearing the smartwatch and kept it on a table.

The straps of the Neo are made of Polyurethane (PUR) and have a width of 20mm. These aren't detachable but are of good quality, and I didn't have any issues with the straps during the testing period. If you like to dress up your smartwatch with fancy leather, Milanese, or metal bands, this isn't going to cut it.

Amazfit has a metric it calls PAI, which stands for Personal Activity Intelligence, which is a proprietary fitness metric that takes into account heart rate data in conjunction with daily activity intensity and other physiological measurements to generate a score to measure your overall fitness. The idea behind PAI is to boil down all the health data the watch is collecting into a single, understandable number. Personally, I don't find these efforts like Garmin's Body Battery very helpful, though it may be useful for others. Everything about this watch is about how it looks. It's like no other watch in Amazfit's range and, given the mix of features, there's very little like it in the world of wearables. It's the device Casio should have made three years ago.