Amazfit T-Rex Pro review - A great fitness tracker that misses out on certain smartwatch essentials - Android

Fitness wearable brand Amazfit has been on a good run recently. Apart from its affordable Bip series, the company has been able to deliver some serious fitness-tracking wearables like the Amazfit GTR and the GTS. It also launched the Amazfit T-Rex last year which caters to the hardcore fitness enthusiasts and now the company has […]

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Fitness wearable brand Amazfit has been on a good run recently. Apart from its affordable Bip series, the company has been able to deliver some serious fitness-tracking wearables like the Amazfit GTR and the GTS. It also launched the Amazfit T-Rex last year which caters to the hardcore fitness enthusiasts and now the company has decided to upgrade the T-Rex with the T-Rex Pro.

This beefy fitness tracker brings with it an extensive fitness tracking portfolio with a little extra for its customers. But, is it really worth the price tag of Rs 12,999? We used the watch for a while and here’s our review of the Amazfit T-Rex Pro.

Design

Right off the bat, the new Amazfit T-Rex Pro has a striking similarity to its predecessor, the T-Rex; however, it now comes with more colour options which is where the distinction lies. We received the blue colour variant of the watch. It’s just a shy under 60-grams and doesn’t feel bulky on the wrists despite looking the part.

No doubt that the T-Rex Pro is a chunky device, but again it hasn’t been designed to please the eyes rather offer some serious fitness tracking features.

Though it is made of plastic, the company says that it survived almost 50 military-grade tests and is shock absorbent. Just out of sheer curiosity I dropped the watch at least 5-7 times on different surfaces from a height of 3-4 feet. It’s still working which means Amazfit has done a decent job making this one a sturdy and a tough gizmo.

The Amazfit T-Rex Pro comes with a 1-3-inch AMOLED touch screen that sports a resolution of 360×360 pixels. Even under harsh sunlight, I was able to read all the counters on the watch. Make sure you keep the screen brightness on ‘Auto’ else it’ll eat into your battery life if you keep it always lit up like Christmas.

You get four physical buttons that give you that added functionality for times when you won’t be able to touch the screen. Maybe because you are swimming or wearing gloves. The feedback from the buttons is responsive although you will have to press on them a bit harder than usual.

The T-Rex Pro now gets a water-resistant certification up to 100m depth which was earlier till 50m with the T-Rex. Since all public pools are closed, I couldn’t test how the watch would perform underwater. I did drop the watch in a bucket of water for over 5 minutes and it didn’t pick up any water damages. Talk about improvisation.

It’s clear that the T-Rex Pro is meant for adventurers and fitness enthusiasts which is why it has been designed that way. I liked the design but would have loved it if the company offered the option to swap bands which is missing on T-Rex Pro.

Performance and UI

The T-Rex Pro comes with an extensive array of fitness tracking features, but we’ll talk more about that later.
First, you need the Zepp app to set up your watch and create your own profile. The app keeps a track of your fitness stats and recommends your workout times, shows sleep patterns and more. Unlike WearOS, you don’t get to download new apps on the watch but it’s not like you are missing out on anything.

The UI looks similar to Google’s WearOS with the customised menu-style icons and the black and white settings option. It’s a clutter-free UI and you will not have any trouble navigating through the T-Rex Pro.

A swipe up from the bottom takes you to the new widget screen which you can customise. It shows you some of your fitness details like SpO2 levels, heart rate, etc. You can tap each option to get a more in-depth analysis of your performance.

A swipe down will show you multiple options like the torch, brightness, do not disturb and even Cinema Mode. This feature is for times when you’re in the movie hall and don’t want your screen lighting up because of the notifications. It adjusts the screen brightness to the lowest intensity and also turns off the automatic wake up gesture.

The watch also comes with an onboard GPS which means that you don’t have to carry your phone around every time you are going out for a run. The GPS on the T-Rex Pro has been upgraded as it now tracks via four satellite options -GPS, Galileo, GLONASS and BeiDou.

Despite more GPS options, I struggled many times for the watch to pin to my exact location during my run. Not only that, but the slow GPS also delays features like the onboard barometer that tracks your altitude and the weather widget.

There are not a lot of options in terms of smartphone connectivity which I feel can be a deal-breaker for many people. Though it connects to the phone via Bluetooth, you cannot answer calls via the watch. You only get the option to disconnect a call or put the phone on silent mode.

A swipe from the right from the display gets you to your notifications panel. You will be able to read your WhatsApp, Instagram DMs, e-mails, etc but won’t be able to reply to them. You also won’t be able to read the entire message if the text is too long. Also, the watch offers support for emojis but not all of them so you might see some of them missing from the notifications.

The T-Rex Pro also offers music control options like play/pause, previous track, next track and volume controls. There is no onboard storage, so the music is playing on the phone.

The always-on setting now supports the watch face whereas previously it only supported a digital clock. You also get customised watch faces (approximately 30) that you can download from the Zepp app.

Also, I noticed that the watch takes about a second waking up when you flick your wrist in the Standard mode but it’s much faster in the Sensitive mode. I’d prefer the latter, however, there are more chances that the display will wake up even by an accidental flick of the wrist.

Fitness tracking

The T-Rex Pro comes with one of the most extensive fitness tracking portfolios in the mid-range segment. Now, it can track more than a hundred fitness activities with the watch. Believe it or not, it even categorises driving as exercise!

The only problem you may face is that you’ll need to remember to activate the particular fitness tracking feature each time you change a workout.

This can at times disrupt the entire workout cycle and many people might just forget to activate the tracking option. I know I forgot plenty of times. All those calories burned and nothing to show for it.

I would have liked the automatic workout detection feature to have more workouts apart from just running, treadmill and cycling among others. I am someone who is a lot into mobility exercises and Crossfit and despite its massive fitness tracking suite, the T-Rex Pro left me having to manually activate each of my fitness activities which can be a bother for many.

The watch brings to users something called PAI (Personal Activity Intelligence) which is a customised health-tracking suite within the watch. It gives you an overview of your fitness goals and activities and how you can better your performance. You also get a detailed analysis of the workout load and how much time you need to rest to recover. This is a great feature as a lot of people ignore the fact that after a workout, the body needs time to recover as well.

The T-Rex Pro now comes with a blood oxygen monitor onboard. While using it, I realised that you need to be very still for the feature to work and be able to give you accurate results. Though the watch also brings a new feature to track stress, I wouldn’t rely much on its accuracy. Even while I was in a relaxed state of mind the watch was reading that I was stressed (or was I?). I feel there’s still a lot of grey area in that department.

There is no dedicated sleep tracking feature on the watch per se, but it comes with sleep tracking sensors and you get a detailed analysis of your sleep on the Zepp app. I personally don’t think anyone would sleep with such a huge timekeeper on their wrist and neither did I. Just to test it out, I did try for one night and the results are fairly accurate.

It also comes with an assisted sleep tracker that increases the sensitivity of the heart rate sensor when you fall into deep sleep to provide more accurate sleep data. Overall, I was satisfied with its fitness tracking abilities.

Battery

The Amazfit T-Rex Pro comes with a 390mAh battery inside. Charging time for the batter from 0-100% is nearly 80 minutes and I feel that is fine considering you only need to charge it once in 5-6 days. With display always-on turned off, I was able to get roughly a week out of the watch considering I was constantly using its fitness trackers for 5 days a week.

Adding my Saturday 4-kilometre run, the GPS took some toll on the battery but still I was able to get through to Sunday.

With the always-on display activated and constant bombardment of notifications, your battery life will drop but you’ll still be able to get at least 3 days of juice. This is quite impressive for a watch with a bright AMOLED display and onboard GPS.

Verdict

The Amazfit T-Rex Pro checks all the boxes in terms of being a good fitness tracking device but misses out on a lot of smartwatch features like answering phone calls, replying to messages from the watch and some more.
Fitness enthusiasts and people whose itinerary mostly has adventurous destinations will love what the T-Rex pro has to offer. At Rs 12,999, the Amazfit T-Rex Pro is a perfect companion for your weekend runs and the weekend hiking trip to the hills.

A design like this might even fly with the younger section of the audience. But for someone who is in the corporate sector, this design looks a bit ostentatious.

If you are looking for a smartwatch experience for daily use, and a design that’s comparatively more subtle, then you can check out options like a FitBit Versa 2, Samsung Galaxy Watch and even the Amazfit GTS 2.