Amazfit GTS 4 review: Premium price, budget experience
The Amazfit GTS 4 is a strange device. At a retail price of $200, the tracker is positioned as an upper midrange option, competing not only againstscores of trackersfrom market leaders like Fitbit, but alsofully-fledged smartwatches. I really like some things about the GTS 4: it’s got an attractive (if familiar) design, and its display is lovely and vibrant. But in the ever more crowded fitness wearable space, that’s probably not enough to justify the GTS 4’s existence, let alone its price.
Amazfit GTS 4
The Amazfit GTS 4 is a handsome watch-style fitness tracker with great battery life, a punchy screen, and quick performance, but its health tracking doesn’t seem on par with the competition, and the Zepp mobile app used to manage the watch is a pain.
Price and availability
The Amazfit GTS 4 costs $200; priced as it is, the GTS 4 is competing with both premium fitness trackers like the $230 Fitbit Versa 4, as well as some fully featured smartwatches, including the (still very recommendable) Samsung Galaxy Watch 4. You can pick one up on Amazon or directly from Amazfit’s website.
Design, hardware, and what’s in the box
With a rounded rectangular face and a rotating digital crown, the Amazfit GTS 4 bears a strong resemblance to the Apple Watch. There’s no secondary button, though, and the crown is centered on the right edge of the watch (and has Amazfit’s lizard logo on its face, which is a neat touch).
As well-worn as this look may be, it’s also a handsome one, and the GTS 4 looks at home whether dressed up or wearing athletic gear. It’s available in black or gold, with several band options, and takes standard 20mm watch bands so you can tailor the look to your liking. The hardware also feels somewhat high quality, and the watch’s 390 x 450 OLED display is vibrant and bright enough to see outdoors.
The Amazfit GTS 4’s underside features a cluster of health sensors for tracking your heart rate, SpO2, and stress levels (though Amazfit calculates stress solely using heart rate variability). The GTS 4’s magnetic charger — the only accessory included with the watch — connects with USB-A. That’s a bummer but a pretty common annoyance. Even the $300 Fitbit Sense 2’s charger is USB-A.
Software, performance, and battery life
The Amazfit GTS 4 runs proprietary software called Zepp OS, named for Amazfit’s parent company, Zepp Health. It works well enough. Navigating menus and opening the GTS 4’s pre-installed apps is snappy, and in my weeks with the GTS 4, I’ve yet to experience any debilitating bugs. I like a handful of the GTS 4’s watch faces, too.
On its face, Zepp OS is pretty familiar. Quick settings live above your home screen and notifications below it. Swiping left or right scrolls you through a looping list of “quick access apps” similar to Wear OS’s app tiles, with options to choose from like the current weather, your heart rate data, and workout modes. The tile immediately to the left of the home screen is fixed as a vertically scrolling list of yet more shortcuts. You can edit your quick access apps from the Zepp smartphone app, but the shortcuts panel can be tweaked right from your watch.
Being a purpose-built lightweight operating system, Zepp OS doesn’t have access to an app store like full smartwatches do. Still, you can install a handful of simple apps developed primarily by Zepp Health. These apps range from simple games to various specialized timers to an app that recommends what type of clothing you should wear based on the weather. There are GoPro and Todoist apps, but don’t expect to find the likes of Spotify or Google Maps.
There’s no Google Assistant on the Amazfit GTS 4, but you can easily interact with Amazon’s Alexa. By default, long-pressing the watch’s crown starts Alexa listening for your voice, and responses are shown on screen and read back through the GTS 4’s tinny built-in speaker.
While the Zepp OS experience is fundamentally solid, it includes some rough edges that you won’t find on comparable devices such as Fitbit. For example, I spent a few days not getting Google Messages notifications on my wrist because, for some reason, my phone’s SMS app wasn’t listed on theApp alertspage in the Zepp smartphone app, and SMS notifications were off by default.
Also, the app is crammed with information and functionality, but very little is explained when you first come across the various features.
Case in point: I only recently noticed that, in the Zepp app’s Sleep section, there are options to log what you were doing before bed and how you felt when you woke up. There’s also a “sleep breathing quality score” I have no data for, despite having worn the GTS 4 to bed every night for weeks. The app’s only guidance about how this feature works is:The sleep breathing quality is evaluated based on your overall and hourly basis. Garbled translations like these aren’t uncommon.
Once you wrap your head around Zepp’s quirks (in the smartphone app and on the watch itself), it’s easy enough to live with, but the experience needs some streamlining. Considering how dense and convoluted a lot of the GTS 4’s features and menus are,somehand-holding would be welcome.
Given the GTS 4 is a simple fitness tracker, battery life is unsurprisingly fantastic, with the watch regularly seeing me through about a week of use with the display always on. Unfortunately, charging with the included magnetic charger is bizarrely slow. It takes about two and a half hours to get the GTS 4 from empty to full; however, that’s manageable, as you’ll only have to top up once a week or so.
Health tracking
The Amazfit GTS 4 has the typical health-tracking chops you’d expect from a watch-style fitness tracker. There’s hardware to track your location, physical activity, heart rate, SpO2, and sleep patterns. But like the watch’s software, its fitness features also lack focus.
Popping open the Workout app on the GTS 4, you’re presented with shortcuts to common exercises like running, cycling, and strength training, plus less typical activities like skiing and “golf swing.” UnderMore workouts, you’ll find a whopping 13 exercise categories, each containing between four and 31 individual activities to track. Specialized workouts like cross-country skiing and boxing are surely useful for some, but the GTS 4 also gives the option to log activities like driving, flying a kite, and playing computer games or checkers as workouts. A lot is going on here, and much of it isn’t helpful.
In my experience, the Amazfit GTS 4 isn’t an especially accurate tracker. Running on a treadmill, I noted that the tracker logged my distance at about 20 percent lower than the treadmill did. And when logging strength training, the GTS 4 regularly registered the wrong number of reps. You’re given a chance to correct the tracker’s measurements after each workout, but I think manually entering your exercise info after the fact defeats the purpose of tracking it. The GTS 4 also regularly tells me I’ve been sitting too long and should stretch my legs — while I’m already standing.
I’m similarly unconvinced by the Amazfit GTS 4’s sleep tracking. It seems like it gets the overall duration about right, but the watch isn’t good at distinguishing when I am awake versus when I am asleep. I’m a light sleeper and regularly wake up several times a night, but the Zepp app typically shows that I sleep through the night, even when I know that is not the case. Given how unreliably the GTS 4 can tell whether I’m asleep at all, I don’t trust it to gauge the quality of my sleep.
The Zepp app also pushes a subscription feature called Zepp Aura Premium that helps you sleep using “expert-curated AI compositions” and tracks “how relaxed your body gets in real time” for$10 a month. It’s optional, but ads for the service are visible on the Zepp app’s home screen and in your sleep data, so they can’t be dismissed.
Competition: What other options are out there?
At an MSRP of $200, the Amazfit GTS 4 is facing stiff wearable competition. The Fitbit Versa 4 retails for $230 and is regularly available for less. Compared to the GTS 4, it features a more polished user interface on the wearable and in the Fitbit app. Unlike the GTS 4, the Versa 4 has a skin temperature sensor, too, and at $10 per month, Fitbit Premium is a much more robust subscription offering than Zepp Aura Premium for the same price.
In this price range, there are also full smartwatches to consider. TheSamsung Galaxy Watch 4has been available for as little as $139 lately. Compared to the Amazfit GTS 4, the Galaxy Watch 4 has a better display, faster performance, and access to the Play Store — including apps like Spotify, Google Wallet, and Google Maps. The GTS 4’s week-long battery life is a big point in Amazfit’s favor here, but if you may deal with charging every day, the Watch 4 will be a better experience in literally every other way.
Should you buy it?
Compared to other wearables you can get for about the same price, the Amazfit GTS 4 does very little to justify its $200 MSRP. Its fitness tracking features don’t seem as accurate as what you’ll find elsewhere, and its menus are convoluted and packed to the gills with options.
It’s a nice-looking watch with solid hardware and a pretty display, but so are all of the best fitness trackers and Wear OS watches on the market today. In a vacuum, the GTS 4 isn’t an outright bad device, but it’s outclassed in most ways by options from more established players — and many of those options are available for about the same price.
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