Design
The Amazfit Band 5 is a budget-minded fitness tracker with a design similar to many that have come before it. The main tracker consists of a 1.1-inch full-color AMOLED touchscreen display in a polycarbonate case that houses all the sensors. To hold it on your wrist the Band 5 uses a black soft-touch adjustable TPU band.
Of course, the band is replaceable if you prefer something more colorful and a quick search on Amazon revealed myriad colors to choose from.
Finding a comfortable fit was easy thanks to the copious amount of holes on the included band, and combined with the lightweight nature of the Band 5, I could barely tell it was there after strapping it on.
User Experience
I’m coming from a Wear OS smartwatch and I found that the Amazfit Band 5 gave me many of the same features I was accustomed to along with some new ones. For starters, most watch faces will display the time and date, along with your step count or heart rate that the Band 5 monitors 24-hours a day.
Plus, the store has a wide variety of styles to choose from, including some that display additional info, such as the weather, distance walked, calories burned, and more.
Additionally, the Band 5 offers more functions, such as automatically tracking your sleep, checking your blood oxygen level on demand, monitoring your stress levels, and it can even track 11 different sports including swimming. The 5 ATM waterproof rating helps out with that last one.
Just be aware, many of these monitoring features must be enabled manually using the accompanying Zepp app, including viewing notifications on the Band 5. In fact, even after enabling notifications, you still need to manually select which apps you will get notified from.
It’s kind of a big undertaking to get the Band 5 set up initially. The app has so many options that it can feel a bit daunting to sift through them all and make sure you enabled everything you want. Plus, there are many features present in the app that are not compatible with the watch, such as the ones meant for the smart scale, and it quickly becomes cluttered and a little confusing.
For example, it took me a couple of days to find where to set up support for Alexa. Furthermore, it’s not helped by the fact that some of the English translations are a little off, in some areas of the app it’s very apparent a native English speaker wasn’t present when translating.
However, once you get the app and Band 5 set up, you won’t have to go digging around anymore. The Zepp app puts all of your pertinent details front and center, and it makes keeping up with all of your stats quick and easy.
Overall, I guess you could say I have a love/hate relationship with the Zepp app. I love the way it displays all of my health data, but navigating and setting it up is quite the chore in the beginning. The good news is, Google Fit syncing is supported in case you don’t like the app or you’d rather view all your data from multiple devices or services in one app.
I mentioned above that the Amazfit Band 5 gives me most of the functions I’m accustomed to with a Wear OS watch, however, one I didn’t realize I’d miss so much is an always-on display.
The Band 5 doesn’t have support for this and the lift to wake feature requires quite an exaggerated flip unless you enable the “sensitive” option in the settings. This made me wish there was at least some sort of tap to wake function because I don’t always want to flip my wrist to view the time or my stats for the day. Regardless, it’s a sacrifice for extended battery life and I understand that.
Battery Life
Speaking of battery life, Amazfit estimates the Band 5 will get you up to 15-days worth of usage. In my experience, that’s a big stretch, I’m sure the Band 5 is technically capable of providing 15-days of usage, but it would be a very limited use case.
In my experience, with everything enabled and taking full advantage of the fitness tracker, it lasted around eight to nine days. That’s still not bad at all, you can get a full weeks worth of usage in between charges. Still, it’s a far cry from 15 days.
Final Thoughts
The Amazfit Band 5 is a capable little fitness tracker that is much more affordable than a comparable Fitbit. It has some unique features that truly make it stand out at this price point such as Alexa support and an SPO2 sensor. Still, the app could use a little polish and a more organized design, but once you get it all set up you’ll pretty much live on the homepage anyway.
The Amazfit Band 5 retails for $50 but it can currently be picked up on sale for $30 from Amazon, B&H Photo, or on the Amazfit website.
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