I Tested the Amazfit Bip 6. It’s Proof Good Smartwatches Don’t Need to Cost a Fortune

I’ll admit I judged the Amazfit Bip 6 by its low price tag. At $80, I didn’t expect it to hold its own, let alone compete with higher-end smartwatch rivals. But after a week of testing, I can say it’s more than just a good deal.  

At a time when most smartwatches cost hundreds of dollars, the Bip 6 stands out because it goes beyond the basics. In my time testing the Bip 6, I found the fitness tracking to be solid, the advanced health metrics to be accurate and the battery life to last more than a week on a charge. Add in the fact that it works on Android and iPhone, and you have one of the few sub-$100 smartwatches that’s actually worth your time. 

It’s not the most refined watch out there. Design and navigation feel clunky compared to pricier models, but this feels like a small price to pay (pun intended) for everything else the Amazfit Bip 6 delivers on. 

If you’re after function over polish, the Amazfit Bip 6 makes for an easy, affordable entry point into the smartwatch world. It’s ideal for first-time smartwatch buyers who want to explore health and fitness tracking without spending big, and particularly appealing to iPhone users curious about smartwatches but hesitant to commit to an Apple Watch.

Amazfit Bip 6 design 

The Amazfit Bip 6’s design is simple and functional. It has the boxy, flat look of an old Pebble Watch, with a slight curve to the screen and a metal trim that gives it a bit of polish. The 1.97-inch AMOLED display (390 x 450 pixels) looks bright and crisp indoors but I struggle seeing what’s on screen in direct sunlight. While it feels light, the 44mm watch looks bulky on my medium-sized wrist (6.5 inches), and it doesn’t come in any other size.

My review unit came with the black sport band but it’s also available in charcoal, stone and red (which I might’ve preferred). All the bands lean to the sporty side of the design spectrum and there’s no real way to dress it up unless you go with an alternative band from Amazon. 

Amazfit Bip 6 setup and software

Right out of the box, the Bip 6 doesn’t offer the smoothest onboarding experience and it took me a bit of fine-tuning to get the watch set up the way I like. I swapped out the default watch face, adjusted battery settings to keep the screen on during workouts (there’s no true always-on display) and customized which fitness metrics I wanted to appear during my runs. It also took a little trial and error to figure out what the physical button and various swipe gestures actually do. It’s not as intuitive as other smartwatches like the Galaxy or Apple Watch, but if you dig deep enough in settings, you should find a way to make it work.

Even with those tweaks, I still ran into some UI quirks. The font, for example, is too large and uses a billboard-style animation to reveal text that doesn’t fit on the screen — making it hard to read at a glance. The screen feels sluggish, with noticeable lag after selecting an option.

The Bip 6’s voice assistant, Flow, is perhaps its most obvious weakness. Flow somehow makes Siri seem like a damn mind reader. I usually rely on voice commands for quick tasks like setting a timer or replying to messages and while Flow claims to handle these, it rarely gets things right on the first try. I found myself screaming at my wrist, which I’m not proud to admit. Even when it did understand the assignment, the lag between recognizing my request and responding was so long that I was better off just tapping through the menus and doing things on my own. 

Fortunately Android phone users can reply to texts with a keyboard or dictation but iPhone owners are out of luck unless they go through a third-party app workaround. It doesn’t help that Flow functionality relies on the phone and the Bluetooth range (at least with an iPhone) is frustratingly short. I often lost connection when my phone was just one room away. This makes the Find My Phone feature pretty useless if you depend on it as a lifeline to locate your phone. 

Once I got past those early growing pains, though, the rest of the experience was much smoother sailing.

Amazfit Bip 6 battery life

Battery life is easily one of the Bip 6’s strongest features. I put it through the paces, including multiple GPS workouts, heart rate tracking and using the always-on display during runs and it still managed to get more than a week on a single charge — 8 days to be exact. Had I been more conservative with the settings, I likely would’ve come close to the two-week promise the company boasts. Higher end rivals like the Apple Watch, Galaxy Watch and Pixel Watches need charging after a day and a half. Even the more expensive Apple Watch Ultras with larger batteries don’t last longer than three days on a charge.

When you finally do have to go back for a charge, however, it’ll take about two hours to go from zero to full and there’s no fast-charging option that I know of. Although I’ll take longer lasting battery life over faster charging any day, I’d rather leave it charging overnight once a week rather than having to figure out a time during the day to charge it back up. You’ll also have to supply your own USB-C charging cable (and brick), as the box only includes a magnetic charging puck that needs to be plugged in. Most new watches like the Pixel Watch and the Apple Watch have stopped including the charging brick but do provide the charging cable.

Amazfit Bip 6 fitness features

To say the watch covers fitness tracking basics would be underselling it. It has all the workouts you’d ever need plus nuanced metrics for runners and other popular sports. I mainly tested the running workouts as that’s my primary form of exercise. 

Tracking a run on the Bip 6 feels shaky at first — it takes about 10 seconds to lock onto a GPS signal, which can be a momentum killer when you’re ready to hit the pavement. But once it locks in, it’s off to the races. In multiple runs, the GPS worked reliably even without my phone. Heart rate tracking, including zone breakdowns, held up surprisingly well. The data was on par with the Polar chest strap HR monitor (the gold standard for consumer heart rate tracking) which I use to test smartwatches. The Bip 6 was slower at detecting spikes as I approached my peak but that’s a common shortcoming of wrist-based monitors — not something unique to this device. If you’re willing to dig into the Zepp app (more on this later) you’ll also find nuanced metrics like cadence and stride to help you analyze your run.

It did hit a bump in bright sunlight, though, as the screen doesn’t get bright enough to read outdoors. 

For indoor workouts, it tracks strength training and even attempts to identify which muscle groups you’re using. I didn’t do a traditional strength workout so accuracy is still TBD but it did correctly flag arm muscles during a Pilates session I had labeled as strength training for testing purposes.

Amazfit Bip 6 health and wellness

The Bip 6 had a hard time telling the difference between when I was sleeping and when I was watching White Lotus and gave me about an hour’s worth of sleep “extra credit” on weekend nights when I was very much awake. It’s worth noting that the Apple Watch has made the same mistake in the past, which makes me question how lucid I actually am when I’m lying comatose on the couch at the end of the day. 

The actual measurements, however, are very helpful, as it measures heart rate and temperature variations, sleep stages and breathing quality. This could potentially help signal the onset of diseases similar to the vitals check on other wearables like the Oura ring and Apple Watch. 

The Bip 6 also offers a vitals check outside of sleep mode called One Tap Measuring, which collects your heart rate, SpO₂, stress and breathing rate in a single read. You can even track your menstrual cycle on the watch but it doesn’t factor skin temperature into the ovulation predictions like other health wearables. 

And if you really want to dig into your sleep and health data, you can subscribe to the Zepp Aura add-on, which offers advanced sleep analysis, AI-powered coaching and tools that can help flag conditions like sleep apnea and insomnia. It’s currently on sale for $60 a year (normally $150).

I also had a bit of trouble blocking notifications during sleep and I had to set up the “do not disturb” mode manually because it didn’t mirror what I had set up on my phone. 

Amazfit Bip 6’s Zepp App

The problem with all this health data is that it comes with little to no context. Whether you’re looking at the immediate results on the watch or reviewing long-term health trends in the Zepp app, there’s no guidance on what the numbers mean, what’s considered normal or how to take action based on them. Maybe the Aura premium option helps make sense of it all, but I didn’t test it for this review.

The watch runs on Amazfit’s proprietary Zepp OS, with all your data and settings managed through the Zepp app on your phone. It handles everything from system settings and health metrics to the app and watch face stores. But good luck finding what you need because the Zepp app’s interface is not intuitive and layers tabs upon tabs.

Even when you do find the tab you need, the data itself is often hard to understand. As someone who’s reviewed smartwatches and fitness wearables for more than a decade, I consider myself well-versed in fitness lingo but even I found myself questioning what some of these scores meant.

Take the Readiness Score, which sits right at the top of the dashboard claiming its importance without telling you why. I had to dig deep to figure out it’s calculated using a mix of sleep, exertion, skin temperature and heart rate. But even then, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be ready for. To function? To work out? To parent? I assume it’s similar to Garmin’s Body Battery, which I usually ignore anyway. As a working mom of three, I don’t have the luxury of waiting around for a good score to give me permission to exercise. If I don’t squeeze in a workout during the one 30-minute window I get to myself, it’s just not happening. Ready or not.

Then there’s the PAI (Personal Activity Intelligence) score, which, according to the app, reflects your physical condition. More digging revealed you’re supposed to keep it above 100 to reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease and boost life expectancy. All good in theory but by the time I finished decoding what the PAI and Readiness scores were, I was too far down the rabbit hole and more ready to lie down than to take action on my metrics.

Another bonus feature is an AI-powered food journal that automatically populates calorie and nutritional information from a photo or barcode. I tested it with a home made cheese sandwich, and it was surprisingly accurate in calculating calorie count, which I later cross referenced with the actual nutrition information of each ingredient. I can see this being a practical tool for people who like to keep track of intake for weight management but didn’t log long term for a comprehensive analysis of this feature. 

Amazfit Bip 6 final verdict

The Amazfit Bip 6 is a functional, subdued powerhouse that won’t dazzle you at first glance but will consistently overdeliver where it counts. It’s the kind of rare find that you don’t expect to come across in the sub-$100 smartwatch world and easily the best option we’ve tested in its price range.