In general, it was within 1-2bpm for resting heart rate readings compared to a Garmin watch and a chest strap monitor. Though it had a habit of posting some rather excessive heart rate readings too. As much as 40bpm more.

The straps of the Neo are made of Polyurethane (PUR) and have a width of 20mm. These aren't detachable but are of good quality, and I didn't have any issues with the straps during the testing period. The Amazfit Neo ships with a 160 mAh battery which is claimed to offer 28 days of autonomy in a typical usage scenario and 37 days in power-saving mode, which has the heart-rate monitoring, Bluetooth, lift-to-wake screen and buzzer tone disabled.Amazfit has a metric it calls PAI, which stands for Personal Activity Intelligence, which is a proprietary fitness metric that takes into account heart rate data in conjunction with daily activity intensity and other physiological measurements to generate a score to measure your overall fitness. The idea behind PAI is to boil down all the health data the watch is collecting into a single, understandable number. Personally, I don't find these efforts like Garmin's Body Battery very helpful, though it may be useful for others. The Zepp companion phone app collates that data along with showing when those steps happened over your day plus weekly and monthly step goals.

Before I wrap up this part of the review, I want to point out that the Amazfit Neo takes long to reconnect with the smartphone at times and data syncing is also slow. Not too much to be a deal-breaker, but enough to hamper the overall experience. We believe this is something Amazfit can fix with a software update. Battery life We'll start with notifications, where there is support for native and third-party apps. You can't read notifications on the watch, instead getting pinged with an envelope or message icon popping up in the corner to let you know it's come through on your phone. Moreover, the fields that aren't related to the smartwatch are visible without any data and no way to enter any value, which may confuse some users. Long story short, Amazfit's official app remains a mess and needs a design overhaul. If you like to dress up your smartwatch with fancy leather, Milanese, or metal bands, this isn't going to cut it.You can set a maximum of 10 watch display settings at any one time, which means you can pretty much get access to everything the Neo is capable of. Huami launched many smartwatches this year under its Amazfit brand, but the Amazfit Neo stands out from the rest because of its design. The wearable comes with retro looks, but has a few features up its sleeve which make it quite modern. It's also the cheapest smartwatch the company has launched this year, but is it a worthy addition to your wrist or has Huami cut one too many corners? Read on to find out. Amazfit Neo specifications You're getting basic smartwatch features, an always-on display and the promise of up to four weeks of battery life. The retro-looking smartwatch also supports incoming calls and app notification alerts, but I didn't find the latter useful at all, because the smartwatch doesn't show the notification contents on the screen and all you get to see in the name of notification alerts is the notification count. It also offers support for Huami's PAI heart rate-powered health scores, which use an algorithm to take your weekly activity and put it into a single score. Keep it over 100 to be reassured you're getting enough exercise.

Perhaps the most impressive feature of all is the Neo's battery life. Amazfit says that you should expect at least 28 days on a single charge under everyday use. That estimate jumps to 37 days if you activate the power-saving mode. I haven't had the watch for quite long enough to test these claims, but after a week of heavy use, I still had 75% battery life, so it seems spot-on.Moreover, the smartwatch doesn't vibrate for incoming calls and app notification alerts, but relies on different sound tones. This applies to alarms as well, which makes the feature less effective compared to the vibration alerts. The name of the official app has changed, but the app itself (at least for Android) hasn't gotten any better and remains the same on the inside, meaning you still see shortcuts for the same settings at multiple locations and the ones that aren't supported by the device continue to be grayed out by Amazfit instead of being hidden. Of course, to offer this aspect you have to eliminate the screen so that it has a totally traditional design. And this is where limitations come in. This type of smartwatches are capable of monitoring your steps, calories burned, have a notification alert system through vibration … You can tinker with the display settings in the Zepp companion phone app where you'll also find features like locating your watch and turning hourly chimes on or off.

You can see heart rate during sleep, but there's no REM sleep recorded so it's not as detailed as Fitbit's or Amazfit's GTS/R watches. This makes Huami's PAI Health scores a little redundant here as well. It relies on good heart rate data to tell you whether you've been getting your heart rate rising regularly with exercise over the week to generate those scores. Based on our experience however, those scores probably aren't the most reliable. Is there more to this hybrid than retro charm though? We've been living with the Neo to find out. Here's our verdict on whether this budget hybrid is worth your time. Manual heart rate measurement is fast enough but automatic monitoring isn't reliable, because there were times when the Neo did not detect any pulse at all, and sometimes it recorded heart rate data when I wasn't even wearing the smartwatch and kept it on a table.

It doesn't feel badly made, but it's what you'd expect to find from a watch that costs in the region of . It's paired up with a 20mm polyurethane strap that has been comfortable to wear in general. It's not the removable kind however like you find on so many Amazfit watches.