Amazfit Balance 3 Review: A Rugged, Long-Lasting Sports Watch

Amazfit has moved steadily upmarket across successive generations, and the Balance 3 is the clearest sign of that shift yet. Where the original Balance looked fairly anonymous, the third iteration has obvious sporting ambitions and a design that is far less likely to blend in. It is a big, deliberately rugged watch, built around endurance training and Hyrox in particular.

The Balance 3 is emphatically not a watch for every wrist. The case measures 51.4 x 51.4 mm, which places it among the largest currently on the market, and thickness follows suit at 12.5 mm. Weight comes in at 62 g, making it slightly heavier than an Apple Watch Ultra 3 despite a smaller display.

That mass comes from the stainless steel used for the frame — tough, but not light. A titanium version is also available, dropping the figure to 55 g.

Inside the case sits a 1.5in AMOLED panel at 480 x 480 pixels, with peak brightness quoted at 3,000 cd/m2 and an ambient light sensor to drive it. In practice that is more than enough for outings in full sun. Amazfit has also specified 10 ATM water resistance and a sapphire crystal over the display, so scratches and knocks are not a constant worry.

The silicone strap is firmly sporting in character and uses a standard 22 mm fitting, which makes swapping it straightforward. Inside the case there is both a microphone and a speaker, so calls can be taken audibly at the wrist. There is also a small LED on the upper edge of the watch, selectable between white and red with adjustable brightness — a feature Garmin popularised on its Fenix line, and a genuinely useful one for winter outdoor sessions, night trails or rummaging in the bottom of a bag.

Storage is doubled from the Cheetah 2 Pro's 32 GB capacity, leaving room for maps and music. That said, the watch does not support offline playlist downloads from Spotify or Deezer. App compatibility is thin beyond the mini-apps available through Zepp's portal, but the watch does at least synchronise with both iPhone and Android handsets, and it can be linked to Google Health.

Amazfit gives the Balance 3 plenty of physical controls. A crown on the right side scrolls through the training modes and confirms actions, while a conventional button below it goes back or opens the installed apps — something a right-swipe also does. The buttons on the left duplicate the downward swipe for quick settings and the upward swipe for the widgets summarising the day's activity, weather or calendar.

Zepp Pay is among the on-board apps, but the payment tool does not work with French banks and requires the third-party Curve service instead — the same route Huawei users have to take. In practice that means depending on an additional app whose long-term future is outside Amazfit's control.

Like other Amazfit watches, the Balance 3 syncs with the Zepp app. It is dense with biometric data, arguably to the point of saying too much, and it is still held back by occasionally clumsy translations. The layout splits into tabs: the home screen subdivides into training load, sleep and fitness level; the second tab covers exercise history and hides the Zepp coach, which builds personalised training plans, notably for running; the third, Medals, handles the social side; the fourth opens Aura, the brand's AI feature, which sits behind a paid tier. The last tab is where the watch is personalised with apps, watch faces and downloaded GPS map regions.

The Balance 3 is a sports watch before it is a wellbeing device. It carries a full set of biometric sensors — branded BioTracker 6.0 PPG — including a heart-rate sensor and a temperature sensor, and it offers stress-level tracking, but it does not record an ECG at the wrist.

The heart-rate sensor supports around 180 sports according to Amazfit, with Hyrox among the most prominent. The individual components of Hyrox training are covered, and dedicated activities can be launched, from PFT sessions through to hybrid workouts. For Hyrox as much as for more conventional sports such as running, though, the reliability of the cardiac data is what counts.

In steady endurance work the watch is reasonably dependable. It struggles briefly at the start and settles within a few minutes, then follows heart rate closely with only occasional dropouts. Average deviation against a Polar H10 chest strap used as the reference did not exceed 2.21 beats per minute, although larger gaps appeared at isolated moments.

Interval work behaved similarly. The initial difficulty shows up as a clear overestimate of heart rate during the first minute of effort, then smooths out quickly. Even so, the watch needs a moment to adjust when confronted with effort blocks of roughly 45 seconds hard and 45 seconds recovery. The first block was not detected, though the following ones were picked up reasonably well. Average deviation against the chest strap stayed within 2.75 bpm, but peaks were almost systematically underestimated. Nothing disastrous, but more precise devices exist.

Positioning is handled by a dual-frequency GNSS, and it delivers. In an urban environment it proved more accurate than the comparison watch tested alongside it, and the same held in far less dense surroundings, where it followed the route with excellent precision.

The Balance 3 carries a high-capacity 658 mAh battery. Paired with an operating system that is light on resources, that allows Amazfit to quote up to 21 days. Across a heavy programme of sporting sessions the watch held out for more than 16 days, which is a real practical advantage: long training blocks can be planned without worrying about a charger afterwards.

Charging uses a small magnetic puck with pins that make positioning it on the caseback easy. No cable is included, but the USB-C connector means any phone lead will do — a sensible piece of material economy. A full charge takes 1 hour 17 minutes, which is perfectly acceptable given how rarely the watch needs one.

Rugged outdoor watches of this kind remain relatively few in number, which helps the Balance 3 stand out. The Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra is the more complete device on software functions and wellbeing tracking. Less rugged watches that suit smaller wrists, at the cost of shorter battery life, are also worth weighing up — the Apple Watch Series 11 or the Huawei Watch GT Runner 2 among them. For Hyrox specifically, though, there is no real alternative: Amazfit is the only manufacturer offering discipline-specific training on its smartwatches.