Amazfit GTS 4 Review: Some Unexpected Surprises, Some Expected Disappointments Though Amazfit GTS 4 wins on many counts, especially with regards to monitoring health and fitness, it lacks some sought-after smart features. Regardless, if you can shell out some cash on this new upgraded smartwatch, then why not?
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The market today is inundated with several smartwatches across the premium and budget segments, such as Google's Pixxel Watch, Fossil's Gen 6 Wellness Edition, OnePlus' Nord Watch, Fitbit's Sense 2 and more. Among these recent launches is Amazfit's brand new GTS 4, which is priced at INR 16,999.
Here's Looking at You, Kid
On the question of design, display and build, the Amazfit GTS 4 scores high marks! With a 1.75 inches long AMOLED display and a comfortable nylon/ fluoroelastomer strap, the watch weighs around only 27 g, ensuring that it isn't cumbersome to wear, especially during workout and swim sessions. It also looks rather sleek and the user can have their pick from among four colours—infinite black, misty white, autumn brown and rosebud pink.
The curved glass of the screen allows you to perform swipe actions quite smoothly and the accented crown key not only functions as a 'go-back' tool when pressed but also rotates to enable interaction with various menus and settings. This is a pretty sweet update on previous versions! The most fun aspect of the GTS 4 is probably its wide range of watch faces (over 150, to be exact), which include several exciting animated and interactive ones. You can even edit certain widgets and upload your own photos to the watch face. Granted that you cannot install watch faces from the Play Store but Amazfit's own selection is good enough to cater to most of your personalisation and customisation needs.
No More Wasting Your Gym Membership
Like all its predecessors, the Amazfit GTS 4 is much more of a health and fitness tracker than a typical smartwatch. With a more detailed UI than ever before, it tracks various activities, including walking, exercise, sports, sleep (i.e. light, deep, REM sleep stages), etc., and uses diverse health metrics, such as heart rate, breathing rate and blood-oxygen saturation and stress levels, to compute a comprehensive and accurate PAI health score.
Being a fitness-oriented watch also implies that it comes with over 150 sports and exercise modes, including running, yoga, elliptical, parkour, cycling, rowing and swimming. The latter's experience is particularly enhanced by the heart-rate monitoring feature as well as the familiar 5 ATM water-resistance, which ensures that the watch can endure the equivalent of up to 50 meters' water pressure.
Additionally, to facilitate effective workout sessions, the watch recognises dozens of strength training movements, many of which have adjustable variations in the Zepp App. It also counts your reps, tracks rest time between sets, and shows the muscle group exercised for post-workout analysis.
An Ever-Expanding Feature Set
The Amazfit GTS 4 has a host of other smart features as well: a powerful integrated GPS which tracks your movement and location, thereby eliminating the need to carry your phone for the same; applications such as calculator, go pro, games, torch, alarms, checklists, world clock, currency converter, inspirational quotes, and water ejection (admittedly, the selection, which can be directly downloaded from the app, is somewhat limited when compared to android wear and apple watches); microphone and speaker (reintroduced after they were removed from GTS 3 post their debut in GTS 2), which facilitate direct phone calls, voice assistance and sound interaction in workout modes and other contexts. It'd have been the cherry on the cake if the watch allowed you to not only receive notifications and read to-do lists, as it does at present, but also write text messages and create these lists on the device.
Another feature of the watch that allows you to further reduce your dependence on your phone is a dedicated mp3 player, accompanied by around 2.3 GB of built-in storage for music. This means that you can just connect your wireless headphones with the watch and leave your phone at home before heading out for a relaxing run. Once fully charged (which takes around 1.5-2 hours), the battery lasts up to eight days of average usage, in contrast to android wear or apple smartwatches which typically don't make it beyond a day or two at the most.
Unfulfilled Expectations
Despite these various positives, it's not as if the Amazfit GTS 4 leaves nothing more to be desired. For one, a couple of its key functions—such as the ability to make and receive calls and shift from watch to phone and vice-versa while on the call—have simply been reintroduced post being scrapped out in the past. Also, the watch still fails to allow you to do more than merely get notifications: for instance, you can't write and send out a whatsapp text or search and download a song from Spotify. Clearly, there is some time before Amazfit offers application integration of this kind for its smartwatches to be regarded as more than just fitness trackers.
Verdict
Though the Amazfit GTS 4 wins on many counts, especially with regards to monitoring health and fitness, it lacks some of the sought-after smart features. Regardless, if you can shell out some cash on this upgraded new smartwatch, then why not?
