Amazfit Active 2 Review: The Best $99 Smartwatch Yet

A good smartwatch will tell you your basic health stats and serve up some notifications. A great one will add in a few other features like a smart assistant, or a speaker that allows you to take calls on the watch. A really great one will price is reasonably. By those criteria, the Amazfit Active 2 smartwatch is really great.

But it's not perfect. There are a few other things I personally look for in a smartwatch that are not here. But those are more personal preferences and, to be honest, based on the fact that I often wear smartwatches that cost hundreds of dollars. So, when I'm faced with a smartwatch that costs as little as $99, that's not really a fair comparison, and I promise you, I'll take that into account.

But for now, let's get into it. I've been wearing an Amazfit Active 2 smartwatch samples provided by Amazfit for three weeks, and this is my full review.

It's important to remember that for the majority of my review period, I was connecting the Amazfit Active 2 smartwatch to my recently reviewed OnePlus 13 using beta software. Since the launch of the smartwatch happened just recently, the beta was required to even get the phone connected.

During my review period, I traveled to San Jose for a week, and the Active 2 refused to pick up my location — continuously reporting the snow and deep freeze conditions in Chicago while I lazed in the California sun. Well, actually San Jose was pretty cool, but it wasn't 7 degrees Fahrenheit. It was only when I was on the plane home to Chicago that the watch updated to San Jose weather, which I found hilarious.

On during my stay in San Jose, the regular app launched, and I was able to update to the non-beta app. That was likely the culprit, but I haven't traveled anywhere since then, so I can't completely rule it out. That being said, the GPS is slow to kick in, so I guess that's a minor downside, but beyond that, the beta software was the likely culprit.

The review sample I wore is a premium version of the Active 2, which costs a whopping $30 more than the standard version. So, if you want to be extra fancy, you'll get the version of the watch I wore. You'll still be at less than half of most of its "true smartwatch competitors" like the Pixel Watch 3, or the Samsung Galaxy Watch 7, so if I were you, I'd spring.

The Active 2 has a round face with silver bezel. Two buttons adorn the side of the watch. The inner circle of the bezel has stopwatch-like tics around it denoting seconds by 10s up to 60. I'm not a fan of that type of decoration on the face of a watch — it feels like it's trying too hard to say, "Look at me! I'm a watch!" But the tick marks are fairly unobtrusive and at a glance you may not even notice them.

The frame is stainless steel by the way and quite durable. It holds a 1.32-inch AMOLED touchscreen which is nice and responsive. It's covered with Sapphire Glass. The whole package is water resistant up to 5 ATM. The premium watch comes with a black leather band.

Moving around the software on the watch is pretty easy. Swipe in from either side and you get Shortcut cards and panels which give you your data like weather, your readiness score, and the like. Swipe down from the top and you get your quick settings, and up from the bottom gives you notifications. The top button launches your app list and the bottom starts an activity.

The app list is not great. By default, you get the same spiderweb of apps that other operating systems use. The iconography is not super clear which app is which. You can switch to list view, thankfully. I get why the grid view is the default; it is in some ways cleaner, but without knowing which app is what, it's not amazing. Thank goodness list view is there.

The apps themselves are pretty good. They're mostly centered around health. There is a nice map app which feels like it could be useful — assuming you've downloaded the maps you need. Downloading them is fairly simple, but you need to do so in the Zepp app on your phone. Moving the map around and zooming is a tad clunky, but it works. 

Speaking of thank goodness, the app store on for the watch is not bad. I'm not saying there are any earth-shattering apps in there, but there are a few fun games, including Water Sort which I've been having some fun with. What's missing are apps that connect with popular apps on my phone. I keep coming back to the Apple watch (and Wear OS watches to some extent) but the ability to arm my house's alarm from my watch is the goal. Independent apps that run on the watch are nice, but I really want my watch to prevent me from pulling out my phone, at the end of the day.

Watch faces are also numerous and nice, but with limited customization options for the complications. I might be spoiled with Apple and WearOS watches, where you can fiddle with complications until your heart's content, but I'd very much like it is there was just a standard set of complications that you can choose regardless of the watch face. Instead, only certain complications are available on certain watch faces. It's not ideal. Plus, you can only adjust complications on the watch itself, and not in the app which is another barrier to entry.

If you long press the top button, you get Zepp Flow, which is the watch's AI assistant. It's a little like Siri or Google Assistant. You can ask it general questions about things — I was impressed when it was able to produce a list of Stargate crossover episodes, though I'm not positive the list was complete — and you can ask it to perform functions on the watch such as turning on Airplane Mode and Setting timers. It was pretty cool what Zepp Flow was able to find out and do for me.

Finding an assistant that is this comprehensive on a watch that doesn't run a major operating system is impressive and frankly sets the bar for all other watches that fall into this category. Even replies to messages can be smart and enhanced by this AI. For example, when my wife messaged me in Facebook messenger to tell me about a movie she was watching, Zepp Flow offered a few responses, all of which referenced an earlier conversation in which she mentioned she hadn't been feeling well. That's the kind of smart replies even Apple and Google could learn from.

As for the data the watch collects, I also like how it's organized. You can look at data by the day, by the week, or by the month. In addition to sleep apnea detection — which is on by default, by the way — you also get a readiness score, and a daily insight into your sleep and your readiness. For example, one insight said, "It seems you woke up last night and had trouble falling asleep again." I don't remember that particular night, but it sounds accurate.

There's also Zepp Plus, which is the company's subscription service which gives you even deeper insights into your score. For example, it'll generate a monthly sleep summary for you. The subscription plan is a bit muddied. The company offers two yearly subscription plans, one for $59.99 or $49.99 and I'm not sure what the difference is between them. If you don't need these deeper insights — and most probably won't — the free tier gives you plenty of data and insight.

Because of all this, I keep circling back to this one fundamental question — is this a smart watch or a fitness tracker? Looking at the price, you'd be inclined to think this must be somehow lesser than "real" smartwatches. For the life of me though, I can't find a way how.

Yes, the watch face could be more customizable. Yes, there could be more apps that tie into apps that are on your smartphone. Beyond that, I can't really find anything wrong with this smartwatch. As is generally the case with any activity tracker, activity data is never 100% accurate — but given the data I recorded wearing this device at the same time as an Oura Ring 4, it would appear that we've got more than enough consistency in play. 

As I've said in the past, what's important with data like this is trends. Even if the data is off and doesn't accurately count each and every step, you can still see if you're trending in the right direction.

But given everything else that this watch offers — and nails by the way — I wouldn't be surprised to find that it has nailed metrics as well. This is an exceptional value for a smartwatch, considering all it offers. For $129.99 (at its most expensive) you get almost everything you'd get from an Apple Watch or a Pixel Watch, for less than half the cost. You can get it at Amazfit's website or Amazon, and quite frankly, I can't find a reason you shouldn't.