Smartwatches make a lot of sense for me – they give me the most relevant information through notifications and quantifiable data to improve my fitness and keep my health on track.
Let’s get the ball rolling by learning about the specifications and the box contents of the Amazfit Verge smartwatch.
Amazfit Verge Box Contents
The box of the Amazfit Verge snuggly wraps its content and feels solid and durable, while the graphics on the outer leaf are very appealing. The contents include:
- Amazfit Verge smartwatch
- Charging “cradle” aka dock
- Manuals
The Home button lies on the side of the Amazfit Verge along with a tiny microphone for calls. The button has a shallow travel and does not feel very posh, even though it is fairly tactile. On the other side, there’s a modest loud-speaker which can be used to listen to music or take calls when you’re on the move.
Amazfit has also guaranteed protection from dust and splashes of water with an IP68 rating, which means you need not take the watch off in the shower or while out in the rain. However, the watch gets no mention of protection against swimming, so it is advised to avoid using it in the pool.
Coming to straps, the Amazfit Verge uses Silicone watch bands which you can bend or stretch easily without fearing that it might break. The buckle on the strap is made of good quality plastic and the strap loop has a single tooth (see below) to prevent it from sliding off when worn. This, however, also makes taking off the watch somewhat inconvenient.
Amazfit Verge Display
Amazfit Verge scored full marks when it comes to the quality of this display, which has colors to put budget smartphones with LCD displays to shame.
Coming to the meat of our review. Here’s what using the Verge is like:
The Amazfit Verge runs a custom UI which, as per the product description page, is based on Android. The interface cleanly laid out, with large menu icons and intuitive navigation – although there are no tutorials offered by the company and the users will have to figure it out by themselves.
Moving forward, swiping from right to left opens a vertically-scrolling menu. This includes a host of features such as Health, Heart Rate, Sports, Sleep, Activities, Phone, Alarm, Timer, Stopwatch, Compass, and Settings. Health shows general stats like the numbers of steps walked, floors climbed, and a history of data from the past week. The Sports option lets you start logging of 12 different types of physical activities manually but as I mentioned before, swimming is not included. Furthermore, the Activities menu shows an overview of your workouts in the past.
Fitness Tracking
The main elements for tracking your health and fitness on the Amazfit Verge include a massive heart rate monitor on the back. It also supports continuous heart rate monitoring but there is no option to choose the intervals for intermittent tracking. The smartwatch shies away from gimmicky features like Blood Pressure or SpO2 monitoring and focuses on the essential ones. When it comes to tracking sleep, it captures the duration of light and deep sleep zones and any instance of you waking up at wee hours. Besides night sleep, the smartwatch can also track naps during the day.
This data output by the Amazfit Verge is comprehensive enough to let you plan your workouts effectively or get better sleep. It’s also extremely reliable in most cases.
Amazfit Verge is equipped with a 1.2GHz dual-core processor which runs decently in tandem with the 512MB RAM most of the time but might feel underpowered at times. One might have a jittery experience upon opening a lot of inbuilt apps at the same time. Besides the processor, the accelerometer is useful for tracking movements during sleep and also wakes the display when you lift or flick your wrist, which can be turned off in the Settings.
While the Amazfit Verge comes with only 11 inbuilt watchfaces, it allows you to use third-party watchfaces. Amazfit Watchfaces is my go-to destination from where I download unofficially developed watchfaces for free. Since the Amazfit Verge is fairly new, the number of available options is smaller compared to Bip or Stratos but the developers have ported a fair amount of watchfaces from Stratos, which also has a circular dial. Here you can download the watchfaces in WFZ format and transfer them to the watch directly by connecting it to a computer via the USB charging cradle. Third-party watchfaces
Apart from Bluetooth to connect with the smartphone or wireless headphones and speakers, the Amazfit Verge features (2.4GHz only) Wi-Fi which can be used to transfer data including music files quickly to and from the connected smartphone. Additionally, Wi-Fi can also come in handy for finding the newer updates for the smartwatch.
Verge, as I mentioned above, also supports file transfers over USB and you can use the bundled charging dock to transfer music files or watchfaces to it. When connected with a PC or other smartphone (via OTG), the smartwatch shows a file system similar to a standard Android phone. I really like the mass storage option and it makes transferring watchfaces or music files very convenient.
Powered by a 390mAh battery, the Amazfit Verge is claimed to last around five days of moderate usage. In my usage, the watch stayed alive for over two-and-a-half to three days easily with continuous heart rate, always-on display and brightness cranked to full, and GPS monitoring switched on. With heart rate measurements set to manual and always-on display switched off, the battery life increases to almost four days, which is satisfying.
The official Amazfit app (free, Android, iOS) can be used to see your fitness data and vital stats such as the data related to your physical activities, heart rate, and sleep-related information.
All of the data can be seen on daily, weekly, or monthly basis, and you can also drag your finger across the graphical charts to pan to a specific time. Besides showing your essential data, the app also lets you change the order of widgets and choose watchfaces. Moreover, there is an option to share this data on social media, or export it as binary files, as well as the option to link your Strava account for running and cycling data.
Despite looking beautiful, the Amazfit app doesn’t have essential features such as the option to link Google Fit or Mi Fit data, even though logging in with your Mi account is supported. Further, you can neither change the frequency of automatic heart rate scans nor change the settings for gestures like lift-to-wake or automatic tracking from the app, which is disappointing. Besides that, what is crushing is that this data is not synced to the cloud.
The Amazfit Verge has fared really well during my usage and has shown almost accurate results when it comes to the fitness data. However, there are certain areas where it left me longing for more. So while there’s a lot to love and little to hate about the Verge, here are the pros and cons:
- Sporty design
- Solid build
- Striking AMOLED display with great readability
- Decent fitness-tracking features
- Music playback support and controls
- Automatic brightness
- Speaker for music and phone calls
- Wi-Fi and USB for faster file transfer
- 3rd-party watchfaces supported
- GPS with GLONASS
Cons:
- Complicated strap design
- No support for 3rd-party apps
- Not ideal for swimming
- Can run slow at sometimes
- Lack of controls in the smartphone app
