Amazfit GTS 3
£149.00 
www.amazfit.com 
 
The GTS 3 smart watch from Amazfit takes fitness watches to new heights and (thanks to its water resistance) depths. Available in three colours with the earthy names Graphite Black, Terra Rose and Ivory White, this watch looks neat and stylish and, more importantly, offers an awesome range of functions that mark it out as a strong competitor in the smart fitness watch arena. 
 
The Amazfit GTS 3 monitors your health 24-7, which makes its 12-day battery life fantastically welcome. Additionally, it only takes 2.5 hours to achieve a full charge, which is done via a magnetic charging base. 2.5 hours once every 12 days isn’t bad – you’ll hardly have to go any time at all without monitoring your vitals, if you want to use the watch to its full. 
 
The health indicators that this watch can track are your heart rate, blood-oxygen saturation, stress levels and breathing rate. This last feature isn’t always included in fitness watches, but it’s a fantastic way to measure your current cardiovascular health – especially when measuring how well you recover from periods of exercise. Using these metrics, the watch not only monitors your day-to-day health, but also tracks your performance during your workouts and how healthy your sleep-cycles are. It even keeps track of menstrual and female fertility cycles, which I always appreciate seeing included in fitness watches (it’s nice to have this feature on the standard model, rather than relegated to some ‘Hers’ version). 
 
When it comes to workouts, I was stunned to discover that this watch has 150 different sports modes!! This lets you select your exact activity and to track your data and supplement your exercise exactly the way you’d like to. For example, a fun bonus feature if you’re jogging is the Virtual Pacer, which brings up a red and blue image of a runner – one tracking your progress in the moment and the other reflecting your times on a previous run. This way, you can have a ‘race against yourself’ for a great visual indication of not only which run was fastest overall, but where you stack against your past self at different stages of the run. This level of detail really impressed me.  
 
Another detail I was impressed by was that, as well as having so many specific sports modes, there are eight main activity types - such as walking, rowing, swimming, the elliptical machine etc – that it can identify and begin tracking automatically! It recognises the motions you’re making, though how it can do this just from one wrist, I have no idea. Even more impressive, it can tell between indoor and outdoor walking (presumably by pace and whether the ground remains flat or not), and treadmill vs outdoor running! I was ready for this to be inaccurate, but it works! The watch will even factor everyday activities such as doing the laundry into your fitness calculations (though this isn’t one of its eight automatically recognised sports!) 
 
All of this is viewed on a fantastic Ultra HD AMOLED, ‘Always On’ display. I’m in two minds about whether the Always On feature is a pro or con – on the one hand, it allows your watch to be viewable hands free at a glance, like a traditional watch, but at the same time, I’m not a fan of being surrounded by electronic screens when I don’t need them. However, with over 100 display faces to choose from, you can make sure that your Always On watch looks the way you want, and some of these are even editable. The fact that this watch’s face CAN always be on certainly makes its battery life all the more impressive. 
 
The Amazfit GTS 3 has a slim and lightweight 8.8mm aluminium body, so it’s comfortable and no inconvenience to have on your wrist. It is Alexa compatible, has a reliable GPS system, is water resistant enough to take swimming…Overall, it does what it does extremely well. It would take far too much space for me to break down every single feature it has, but I can safely say that whatever you need a smart fitness watch for, the Amazfit GTS 3 has your needs covered, and will cover them well. 
 
5/5 
 
Pros: 
Tracks heart rate, blood-oxygen saturation, stress levels and breathing rate 
Monitors sleep cycles, female cycles 
Easy to navigate with navigation crown 
Ultra HD AMOLED display 
150 sports modes 
Auto-recognises 8 exercise activities 
100 display faces to choose from 
Great battery life and quick charge