I’ve spent a full week with Amazfit’s newest budget smartwatch. For only $80 the Bip 6 claims to have a 14 day battery life, sleep and fitness tracking with over 140 workout modes, Bluetooth phone notifications, GPS and offline maps, and more. The Bip 6 also features Amazfit’s latest BioTracker 6.0 sensor, so the data should be the same fidelity as their more expensive models that share this sensor.
I’m particularly interested in the basic time function, fitness and step tracking, and sleep tracking. It think there’s room for a smartwatch to fit into a digital minimalist’s life, and lead to less total times picking up one’s smartphone. I’m really enjoying setting an alarm on my Bip 6 and checking the weather for that day from the watch, enabling me to leave the house in the morning without ever unlocking my phone!
Here’s my thoughts on the Bip 6, broken down into my major use cases for this watch, as well as a comparison to the most prominent features of the original Amazfit Bip from 2018.
Fitness tracking
Bip 6 offers far more workout tracking options than the half-dozen on the original Bip. With 140 different exercises to choose from, I couldn’t think of something that’s not available, and it’s clear they’re mostly inflating numbers at this point by adding a few silly things like “chess” and “esports” to the activities. Workout history is automatically synced to the Zepp app.
Strength training is a welcome addition. It allows the user to comprehensively keep track of a weight lifting or calisthenics workout, including entering the weight lifted, number or reps, and the option to set a handy rest timer. All while tracking sets so the user will never forget what set number they are on. Bip 6 attempts to identify the exercise being performed, but I didn’t find this very accurate. It got close in one case, identify chin-ups as pull-ups, but didn’t even attempt to guess at push-ups or dips. Exercise type can be fixed or updated in the app after, if the user cares about this data. Bip 6 also tracks heart rate and calories burned when working out.
I also took the indoor cycling mode for a spin on the Peloton. For a 717 kJ output, Bip 6 estimates that I burned 822 kcal. This is solely based off heart rate data — the watch is not linked to my Peloton bike in any way. Interestingly the Bip appears to have calculated a more accurate energy expenditure than the Peloton, even completely isolated from its metrics. Peloton estimated 1,029 kcal burned, a 1.44:1 kcal:kJ ratio; Peloton is fairly notorious for overestimating. The Bip 6’s ratio of 1.15:1 is closer to within a reasonable range as suggested by the cycling literature.
Finally, I compared both the step tracker and heart rate to manual measurements. In about a dozen tests the heart rate measurement was always within ±2 BPM from my manual measurements. I counted 200–300 steps manually four or five times and the Bip 6 was spot on with adding the exact same number of steps to my total. The algorithm appears to wait for around 15 seconds of movement to reduce false readings, then after that time has elapsed and the user is still moving, it adds the steps taken during the buffer period and begins counting as normal. Bip 6 counted zero steps when driving my normal commute.
Battery life
I fully charged my Bip 6 when receiving it. After exactly a week (down to the hour) I had 47% battery remaining, extrapolating to an expected 13.2 days for my use case. It’s easy to see how disabling features like the blood oxygen monitor or stress monitor, or increasing the time between heart rate measurements from the default five minute interval could certainly push the battery life up to or slightly past Amazfit’s claimed two weeks.
Unfortunately, the original Bip still reigns supreme with its one month battery life, which I proved out many times over several years of actively using that watch. Despite Bip 6 boasting a much larger battery than Bip (340 vs 200 mAh), the AMOLED display and additional features on the Bip 6 end up using that capacity at a much higher discharge rate.
The recently revived Pebble brand, with original founder Eric Migicovsky1 once again heading up the project, is launching two E-Ink smartwatch models, the Core 2 Duo and the Core Time 2, both of which claim they will offer a 30 day battery life.2
Personally, nightly charging à la Apple or Samsung watches is a complete non-starter for me. Charging twice a month instead of once on the other hand, is not a big deal. When Bip 6 gets to 30% battery, the user still has a whole four days to remember to charge it at some point.
AMOLED (Bip 6) vs transflective LCD (Bip)
The major draw of many users including myself to the original Bip was the transflective LCD display, which enabled its month-long battery life. The technology is the same used in the Gameboy Color screen, and relies on reflecting enough ambient light to be read in most situations, with the Bip adding a backlight for use when ambient lighting is too dim. After E-Ink watch maker Pebble shut down in late 2016, Bip’s launch in 2018 meant it was the only smartwatch on the market with a low-power, always-on display.
The launch of the Bip 3 brought a controversial decision to move to a traditional LCD screen, halving the battery life, reducing outdoor visibility, and users lost the always-on display unless they were willing to cut the battery life even further to less than a week.
Bip 6 once again switches up the display, this time to AMOLED, so how does it stack up to the original? First, it’s clear from the specs alone that Bip 6’s screen is larger, with a much higher pixel density. In-person, colors on the Bip 6 are unsurprisingly more vibrant:
A moderate, indirect lighting situation such as indoors really highlights the differences of the displays. The Bip’s transflective display is legible with the backlight off (see below, top image) but text on the Bip 6’s AMOLED display is far clearer, even with the backlight on the lowest setting. Enabling the backlight on the original Bip is a great example of how differently LCD and AMOLED displays show true blacks. The blacks on the Bip’s transflective display are washed out by the backlight, whereas the Bip 6’s AMOLED display can selectively leave these pixels off, achieving the infinite contrast these displays are coveted for.
Finally, it’s only fair to compare the displays in a harsh direct lighting situation with glare, such as the display would present outdoors in direct sunlight:
The transflective LCD does what it is designed to do, and requires no backlight for legibility. However, the glossy screen coating causes some glare to get in the way, clearly reminding us that this is not an E-Ink display. Personally, I forgot how glossy the Bip’s screen was, and I think I might have been misremembering and overstating the readability in direct light until I pulled it out of my drawer.
On the lowest backlight setting, Bip 6’s AMOLED screen struggles a bit, and similarly the glossy coating reflects glare from light sources, but it’s still readable. Turning it up to the highest backlight setting, the AMOLED unsurprisingly becomes more visible, and the information is perceptible with a quick glance. One related note, aside from the hour number and the cloud icon, all of the text on this watch face is a light gray color, so using a watch face with pure whites and blacks would offer the maximum amount of contrast for harsh lighting situations. Either way, Bip 6’s display is far more legible outdoors than my Google Pixel 7a phone’s AMOLED display, which is nearly useless on a sunny day even at maximum brightness.
Auto-brightness on the Bip 6 works excellently and I’ve left that setting on after testing it and finding it seamlessly adjusts the watch face for all lighting scenarios.
Bip 6 phones home (to China)
It shouldn’t be news to anybody that with most pieces of modern tech we are trading our data away as part of the exchange. Amazfit (and their parent company Zepp) claim in their privacy policy not to sell any personal information, however they do disclose a number of vague circumstances where they share personal information including to “service providers” and third-party advertisers.
Investigating the web traffic generated by the Zepp app on my Android phone shows requests to around a half-dozen subdomains of zepp.com and a couple to huami.com (Huami is the former name of Zepp Health Corporation, which owns the Amazfit brand). I sinkholed the traffic to these domains on my Pi-Hole and tested whether any features of my Bip 6 or the Zepp app broke. Most domains negatively impacted the function in some way when blacklisted, such as not allowing watch face images to load in the Zepp store, or killing the weather API. The following two domains however did not perceptibly break any functions of my watch or app after being sinkholed for several days:
api-analytics.zepp.com
api-analytics-us.zepp.comIt’s possible these are the domains Amazfit is using for data harvesting, so I’ll be keeping them in my blacklist.
A minor complaint
My biggest issue isn’t even exclusive to the Bip 6 but rather the Zepp app itself, and thus all Amazfit watches. The watch face store has no search function and only a few preset filter categories. If I tell you I’m using the “Battery Saving” watch face by “bannite” you’d either need to scroll through every single watch face, or also know that it’s in the “BizStyle” category, which you’ll still have to scroll through that one category until stumbling upon it. It’s unclear how the Zepp app sorts watch faces in a category, whether it’s by popularity, date added, or something else.
This isn’t a huge deal, and I imagine most users will grab a few watch faces they like, try them out, and end up sticking with one or two for the long haul. Watch faces in the Zepp app range anywhere from free, to $3.99 with the most common price point seeming to be $1.99.
Final thoughts
For $80 I am definitely pleased with the Bip 6, and I think it’s a winner for the title of best value for the money in the smartwatch market. For my primary use cases of telling time, fitness and sleep tracking, and quick-glance weather conditions, Bip 6 has met or exceeded my expectations, and it’s also helped me pull out my phone even less.
Wearable tech is undeniably disposable, which is why I have such an interest in budget smartwatches. You could spend 10x as much on an Apple Watch Ultra (or more on some Garmin models) but it will meet the same eventual fate as every other smartwatch — death via battery failure, screen breakage, or reaching end of life on firmware or software. These devices are not generational heirlooms like a mechanical watch could be. The Bip 6 is cheap enough that I’m not too concerned with letting it suffer the bumps and bruises of everyday life.