Amazfit GTR 3 review

The Amazfit GTR 3 deserves a place among the best running watches. We love this all-purpose, affordable smartwatch that has an amazing amount of customization, superior battery life, smart design and extensive health and fitness metrics. 

The Amazfit GTR 3 offers 4-in-1 health measuring powered by BioTracker 3.0, which is impressively accurate. It’s got all the health and fitness metrics you’d expect, from all-day heart rate monitoring, menstrual cycle tracking, ovulation prediction, sleep and stress tracking, blood oxygen levels and breathing rate. In that sense, it's a good fitness tracker too.

It comes with 150+ sports modes, eight of which are auto-detection. When you enable this, it will automatically switch on GPS tracking, which is a bonus. It also has a Personal Activity Intelligence (PAI) score – a science-backed health score, which measures the heart health impact of physical activity. The Hunt Fitness study published in the American Journal of Medicine found that keeping your PAI score at 100 or higher could reduce the risk of hypertension, heart disease and type 2 diabetes.

The stand-out feature of the Amazfit GTR 3 is its excellent battery life – 21 days with typical usage or 10 days of heavy use! Switch to Battery Saver mode and you can expect to enjoy 35 days without charge (it still counts your steps in this mode). Even with continuous GPS tracking, the watch lasts 35 hours without charge – making it an appealing sports watch for marathon runners and hikers.

Amazfit GTR 3: Design and display

Slim and stylish with a classic round clock face, the Amazfit GTR 3 is made from lightweight aircraft aluminum alloy with curved glass (it weighs 32g without the strap). The watch interface itself is on the larger side (1.39”) so this is not for those who like a minimalist look. But it has a design more akin to a classic watch, so suits someone who likes their fitness tracker to blend in with their outfit rather than make a statement.

We love that the watch has just two side buttons, including a classic navigation crown or ‘scroll wheel’ similar to an Apple Watch. This means you can twist the button to scroll through menus and longer notifications, which adds to the watch’s minimal and elegant look. 

With over 100 watch faces to choose from, you can store nine on the device itself which we found is more than enough. The animated watch faces look good but can be a little distracting.

The display features tempered glass with an anti-fingerprint coating, but it’s the Amazfit GTR 3’s high-quality screen that has really impressed us. 

The 1.39” AMOLED display (454 x 454 pixels, 326 PPI) has excellent brightness - up to 1000 nits (for reference, mobiles and laptops are usually 200-300 nits). This means it has great visibility outdoors even in bright sunlight – as well as awesome touch sensitivity and vivid colors. If you like the screen on all the time, there’s an ‘always-on’ option but it does rinse the battery life.

The touchscreen is really responsive, while the back of the Amazfit GTR 3 is home to the advanced BioTracker 3.0 sensor and all the lights needed to measure key data including blood oxygen, heart rate and stress levels.

The watch itself has a high-end look and feel with a matte finish around the bezel and a comfortable 22mm sweat-wicking silicone band, that you barely notice even when sleeping. Quick-release pins let you easily swap out bands. 

The GTR 3 comes with a good quality inbuilt mic so you can use the offline voice assistant for basic control commands, or via Amazon Alexa – but it doesn’t have a speaker so don’t be surprised when Alexa doesn’t reply out loud. The results will instead show in text or images on the watch display.

Amazfit GTR 3: Set up and usability

It’s really easy to set up the Amazfit GTR 3. First, you need to download the Zepp OS app to your Android or iOS phone, and pair or “bind” it to the watch. We just scanned the QR code on the watch with our iPhone and it automatically paired.

The new Zepp OS is a slick operating system, which has a ton of customization options to make the watch easier to use. Within the app in the Profile section, select Add accounts and then you can connect your watch to Alexa, Apple Health (iOS), Google Fit (Android), Strava, Relive and WeChat. 

Under the My devices submenu, you can select Notifications and Reminders followed by app alerts to toggle notifications on or off, and select which smartphone apps flash on the Amazfit GTR 3.

Simply flick your wrist to see the display, or click the scroll button to get started. We love that you can just swipe left to right to browse the shortcut cards – a great way to access and view key info at a glance including the weather, alarms, heart rate and more. These shortcuts are all customizable in the Zepp smartwatch app.

Swipe down from the top to quickly view the nine icons in the control center, including flashlight, cinema mode and brightness (this can be customized or reordered as you desire), and swipe up from the bottom to see notifications. Hold down on the watch face and click on the pencil icon to customize or change the face.

Amazfit GTR 3: Features

The Amazfit GTR 3 offers 4-in-1 health measuring powered by BioTracker 3.0, which is impressively accurate.

Features include all-day heart rate monitoring, menstrual cycle tracking, ovulation prediction, sleep and stress tracking, blood oxygen levels and breathing rate, as well as a wide variety of sports.

It comes with a Personal Activity Intelligence (PAI) score – a science-backed health score, which measures the heart health impact of physical activity. 

The Amazfit GTR 3 is water-resistant at 5 ATM – which means you can swim or take a bath with it on and it won’t break. It’ll even measure your heart rate underwater. You can also set up alerts on the GTR 3 for when you have abnormal heart rate readings.

The Amazfit GTR 3 now has blood oxygen tracking which happens automatically via a SpO2 sensor; this is an improvement from earlier models which could only do this on-demand. You need to enable the Auto Blood Oxygen Monitor for this to work, which can be done from the watch itself or via the app. 

The sleep statistics are also very detailed, and you can now track your sleep both overnight as well as daytime naps. 

A new feature on the GTR 3 that we love is the one-tap measurement. Thanks to the BioTracker 3.0, it takes just 45 seconds to read your heart rate, SpO2, stress and breathing rate – all at once. 

The Amazfit GTR 3 supports a wide range of activities, including eight workouts that can be set for auto-detection so overall the fitness and health-tracking functionality is substantial. GPS tracking is also much more accurate than on previous models.

However, if you want a watch to answer texts or calls, the Amazfit GTR 3 doesn’t have this feature. Another downside is that the Amazfit GTR 3 doesn’t allow you to listen to music and has no capacity for MP3 storage. If you need onboard music and a speaker, you can upgrade to the Amazfit GTR 3 Pro.

Amazfit GTR 3: Performance

One of the highlights of the Amazfit GTR 3 is its excellent battery life – 21 days with typical usage or 10 days of heavy use. Switch to Battery Saver mode and you can enjoy 35 days without charge (it still counts your steps in this mode). Even using it with continuous GPS tracking, it lasts 35 hours without needing to charge, so we recommend it for marathon runners and hikers.

The Amazfit GTR 3 runs an RTOS (real-time operating system) developed by Amazfit, which is why it gets such long battery life. The Zepp smartphone application offers an almost overwhelming experience with an extensive amount of settings, data collection, reports, and suggestions for improving your health and wellness. It’s really impressive.

It’s super easy to pair the watch and app via Bluetooth, and we didn’t experience any issues with connectivity.

The Amazfit GTR 3 has everything you want in terms of health and fitness tracking, and the GPS is quicker to connect and more accurate than on previous models.

The heart rate monitoring works well and there are a ton of high-performing metrics to sieve through. The only downside is that we would have liked for this watch to support external heart rate monitors.

Should you buy the Amazfit GTR 3?

Considering it costs just $180, the Amazfit GTR 3 is a smartwatch that really gives you bang for your buck. It has all the fitness and health tracking essentials, a bright and user-friendly interface, and amazing features that work well in action. 

It may not offer as many third-party apps or have the notification support of the Apple Watch or the Samsung Galaxy Watch, but it’s great value, has superior battery life and a slick and stylish design.

If this product isn’t for you

If you like the sound of the Amazfit GTR 3 but need a bit more from your smartwatch, then upgrade to the new Amazfit GTR 3 Pro. This has ultra HD AMOLED display technology, a large 1.45” screen (one of the largest displays on the market for this type of smartwatch). Store up to 470 songs and listen to music on the move, phone-free if you have Bluetooth headphones.

New to the smartwatch market? Apple Watch 3 is a great running watch for people on a budget, and it offers a lot of the same features as the Apple Watch 6 including heart rate and sleep tracking. With access to Apple’s Fitness+ platform (via a monthly subscription) and elegant phone notifications, it’s a great starter smartwatch.

Adventure fans might like the Garmin Fenix 6X Pro Solar, which provides an incredible array of exercise tracking, from running and kayaking to parachuting and bouldering. It’s got a rugged and large frame – it’s not that pretty – but you know it will survive if you fall down a rocky waterfall.