Amazfit Bip 6 review: Budget smartwatch gets AMOLED upgrade

Price When Reviewed

$79.99

Best Prices Today: Amazfit Bip 6

The Amazfit Bip 6 is a smartwatch that goes big on smarts and cheap on price. For less than £100/$100, one of Amazfit’s cheapest smartwatches serves you up an AMOLED display, Bluetooth calls, offline maps and potentially weeks of battery life.

These are features you’d typically have to pay a lot more for. As we’ve already seen with the firm’s other smartwatches like the T-Rex 3 and Active 2, Amazfit is capable of delivering the goods.

On paper, there’s a lot to like about the Amazfit Bip 6, but is it the best budget smartwatch to buy this year? Let’s find out.

Design & Build

• Available in five colours
• Weighs less than a smaller Apple Watch
• Easy to remove strap

The Bip 6 is a square smartwatch you won’t mistake for an Apple Watch, yet also doesn’t feel low quality and reminds me a lot of the look of the CMF Watch Pro.

Once you’ve picked from red, black, stone, blush or charcoal straps (there are three hues for the body), you’ll get a polymer case with an aluminium frame. It now has an additional physical button down the right side of the case.

That’s matched up with a 22mm silicone strap that’s breathable and stayed securely in place. It can be simply removed and replaced by sliding across the pin mechanism on the back of each end of the strap.

It measures 10.45mm thick, so isn’t the slimmest smartwatch available. For perspective, it’s slimmer than a Google Pixel Watch 3 and not quite as skinny as a Samsung Galaxy Watch 7.

The 46.3mm case tells you it’s not the smallest smartwatch either, with that wide, square frame soaking up a good amount of wrist space. It weighs 27.9g without a strap which is slightly less than the 42mm Apple Watch Series 11.

If you want to take it for a swim, it carries a 5ATM waterproof rating, deeming it safe to be submerged in water up to 50 metres depth. That’s an improvement on the level of protection offered on the Bip 5.

Screen & Audio

• 1.97-inch AMOLED display
• Up to 2000 nits brightness
• Includes microphone and speaker

One of the biggest changes from the Bip 5 to the Bip 6 is the move to a new screen technology. You’re now staring down at a pretty sizeable 1.97-inch AMOLED display, which is a big step up from the TFT screen featured on its predecessor. Colours pop and it has excellent contrast.

a big step up from the TFT screen featured on its predecessor

There is a fair amount of black bezel around the screen, but it thankfully doesn’t detract from what is now a much higher quality display that’s colourful, bright and can stay on at all times.

It’s bright too, with Amazfit now cranking the peak brightness up to a maximum of 2000 nits. While the display technology has changed, the level of protection against scratches hasn’t. It’s still tempered glass, which has at least remained scratch-free.

It’s no major surprise to discover Amazfit doesn’t include LTE connectivity here, given the price. It does give you the ability to make calls over Bluetooth and is a setup that offers good top volume and a level of microphone clarity that means making calls is a pretty pleasant experience.

Software & Features

• Compatible with Android and iOS
• Zepp Flow AI assistant
• No music player or payment support

Like the previous Bip, this is a smartwatch that works with both Android phones and iPhones. I’ve mainly been using it with the former but my experience using it with an iPhone has been absolutely fine.

If you do pair it with an iPhone, you’ll get the added bonus of being able to take pictures from your smartphone via the watch. Elsewhere, features are exactly the same.

You can view notifications and can additionally use the Zepp Flow AI assistant in the regions and countries that support it. It does work in the UK and US among other places, and meant I could use my voice to ask typical smart assistant requests and also additional information about my notifications.

It worked better in some scenarios and not so much in others. When a notification of a football match starting popped up and I asked for additional information, it asked if I wanted to start tracking a soccer workout.

There are watch faces to pick from, both the watch and the app, though I did experience an odd storage bug that prompted me to delete watch faces to free up storage to be able to track a workout. A factory reset seemed to fix things in the end.

Additional features include the ability to add your transport cards, see weather forecasts and make use of music controls that worked fine with third-party streaming services like Spotify.

The morning updates are nice, if not an original way to give you an overview of your day and help to round off a smartwatch experience that’s while not the most comprehensive, does offer enough to make the Bip 6 useful to use as a smartwatch.

Fitness & Tracking

• Over 140 sports modes, including Hyrox
• Readiness scores and insights
• Free offline maps

Like other Bip smartwatches, the Bip 6 packs in a lot when it’s time to turn to it to track your health and fitness.

Sensors-wise, you’ve got a sensor around the back to track heart rate, blood oxygen and deliver stress and heart rate variability measurements during sleep. There’s built-in GPS to better track outdoor workouts and Zepp’s Readiness scores are there to give you a simple way to understand if you’re prepared to tackle a taxing day.

It’s very rare to find this level of mapping support on a watch this price

I’ve run indoors and outdoors with it, hit the pool and used it for indoor workouts like cycling and rowing. The tracking in general has been pretty good. The GPS tracking for outdoor workouts isn’t on par with the latest sports watches and smartwatches, but also doesn’t put in a terrible performance.

In the pool and for workouts like rowing, the data looked good against rival devices and heart rate accuracy has been surprisingly solid for workouts and during continuous monitoring as well. It’s great to see you can pair external sensors for cycling and running if you want a boost in metrics as well as external heart rate monitors.

Maps is a big new feature and once you’ve selected a section of map from the Zepp app it’ll slowly sync over to the watch. Then you can view maps from the dedicated app or during outdoor workouts that support it. It’s very rare to find this level of mapping support on a watch this price, so that’s going to be a big win for those that want to use it to go exploring.

Its fitness tracker and sleep tracking capabilities are also solid, if not the best in class on offer on a smartwatch. I wore the Bip 6 alongside two other trackers and data like step counts and sleep duration largely matched up. Zepp doesn’t do anything massively groundbreaking in terms of motivating you to move, offering its inactivity reminders mainly to prompt you stay active.

With sleep tracking, I did find the Bip recorded, on occasion, an hour longer of sleep compared to two other sleep trackers. Sleep insights are pretty basic, but for those getting to grips with what a bad or good night’s sleep looks like, they can be useful prompts to make better decisions before bedtime.

The Bip 6 doesn’t quite have health tracking features in the same way that an Apple Watch or Google Pixel Watch does. You can choose to enable alerts for when your heart rate is deemed abnormally high or low or you’re experiencing low blood oxygen levels, which could be an indicator that not all is well.

Heart rate and blood oxygen data chimed well with other devices and while you shouldn’t rely on the Bip 6 to tell you you’re suffering from a serious health condition, it does feel like it can offer an indicator when things have deviated from the normal.

Battery Life & Charging

• Up to 14 days battery life
• Up to 6 days in heavy use
• Up to 26 days in battery saver mode

The Bip 6 isn’t going to be a smartwatch that you’ll need to charge every few days and the battery numbers have improved.

You can expect up to 14 days battery life with typical usage, which drops to 6 days with heavier use. There’s also a battery saver mode that can get you close to a month between charges.

I’d say the Bip 6 largely lives up to those numbers. I found daily drop-off without the screen turned on at all times was around 10%. That would equate to 10 days. With the always-on display mode enabled, it definitely drops below that and is closer to just under a week.

I never felt hugely shortchanged with battery life

What you get in battery life clearly depends on a few features being in use. Keeping the screen on and keeping it bright, using the GPS and mapping or richer health tracking on a regular basis. I never felt hugely shortchanged with battery life and that’s the most important takeaway.

When it’s time to charge, Zepp only provides the USB-C charging disc as it assumes you’ll already have a spare USB-C cable hanging around.

Price & Availability

The Amazfit Bip 6 is on sale priced at £79.90/$79.99, putting it comfortably under the £100/$100 mark.

You can buy it primarily from Amazfit and Amazon.

In Amazfit smartwatch terms, it’s cheaper than the Amazfit Active 2 (£99/$99) and sits just above the Bip 3 Pro (£69/$69).

In terms of the competition, you’re looking at it against smartwatches like the CMF Watch Pro 2 (£69/$69) and Xiaomi’s Redmi Watch 5 (£89.99).

Check our list of the best budget smartwatches for our top 10 recommendations.

Should you buy the Amazfit Bip 6?

You should buy the Amazfit Bip 6 if you like the idea of a very affordable smartwatch that has a nice screen and general look. It also manages to pack in even more features than the Bip 5 all while still delivering strong battery life.

If you’re looking for one of the best smartwatches under £100/$100, this is absolutely up there. You could argue that something like CMF Watch Watch Pro 2 offers a nicer design, but it has software issues too and offers a level of durability that doesn’t quite match up to the Bip 6.

The Honor Watch 4 is another nice AMOLED alternative in and around the price of the Bip, but again is a bit lacking on the software front and it’s getting old now.

While it’s not the perfect smartwatch in all departments, it does an all-round solid job and I’d happily keep it on my wrist for longer, which is the biggest compliment I can pay.

Specs

• Works with Android and iOS
• 1.97-inch, AMOLED always-on display
• 5 ATM water resistance rating
• Built-in speaker and microphone
• Built-in GPS
• 340mAh capacity battery
• Up to 14 days battery life
• PPG Biometric sensor