There are sports watches that, upon waking up, display a morning report inducing performance pressure: ‘Too little anaerobic training in the last few days,’ it says. The resting heart rate is high, and not a single one of the necessary 10,000 steps has been taken. Get up and get moving!
With the Amazfit Balance, things might work a bit differently – at least theoretically. The slim and highly comfortable wearable tends to rate our readiness as ‘Good’ and praises our muscle and bone mass as ‘Excellent,’ thanks to integrated upper body analysis.
However, these comfort elements on the sports watch are relatively subtle – ultimately, it’s still more of a classic sports watch. Some relaxed features can be added for a fee through a subscription, such as AI-generated sounds supposedly based on biometric data, meant as aids for falling asleep – for a hefty 50 euros per year.
Included for free is the readiness feature primarily determined based on heart rate variability. Other manufacturers also utilize this, but the Balance derives from it, among other things, ‘mental recovery.’ It’s an intriguing value but should be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism – like many data provided by sports watches in general.
This skepticism, particularly in the case of the Balance, extends to the built-in body analysis, offering data on bone and muscle mass, fat, water, protein, and basal metabolism. However, this is only for the upper body; for the lower half, an Amazfit Body Composition Analysis Mat is required.
Whether this is available in Europe and its cost remains unknown to us. We wouldn’t spend money on that – as far as we know, there’s no household body fat scale that provides meaningful data. We also consider the data from the Balance regarding the upper body to be of little use.
The Balance boasts one of the largest sports watch AMOLED displays ever: 480 x 480 pixels on a 1.5-inch screen with a brightness of 1,500 nits, ensuring good visibility even in direct sunlight.
The aluminum casing measures 46 × 46 × 10.6 mm and weighs 35 grams without the strap. With the silicone band, the entire watch weighs 52 grams; we didn’t have the fabric strap on hand. It operates via touch, a somewhat shaky rotating bezel, and a side button. There’s no dedicated back button; placing your hand on the display turns off the screen or activates the always-on mode.
The battery has a capacity of 475 mAh. According to the manufacturer, it lasts around 14 days in smartwatch mode. With the always-on display activated, Amazfit claims it should last about five days – a value we achieved while wearing it with GPS tracking for workouts.
It includes typical activities like running and cycling. Outdoors, alongside heart rate monitoring, it can record GPS position data, both consistently providing accurate results. It also features a step and calorie counter, excellent sleep analysis, notifications, standard sensors (including temperature), weather updates, and a training advisor.
The Balance doesn’t have offline maps and doesn’t support cellular or Wi-Fi; it needs to be paired with a smartphone (Android and iOS). Music can be stored on the wearable and listened to with Bluetooth headsets or the relatively good built-in speaker. Contactless payments via NFC are only possible with certain Mastercard cards.
The Amazfit Balance comes with either a silicone or fabric band, both versions priced at around 250 Euros. According to the manufacturer, the casing is waterproof up to 5 ATM.
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