Amazfit makes some great watches, and now it wants to make the best smartwatches for runners in particular.
The Cheetah series smartwatches promise industry-leading GPS tech for unrivalled accuracy when you’re pounding pavements, and the two models also deliver AI-generated answers to your sporting questions.
The GPS tech is particularly interesting. Amazfit calls it MaxTrack, and it claims it’s 99.5% as accurate as a professional gold standard GPS locator. In particular, it’s designed to reduce the interference you tend to get in built-up urban areas, where there are lots of tall trees, or on days when there's heavy cloud, all of which can make it harder for your GPS to track you.
It’s a dual-band setup that supports six different satellite systems for maximum accuracy.
What does AI mean for running smartwatches?
I’m always wary when the term AI is used in marketing, because it’s often a label misapplied: it typically means a chatGPT-style large language model that feels quite human rather than an actual artificial intelligence.
That appears to be the case here: the AI Chat feature is a ChatGPT-style system that can recognise natural language descriptions via your voice or typed commands, and that system can then deliver plain-language answers to your sports-related questions. It'll be interesting to see how well that works in practice, and what limits there are to the questions you can ask.
The AI label has also been applied to the companion app's Zepp Coach feature, which can generate running plans for a variety of race types and personalise them based on your unique characteristics and goals. As you train, the training plan will automatically adjust itself to your progress.
AI aside, the rest of the specs here are good: there’s a 1,000-nit AMOLED display that’s still easy to read in sunlight, a tough reinforced polymer frame and a button-crown combination for accessing your data and other smartwatch features. The Pro version gets a titanium alloy bezel for a bit more class when you’re not working out.
The Amazfit Cheetah is $229.99 and the Cheetah Pro is $299.99. UK prices haven’t been announced yet but they’re likely to be similar.
