Huami, known globally for its affordable wearables, launched a series of smartwatches in India recently. The Amazfit Bip S, first of the lot to hit this market, arrived last month with a beckoning price tag of ₹4,999. The Amazfit BIP S boasts a pack of great features: great battery life, accurate sleep tracking, ultra-lightweight and thin body design, extreme water resistance, built-in GPS, and more.

The smartwatch comes in a neat, tidy and easy-to-open packet. The most striking feature that you notice as you open the package is the look of the device. The Amazfit Bip S is a compact beauty. Huami has used what it calls the New Two-Tone technology to make the watch stand out. The case sports two colours, blending two shades of polycarbonate, enhancing the appearance.

Good looks, great body

The watch has a beautiful dial and the silicone strap flows smoothly and doesn’t gather sweat or dirt easily. The Amazfit Bip S uses the molecular lattice technology to ensure the wristband is soft, dry and resistant to dirt. The watch weighs just 31 grams and has what Huami calls a feather-light polycarbonate body. It feels so light on your wrist that you need some vibrations to remember its presence after a while. The straps come in white, dark orange and pink colours and the carbon black strap is not rough on your skin. The power button doubles up as a control button too. The 316L stainless steel button is nicely crafted, reminding one of the good ol’ retro watch buttons.

The Amazfit Bip S has a 1.28" transflective colour TFT display with a resolution of 176x176. The always-on display supports 64 RGB colour gamut. Huami claims the dial has an ‘ingenious transflective colour display’. Minus jargon, this means the display is transparent in a useful and nice way as it makes the screen visible even when the screen is off.

This low power consumption mode makes the device consume less power and is easy on the eyes since you don’t really need to stare at a backlit dial to know time, step counts, etc. The transflective display is really visible in outdoor environments when bright sunlight falls on it. This feature makes it a good companion for outdoor activities. When the ambient light is low, you can turn on the backlight for a brighter display.

Slow touch

The touch screen has 2.5D Corning Gorilla 3 generation tempered glass, supported by anti-fingerprint coating. The touch response is a tad slow. That said, the Amazfit Bip S has a clutter-free interface, though you’d expect the icons to be a little crisper than they are. Negotiating the interface is a hassle-free affair. If you are a smartwatch user, you’d know the drill. You bring a clutch of widgets to life when you swipe horizontally and then surf through them by scrolling up and down. If you want to know more about each widget, you need to click on them.

The smartwatch has a built-in Sony 28nm GPS chip and the positioning accuracy and power consumption levels are quite impressive. The GPS can operate continuously for 22 hours, claims Huami. In our experience, it lasted an easy 16 hours, which is also really good.

App support and more

Pairing the device with your smartwatch is easy. You need to download the Amazfit app and link it via Bluetooth. The app comes with a bunch of useful, personalised features. This lot includes the Huami-PAITM Health Assessment System, which helps you track your activities and get recommendations.

A striking faculty of the Amazfit Bip S is its 200mAh battery, which lasts a lot longer given the price, thanks to a high-performance switching regulator power chip (low-current high-efficiency DCDC) and optimised Bluetooth. Even though Huami claims a standby (ultra-mode) battery life of 40 days in a single charge, our experience suggests that the watch keeps its business going even after weeks. If you are a heavy user who fiddles with most of the features on the watch, you may need to recharge it in a few days. Still, this is one of the most energy-efficient, budget smartwatches in the market today.

The watch has 5 ATM water resistance; it means the device can take some rains and a lot of sweat but might not be an ideal companion during swimming. The Amazfit Bip S sports daily tracking activities and 10 sports modes. These include the usual suspects such as treadmill, outdoor running, walking, indoor cycling, outdoor cycling, yoga, elliptical trainer, etc. Huami’s home-grown Huami’s BioTracker PPG Bio-Tracking Optical Sensor offers accurate heart rate tracking, heart rate warning and heart rate interval values.

Another interesting feature is the widget to control music on your phone, which is helpful when you are cycling or running on the treadmill keeping the phone nearby; it helps you have a great hands-free experience. The watch doesn’t allow you to store music in it, which is just fine given the price. You can also edit and customise two of the more than 40 watch-faces. That’s a nice add-on.

In sum, the Amazfit Bip S offers a good-looking, extremely energy wearable experience at an affordable price.

Pros : Beautiful design, light-body, strong and smooth straps, accurate data, medical precision in heart monitoring

Con : Touch response is a tad slow, Bluetooth reception is not very strong