I was showing my friend my Amazfit BIP tracker watch which I had received back in March this year (2018). My friend commented that I did not write about it on my blog. I told him that I had not been blogging about my stuff for the past 2 years because it just isn't necessary. Performing a simple Google search on the Amazfit BIP will lead to hundreds of posts and YouTube videos about the Amazfit BIP covering the device in more detail than I possibly can.
However, I have decided that I will do a post about this in case someone find my experience with it useful.
Why the Amazfit BIP?
I had been wearing the Mi Band 2 tracker since October 2016. Prior to that, I used an Omron pedometer that I bought back in 2008:
The Mi Band 2 tracker was cheap (I bought it for S$40 from Lazada Singapore), and was so much better than the Omron pedometer. The Omron pedometer measured only the steps taken. The Mi Band 2 measured that and also the pulse rate, which was used to provide a simple sleep monitor. What's more, the Mi Band 2 can be paired via Bluetooth to my Xiaomi Note 4 smartphone, and will vibrate on my wrist when I received SMS messages or incoming calls. This vibration alert was very useful because the Xiaomi Note 4 vibration is very weak. I sometimes cannot feel the phone vibrating even though the phone is in my front pants pocket (the phone is too big to be put in the rear pants pocket), and have missed calls because of this. With the Mi Band 2 paired to my phone, I can always feel the Mi Band 2 vibrating on my wrist, and I did not have missed calls problems after that.
Of course, I could have bought a more expensive smartwatch (there was a lot of Android smartwatches introduce in 2016) that offers the same tracker features and smartphone pairing as the Mi Band 2. However, almost all the other products in the market required charging on a daily (or every 2 or 3 days) basis. The Mi Band 2 had an astounding battery life of 20 days between charges! I feel that smartwatches should not need to be charged as frequently as smartphones, so the 20 day battery charge life was a winning factor. Although Android smartwatches have really gorgeous displays and superior features (you can run apps on smartwatches - the Mi Band 2 cannot), those were secondary to the main step tracker feature that I was buying the device for. So that was how I ended up with the Mi Band 2 that effectively replaced my Omron pedometer and my Casio digital watch once it arrived.
However, one year after I started wearing it, I started encountering charging problems with the Mi Band 2. Despite the fact that the tracker is securely fitted into its proprietary charging cable that is connected in to a power supply, the tracker would sometimes refuse to charge. I would have to unplug/re-plug the tracker into its charging cable multiple times until something clicks and the tracker starts charging, and then pray that the charging session will not end abruptly short of the 2 hours required to fully charge the tracker to 100%. If the tracker stops charging before 100%, I will have to repeat the unplugging/re-plugging exercise all over again. This was extremely frustrating.
The Mi Band 2 charging cable contains 2 pogo pins that touches 2 electrical contact pads on the Mi Band 2 device. I read from the internet that our body sweat damages the Mi Band 2 contact pads, making them unable to conduct the charge from the pogo pins. I am not sure if that is the reason, but it does sound plausible. Anyway, there are many complaints on the internet about charging problems on the Mi Band 2.
Because of the perennial charging problems that I am always having with my Mi Band 2, in February of this year (2018), I decided to get a new tracker device to replace it. I was worried that the "contact pads corroded by sweat" rumours about the charging problem of the Mi Band 2 is true, and is a design/manufacturing flaw of the Mi Band series in general, so getting another Mi Band product was out of the question. Fortunately, I read about the Amazfit BIP that had been launched by Xiaomi in August 2017.
The Amazfit BIP had all the step tracking, pulse rate and sleep monitoring, SMS/incoming call alert features as the Mi Band 2. And then it had this other amazing features:
1. 45 day battery charge life - this was widely touted in all the advertisements for the Amazfit BIP. This was almost double the 20 day battery charge life that I was getting from my Mi Band 2. And I can vouch that this is absolutely true. If I do not activate GPS features, but just use the basic step tracking, pulse rate and sleep assistant monitor, I can easily get 45 days between charges.
(If I activate any GPS feature on the Amazfit BIP, each hour of GPS use results in a 10% drop in battery charge).
2. Always on display - the BIP uses a transflective LCD display that consumes very little power. This allows the BIP to always display the time on the screen, and not require the display to be turned off to conserve power. With an always-on display, the BIP feels more like a watch as compared to the Mi Band 2 whose OLED display is always off (to conserve power) until you press the button (or lift your wrist) to display the time on the screen for a few seconds before the screen shuts off again.
One interesting thing about the transflective LCD screen is that the display is actually easier to read under the bright sun. On my Xiaomi Note 4 phone, I have to max out the backlight brightness level whenever I am under the sun or I will never to be able to read the display. It's the other way round on the BIP where the brighter the sun, the easier it is to read its display.
It is easier to view the Amazfit BIP under direct sunlight (top) than in the shade (bottom). In the shade, the backlight can be activated temporarily if the display is not vivid enough.
3. GPS - the BIP has a built in GPS sensor, and this is activated when a Workout is initiated from the BIP. This allows the workout to map my walk path which can then be displayed against a Google Maps map in the Mi Fit app.
4. Watchfaces - the BIP offers a multitude of watch faces unlike the Mi Band 2 which has just ONE watch face.
Although the Amazfit BIP was S$80 on Lazada Singapore, which was double the price I paid for the Mi Band 2, I was already won over by these other features that are not on the Mi Band 2. Lazada delivered my BIP in March.
3rd Party Apps
The same Mi Fit app that I had already installed for synchronizing to my Mi Band 2 is also used for the Amazfit BIP. Interestingly, the Mi Fit app cannot be used to sync to both my Mi Band 2 and Amazfit BIP concurrently on my Xiaomi Note 4 phone. The app only integrates with one tracker at a time.
However, there are some limitations with the Mi Fit app that can luckily be overcome with 3rd party apps.
Watchfaces
When I paired the Mi Fit app to the Amazfit BIP, the app provided 10 additional watch faces that can be downloaded to the BIP (the BIP comes with 10 built in watch faces). However, I discovered that the BIP has only 1 free memory slot for the downloaded watchface from the Mi Fit app. When I activated another watchface from the Mi Fit app, the new watchface overwrites the previous watchface that I downloaded earlier. When I scrolled through the list of watchfaces on the BIP, I can only see the built-in watchfaces and the newly downloaded watchface. The watchface that I downloaded earlier can no longer be selected.
Luckily, there are apps from the Google Play Store that provides hundreds of watchfaces for the Amazfit BIP. The one that I am using is called:
I am currently using this particular watchface:
I like this particular watchface because it shows all the important attributes I care about in large and clear fonts:
24 hour time ("16:48"),
steps ("9000"),
kilometres ("6.30"),
% battery level remaining ("20"),
day/month/date ("SUN 09/23"),
current weather (not accurate - sun is shown at night to represent clear skies)
current Celsius temperature ("38°"),
max/min Celsius temperature ("1/8°"),
pulse rate ("78").
Sleep Monitor
There is a problem with the Mi Fit sleep monitoring app that I had noticed when I first obtained the Mi Band 2 back in 2016.
1. If I take an afternoon nap, the nap is never registered by the Mi Fit app.
2. I sometimes work through the night, and then go to bed only after 6 am. When I wake up in the afternoon, I realise the Mi Fit app does not register the 8 hours of sleep I had taken between 6 am and 2 pm. After a while, I realise that if I fall asleep after 6 am, the Mi Fit app will never register the sleep period. However, if I fall asleep before 5:59 am, the Mi Fit app will show the sleep period.
This 2nd point is very critical because if I am working a permanent 3rd shift (11 pm to 7 am), the Mi Fit app will never be able to show any sleep data for me. I find this very funny because it seems like the programmers for the Mi Fit app do not cater for measuring the sleep for 3rd shift workers.
Sleep data was never important to me, so I never bothered to look into this when I was still using the Mi Band 2. However, after I bought the Amazfit BIP and had to download an app for watchfaces, I found that there were 3rd party apps that can supplement, and even replace, the Mi Fit app.
One of these app is the:
Amazfit Master
which I use as a supplement to the Mi Fit app. The Amazfit Master app is able to show sleep data for the 2 situations that I indicated above, and is therefore a more accurate sleep monitor than the one in the Mi Fit app.
However, the Amazfit Master app does not show the Workouts, and particularly the walk path on a Google Maps map that I find very useful. As such, I have to use the Amazfit Master app together with the Mi Fit app, and cannot just solely use the Amazfit Master app (there is an impact to the battery on my Xiaomi Note 4 phone as I need to keep these 2 apps running in the background).
SMS/Incoming Call Notification Problem
I did not have this problem with the Amazfit BIP when I first obtained it back in March. SMS and incoming calls on my Xiaomi Note 4 phone are automatically sent to my Amazfit BIP watch, causing it to vibrate and thus alert me about the SMS or incoming call.
However, in November, I received a firmware update for my Xiaomi Note 4 phone, which upgraded my phone firmware from MIUI 9 to MIUI 10.
After my phone was upgraded to MIUI 10, the BIP can no longer alert me on incoming SMS/calls that are received on the phone.
I tried a lot of configuration changes, but none of them work. The SMS/incoming call notification alert feature is now completely kaput. I am not sure if this is because MIUI 10 requires Android 8.0 and higher to work properly with the BIP notification alert. Unfortunately, although Xiaomi is very diligent with providing firmware updates, the updates are always for MIUI, but never for the underlying Android OS. Hence, my Xiaomi Note 4 is still on Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) despite the fact that Xiaomi has updated the launcher from MIUI 8 (when I got the phone back in August 2016) to MIUI 9 (last year 2017) and to MIUI 10 in November 2018.
Conclusion
Despite the problem with the SMS/incoming call alert that I now have with the BIP, I believe that is related to software conflicts in the latest MIUI 10 with Android 6.0, and not specific to the BIP itself.
To me, the BIP is still a fantastic tracker watch simply because of its "45 day" battery life and its always-on display. At just S$80, it is great value for money , as compared to smartwatches that are usually double or triple the S$80 price. It is also better than simpler trackers like the Mi Band 2 because aesthetically, it looks more like a watch.
And so far, there are no charging problems similar to the ones that had plagued my Mi Band 2.
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