Amazfit Bip 6 review: The best $80 smartwatch you can strap to your wrist

The Amazfit Bip 6 straps an embarrassment of riches to your wrist. An embar-wrist-ment. Just, a lot. It's the successor to the Bip 5, which was already a stupid-good watch for the money. For $10 less, you get even more, including a larger screen, an always-on option, better battery life, an ambient light sensor and an onboard AI assistant — to name just some of the improvements. Oh, and in place of a plastic body, the Bip 6 comes wrapped in a gorgeous aluminum alloy.

Is it perfect? It is not. Like the Bip 5 and the more health-minded Amazfit Active 2, the Bip 6 can be a bit confusing in places, both on the watch itself and in its companion app. A few features are over-engineered or unreliable. But should any of that stop you from buying it? Here's my Amazfit Bip 6 review.

Amazfit Bip 6: Why you might want a watch like this

If you're new to smartwatches, allow me to outline some key benefits. First: It's a watch, duh. But it's a watch with your choice of literally hundreds of different faces, ranging from elegant to traditional to high-tech. Many of these are free; some will cost you a few dollars.

There's also a really good Portrait watchface that lets you choose up to 10 photos from your library, then arrange the time, date and other overlay elements to your liking (so they don't block someone's face, for example). I think Amazfit's implementation of this is actually better than Apple's.

A smartwatch can also deliver notifications from your phone, meaning you don't have to fish it out every time it beeps or vibrates. At a glance you can view text messages, calendar reminders and more, which I find extremely useful. (One unintended downside: When you're with people and constantly looking at your watch because of all these notifications, they might get insulted. Thankfully, you can specify which apps send notifications to the watch.)

Next, there are the health benefits. The Bip 6 can record not only your daily steps, but also a huge range of exercises. If you're into running, biking or other outdoor activities, you can download maps to the watch for real-time GPS-powered navigation, no phone required.

The watch monitors your heart rate and blood-oxygen and stress levels, and can also capture data about your sleep. It offers predictions and reminders for menstrual cycles as well.

Because it has both a speaker and microphone, the Bip 6 lets you make and take phone calls — though as cool as Dick Tracy made this seem, it's not a feature I use much. Turns out it's not fun holding your wrist up near your mouth for long periods.

Finally, there's Zepp Flow, an "AI" assistant (quotations mine) that can answer basic questions (such as "What's the weather?") and perform a variety of watch-specific functions, like setting timers, increasing screen brightness and even placing a phone call. This is definitely more Siri than ChatGPT, but it can be useful at times — when it works. (See below.)

Those are the highlights, but there's a veritable laundry list of "smaller" features as well: stopwatch, countdown timer, music controls, voice memos, alarms, a compass and so on. This watch can do a lot. It doesn't excel at everything, and there's definitely a learning curve in some areas, but when I remember the price, I'm still pretty blown away.

Amazfit Bip 6: What works well, what doesn't

This is a really pretty watch, one that's available in three different metallic finishes with four possible sport-band colors. The immediate highlight is the 1.97-inch (50mm) AMOLED screen, a big, bright beauty with razor-sharp resolution (390 x 450 pixels). It's easy to view outdoors, even under direct sun, and it's paired with an ambient-light sensor that can automatically adjust brightness. That's a feature I wouldn't expect on a watch this inexpensive.

I don't like Amazfit's charging dock, a little magnetic disc that requires you to supply both a USB-C charging cord and an outlet to plug it into. You've got a 50/50 chance you'll place the watch on it in the proper orientation; otherwise you'll have to flip it around.

At least you won't need it that often: The Bip 6 is good for up to 14 days of regular use on a charge, according to Amazfit. Now, "regular use" is hard to quantify; overall battery life can vary depending on your usage of always-on, GPS, health-monitoring tools and so on. The good news is that the Bip typically lasted anywhere from 7-9 days during my testing — a significant improvement over Apple and Samsung watches, which are lucky to last two days.

That's an especially big deal if you want to use it for sleep-tracking, as you can wear it through the night and not have to worry about it dying the next day. (Speaking of which, I compared the Bip's sleep-tracking results with those of an Oura smart ring, and they were pretty closely aligned. That's impressive.)

In other "tracking" news, I like how quickly the watch detects (and starts recording) activity — specifically walking. Here it kicks in after about four minutes; on my Apple Watch, it takes at least 10, which I find irksome.

I'm less enamored with Amazfit's companion app, Zepp (don't ask), which has improved with time but is still confusing in places — mostly because there's just so much going on. Similarly, the user interface on the watch itself takes some practice to master. To this day I struggle to remember the difference between widgets and shortcut cards (many of which are duplicates).

The Bip 6's AI assistant is of mixed value, as it's limited in what it can do and doesn't always activate consistently — but when it works for what it works for, it's nice to have.

Want to learn more? Here's the thing: There are significant similarities between the Bip 6 and the Amazfit Active 2 — features and flaws alike. Thus, I'd recommend reading my Active 2 review for a much deeper dive into everything I mentioned above. But as for what's actually different between the two, the Active 2 is round instead of square and has a few more workout modes (160+ vs. 140+). Oh, and it costs $20 more. That's really about it.

Amazfit Bip 6: Should you buy it?

For $80, this is a ridiculously capable smartwatch. Wrist-diculously. (I'll show myself out.) And there's an excellent chance you'll frequently see sale pricing, which was the case with the Bip 5. Around Amazon Prime Day, for example, I wouldn't be surprised to see this discounted to $70 or even $60.

Beyond price, the highlights include that big, beautiful screen, the robust feature set and the impressive battery life. There are a few things that could use tweaking, sure, but the same is true of the Apple Watch SE 2 (review), which costs three times more.

Ultimately, the Amazfit Bip 6 proves beyond a doubt that you don't need to spend a fortune to strap a really good smartwatch to your wrist. I enthusiastically recommend it.