Recently, I reviewed the Amazfit Band 5, a capable little fitness band at an affordable price. Today, I have the Amazfit Bip U, another fitness band from Huami with a larger display and a slightly higher price.
Design
The Amazfit Bip U uses a similar design to the Apple Watch with a square 1.43-inch display. While I’m not a big fan of square watch displays, it is highly effective, giving you plenty of screen real estate to view all the information that matters to you.
I found the display to be bright, colorful, and easy to read. At the same time, the Bip U was extremely lightweight and comfortable to wear. All in all, as far as a fitness tracker goes, it does a fantastic job of being comfortable and providing a large display for viewing information. It also has a 5 ATM water-resistant rating making it possible to wear in the pool for tracking swimming.
Plus, there’s a button on the side that can be used to turn on the screen or quickly open up the exercise tracking. That’s something I wish the smaller Amazfit Band 5 also had.
User Experience
The Bip U is able to monitor your heart rate, blood oxygen level, stress level, steps, 60+ exercises, calories burned, and track your sleeping. Out of all of those, it monitors your heart rate and stress levels 24 hours a day, and automatically tracks your steps or when you’re sleeping.
It appears the only measurements you have to manually initiate are exercise tracking and the blood oxygen readings. I wish it automatically tracked your blood oxygen levels throughout the day, but that’s only a minor complaint considering everything else it does.
Additionally, the Bip U can show you the weather, control music playback on your phone, and view notifications. However, the notification support is rather limited only showing a few words and not allowing for any interaction such as replying or dismissing it from your phone.
When using the Amazfit Band 5, I had to manually enable a lot of the 24-hour tracking of all of this data. I didn’t have to do that with the Bip U and I assume that’s because the app was already set up from my previous review of the Band 5. Just be aware that you may have to go in and manually enable all of this on yours, including toggling on app notifications and which apps you want to be notified by.
Now that it’s tracking all this information, you’re going to need a way to view it. The large 1.43-inch display is perfect for showing you all of your stats, and there is a wide selection of watch faces to choose from, nearly 50 in the store. I settled on one called Sports Rainbow which is reminiscent of the Apple Watch and gives you a nice overview of most of your data.
You can get an even better look at your data by using the Zepp app which you’ll need to set up the watch.
App
I had a bit of a love/hate relationship with the Zepp app in the Amazfit Band 5 review. This was mostly because it was a huge pain to set everything up. The app isn’t organized all that well and some of the English translation is a little off.
However, with everything already set up from the Band 5, using the Zepp app this time around was a lot more pleasurable. That’s because after you get everything set up, you mostly stick to the main page for checking your stats.
When that’s all you’re using the app for it works great. It’s easy to check your most vital stats, tapping on them gives you a more in-depth look, and additional useful information. This is a big reason I loved the Zepp app, for the way it presents your health data and the insight it provides about the information.
Battery Life
Huami rates the Amazfit Bip U for up to nine-days of usage off a single charge. In my experience, I was getting closer to 5-6 days after a single charge.
Surely, it’s possible to get nine days of usage off a single charge, but if you’re like me, then you want to enable all the sensors and get full use out of the watch. If that’s the case, you’ll be charging it up once a week to keep it running.
Final Thoughts
The Amazfit Bip U is an impressive little fitness band. It lacks the Alexa integration of the Band 5 I reviewed, but the larger display makes it much nicer to use. When comparing it to the Wear OS watch I typically use, I only found myself missing two main features, the always-on display and better notification support.
If you’re not interested in having an always-on display or being able to read more of your notifications and reply to them, then the Bip U would be a fantastic choice. It is a device that helps bridge the gap between basic fitness bands and a full-blown smartwatch at a price that’s more than reasonable.
Right now you can pick the Bip U up for $60 on Amazon or on sale for $50 from the Amazfit website.
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