Amazfit Bip 6 Brings Garmin Style Features At A Low Price

Amazfit has announced the release of the Bip 6, a fitness watch that offers compelling features considering it costs just $79.99.

There’s a trio of abilities on offer here quite eye-opening at this level: GPS, downloadable maps and a 2000-bit brightness OLED screen.

And the most unusual of these is downloadable maps. Garmin only starts including these pretty high up its ranges, such as in the $599 Forerunner 965.

A feature like on-watch maps also needs to be well implemented enough to feel essential. But at this price? It’s not realistic to expect perfection.

The headline here is the Amazfit Bip 6 provides both free on-watch offline maps and “turn by turn directions.” Amazfit itself admits this is a slightly limited system at present.

For example, you can’t generate routes on the watch, and you’ll only be able to see map data for your current location. It doesn’t sound like there’s software advanced enough to let you browse around an area.

This could still be a great feature for runners and cyclists, though. Half the time I send routes to a high-end Garmin watch, they’ve been created using another non-Garmin app and imported.

It’s unlikely you’ll be able to store continents’ worth of map data on the Bip 6, though.

Amazfit has not announced how much storage the watch has, but its earlier $99 Amazfit 2 watch with downloadable maps offers a guide. It has 512MB storage, and ends up with around 140MB space for map data. That’s not a lot.

Still, it’s an example of what Amazfit does best — packing in a lot of features for minimal cost.

Amazfit Bip 6 Features

Similarly, while the Amazfit Bip 6 has full GPS, it does not have currently trendy dual-band GPS.

There’s little to complain about in the screen tech. This is a large 1.97-inch OLED display of 450 x 390 pixel resolution. It has a “tempered glass” surface too, although it’s predictably not Sapphire or Gorilla Glass.

Amazfit claims brightness of an excellent “up to 2,000” nits, enough for excellent outdoors visibility even in direct sunlight. The watch has an ambient light sensor, so is able to switch to peak brightness only when required.

Elements of the design are notable too. The Amazfit Bip 6 is not all-plastic, using a metal outer frame, and its water resistance is sound too, rated at 5ATM. Its battery is rated at 14 days of typical use, or six days of heavy use.

The ways Amazfit tries to eat Garmin’s lunch aren’t limited to mapping either. Having 140 tracking modes is nothing special. But the coach features, the support for connection to other fitness devices and advanced bits like the virtual pacer mode? The Bip 6 is clearly an ambitious watch.

Those other fitness gadgets the Amazfit Bip 6 can connect to include bike power meters, cadence and speedometers, plus heart rate readers and thermometers. It connects over Bluetooth, so ANT+ devices will not be supported.

The Bip 6 also has a microphone and speaker for Bluetooth calls, and for “live broadcast” of navigation instructions and activity updates – these are voice prompts that can be played over the speaker. There’s no word of connecting headphones yet, though. That feature was added to the Amazfit Active 2 in a firmware update.

While I’ve compared the Amazfit Bip 6 to Garmin’s line a few times, this watch may have just as much appeal for those interested in the Fitbit Sense 2 or Versa 4. With those lines potentially heading for the tech graveyard as they could compete too directly with the Pixel Watch, this could be an attractive, and cheaper, alternative.

The Amazfit Bip 6 is available now, for $79.99.