Amazfit Cheetah 2 Ultra review: A genuine Garmin alternative with offline maps, titanium build and month-long battery life

There was a point a few years ago when, if you needed an accurate wrist-worn device for running – especially trail running – you had to get a Garmin watch. The brand started as a GPS company and became one of the biggest players in wearable technology, and definitely the main brand when it comes to performance smartwatches.

Lucky for us, things look different in 2026. Challenger brands such as Coros and Amazfit aren’t just for people who can’t afford Garmins; they also put out genuinely impressive wearables for beginners and enthusiasts alike. And while Coros is happy to cater for the MIP crowd (for now), Amazfit has been putting out some seriously impressive AMOLED watches over the past.

The brand is closing the gap with Garmin so well that we gave the Amazfit T-Rex 3 the best outdoor watch award last year. Now, with the Cheetah 2 Ultra, Amazfit is after Garmin’s battery bruiser, the Enduro 3. And, as expected, it’s a compelling wearable that’s well built, delivers strong GPS performance, and looks the part.

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While it doesn’t have the Enduro 3’s solar charging prowess – seemingly none of the other brands have cracked this technology so far – the Cheetah 2 Pro can last up to a month on a single charge, which is not too shabby. Best of all, it’s cheaper than the big-ticket rival, which hardly ever gets a discount. Best multisport watch of 2026? Let’s find out.

Amazfit Cheetah 2 Ultra review

Price and availability

The Cheetah 2 Ultra was launched in May 2026 and is available to buy now at Amazfit UK, Amazfit EU and Amazfit US for the recommended price of £600 / €600 / $600 (~AU$979). As always, it’s the good folks of the UK who pay the most for the watch ($600 is around £450). I guess it looks nicer to sell the watch for the same numerical value in all countries, but this might not be the fairest pricing.

It only comes in one colourway, but you do get two straps (one fabric and one silicone) in the box. The Cheetah 2 Ultra is a whopping £150 more expensive than the Cheetah 2 Pro and currently the most expensive smartwatch Amazfit offers. It’s on par with the Balance Ultra, which was launched in June 2026.

For comparison, the recommended retail price of the Enduro 3 is £770 / €850 / $900 / AU$1,549, which is much more expensive across all countries, especially in the US, where you can get the Cheetah 2 Ultra for a whopping $300 less. The Garmin Fenix 8 Pro is pretty much twice as expensive as the Amazfit at £1,200 / €1,400 / $1,300 / AU$2,300.

Design and build quality

I criticised Amazfit before for adding trims to its watches for the sake of it. The T-Rex series is notorious for this approach, but the Cheetah has always been much more streamlined than its rugged outdoor-watch sibling. Indeed, the Cheetah 2 Ultra is surprisingly nimble-looking and weighs a whopping 11g less than the Enduro 3 (52g vs 63g).

The Cheetah 2 Ultra measures 47.4 x 47.4 mm and is 13.3 mm thick, making it a hair smaller (and thicker) than the Cheetah 2 Pro, which is 48 x 48 x 13.2 mm. The case and bezel are made of Grade 5 titanium alloy, giving the watch a more premium feel. The four push buttons located around the edge of the case are also made of the same material.

Amazfit claims the watch has been tested to military standards, but doesn’t specify which. The Cheetah 2 Pro has been described elsewhere as having 15 MIL-STD-810G certifications, but no such info is available on the new watch. Not like it matters all that much; more importantly, the Cheetah 2 Ultra is water-resistant to 5 ATM, even though it’s not certified for diving.

It features a large 1.5 "AMOLED screen with a resolution of 480x480 and peak brightness of 3,000 nits, the latter of which seems to be the ceiling for current AMOLED panels. Most top-tier smartwatches have the same brightness, except for the MicroLED version of the Fenix 8 Pro. The display is protected by a sapphire glass lens.

Carried over from other Amazfit wearables, the Cheetah 2 Ultra has a built-in flashlight with three modes (white light, red light and SOS), and is said to have a more advanced CPU than the Cheetah 2 Pro (HS3s vs HS3). It also has a speaker and a microphone and tends to be very chatty during workouts.

Flip the watch over, and you’ll find the BioTracker 6.0 PPG sensor (5PD + 2LED), the very same you’ll find on the Amazfit T-Rex 3 Pro or the Balance 2. The watch is equipped with ABC sensors as well as a gyroscope, ambient light, geomagnetic, and temperature sensors.

In terms of connectivity, it has BLE 5.2 and Wi-Fi 2.4GHz, the latter of which enables you to transfer large amounts of data (e.g. topo maps) faster. The Cheetah 2 Ultra has a dual-band positioning setup and has access to six satellite systems. It has 64 GB of storage, mainly for maps.

Features

Amazfit markets the Cheetah 2 Ultra to trail runners, but it packs pretty much every health and fitness feature Amazfit currently offers. Around-the-clock monitoring covers heart rate, blood oxygen saturation, stress levels and skin temperature, while sleep tracking goes beyond the basics to include heart rate variability (HRV), sleep stages, breathing quality, daytime naps and a nightly sleep score.

The watch can also alert you to unusually high or low heart rates, low blood oxygen levels and elevated stress, and even suggest guided breathing exercises when needed.

Health features are supplemented by Amazfit's PAI health assessment system (similar to the circles on the Apple Watch), heart rate recovery tracking, and menstrual cycle monitoring. The watch also supports Zepp Flow, Amazfit's AI-powered voice assistant, which I haven’t used much because I’m not a massive fan of talking to my watch about stuff I can check on my phone with less effort.

On the fitness side, the Cheetah 2 Ultra offers more than 180 sports modes and can automatically recognise 25 strength-training movements and eight common sports activities. The watch can recognise certain movements, including walking, and can track them the same way it would if you started a workout manually.

The benefit of this over Garmin’s MoveIQ is that the logged workouts (walks, runs, etc.) contribute to your workout load, so if you’re like me and walk to a lot of places, your watch will give you a much better recovery estimate based on these. Garmin tracks walks in the background but doesn’t seem to take them into account when calculating training load.

Runners are particularly well catered for, with support for structured workouts, Zepp Coach training plans, running power, lactate threshold analysis, ground contact time, virtual pacing and track running mode with smart trajectory correction – all without needing any external sensors, such as heart rate monitors.

Speaking of which, the Cheetah 2 Ultra can connect to external sensors, including heart rate straps, cycling power meters, cadence sensors, and running power pods. Workout analysis is handled by Amazfit's PeakBeats platform, while data can be synchronised with popular third-party services including Strava, Runna, TrainingPeaks, Intervals.icu, Apple Health and Google Fit.

Away from training, the Cheetah 2 Ultra functions as a capable smartwatch, offering Bluetooth music controls (no offline music, though), phone notifications, to-do lists, weather forecasts, voice memos, event reminders, membership cards, Pomodoro timers and morning briefings, alongside practical features such as Find My Phone and Bluetooth camera control for iPhone users.

Mapping and performance

One of the biggest upgrades over previous Amazfit running watches is the mapping experience. The Cheetah 2 Ultra ships with offline navigation support and can display base maps, contour maps and ski resort maps directly on the watch, making it a much more capable companion for trail running, hiking and mountain adventures than earlier Cheetah models.

Maps are downloaded through the Zepp app rather than directly on the watch. The process is straightforward enough, but Amazfit doesn't offer countrywide map downloads the way Garmin does.

Instead of downloading a complete UK Topo map, for example, you select square sections of a map and download those individually. The largest I could select (~250 x 385 miles = 96,000 square miles) covered a substantial portion of Great Britain and required a 640 MB download that included the base map, contour layer, and ski map data.

Once loaded onto the watch, the maps are surprisingly detailed. Contour lines make it easier to assess terrain at a glance, while turn-by-turn navigation and route guidance help keep you on course.

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A recent software update added full-route and segment elevation profiles with colour-coded gradient difficulty, allowing you (and me) to see where the toughest climbs lie before reaching them. The same update also introduced waypoint saving with expanded icon support, making it easier to mark and revisit important locations on the trail.

While Garmin still offers a more mature navigation ecosystem, particularly in route planning and nationwide mapping, Amazfit has closed the gap considerably.

In terms of accuracy, I tested the watch against the Garmin Forerunner 970 and the Fenix 8 Pro, and the Cheetah 2 Ultra marked the miles exactly at the same points as the Garmins. I must confess that I live in an area with a pretty good view of the sky, so I can’t say I pushed the GNSS to its limits.

Still, from what I can tell, the Cheetah 2 Ultra can keep up with the Garmins. Heart rate accuracy: ditto, even though I had a run where the Amazfit pegged my heart rate at over 160 bpm for the full 5k, while the Fenix 8 Pro suggested it was more in the 135-140 bpm range.

The other sessions looked pretty good, though, so I’ll keep an eye on this heart rate situation for now. Amazfit is pretty good at software updates, so if there is a glitch in tracking, I’m sure the brand will fix it soon enough.

Battery and charging

Amazfit rates the watch for up to 30 days of typical use and up to 60 hours of GPS tracking, thanks in part to its sizeable 780mAh battery.

In my testing, the watch certainly felt capable of going the distance. I started with 72% battery remaining at 9 pm on 29 May, and after two days of general smartwatch use without any recorded workouts, the charge had dropped to 63%. If the watch continued to discharge at the same rate, this would equate to around 22 days in smartwatch mode.

A 23-minute outdoor run consumed just 1% of battery, suggesting GPS efficiency is excellent for shorter activities. A one-hour-and-40-minute GPS walking session saw the battery drop from 28% to 25%, suggesting a ~56-hour GPS battery life – very close to Amazfit’s 60-hour claim.

Extrapolating from those figures suggests most users could comfortably get around two weeks of mixed use from a partial charge, while a full charge should get reasonably close to Amazfit's quoted figures, depending on how heavily they use GPS tracking, mapping, and health monitoring features.

Of course, batteries don’t deplete in a linear fashion, so it’s possible that your Cheetah 2 Ultra’s battery performance will be different. Adjusting the brightness or tinkering with the active sensors will change performance, so make sure you go through the menus to check which features you need and which you can live without.

Verdict

The Amazfit Cheetah 2 Ultra is the closest the brand has come to producing a true Garmin rival. It combines a premium titanium build, a bright AMOLED display, excellent GPS performance and impressive battery life into a package that feels purpose-built for trail runners and outdoor athletes rather than simply adapted from a general fitness watch.

What impressed me most is how complete the overall experience feels. The addition of offline mapping, contour maps, elevation profiles, and waypoint support transforms the Cheetah 2 Ultra into a genuinely capable navigation tool, while the wealth of training metrics, sensor support, and third-party integrations ensures serious runners won't feel short-changed. GPS accuracy was excellent during testing, and battery life came surprisingly close to Amazfit's ambitious claims.

It's not perfect. Garmin still offers a more polished navigation ecosystem, solar charging remains exclusive to the Enduro 3, and I'd like to see Amazfit move away from its somewhat clunky tile-based map downloads. The occasional heart-rate anomaly also suggests there is room for refinement.

Those criticisms feel relatively minor when you consider the price. At this price, the Cheetah 2 Ultra undercuts the Garmin Enduro 3 by a considerable margin while delivering much of the same functionality.

For runners who want a premium endurance watch with a gorgeous display and strong outdoor credentials, the Cheetah 2 Ultra is not just Amazfit's best watch yet, but also one of the most compelling multisport watches of 2026.