Amazfit announces PACE, an affordable GPS enabled running watch

Another day, another fitness tracker.

Amazfit announced today its third wearable device in three months, the Amazfit PACE. This is an affordable GPS enabled running watch which joins the company’s Amazfit ARC and ceramic-based Moonbean and Equator activity trackers.

The PACE actually looks a lot, in fact exactly, like Huami’s Amazfit smartwatch released in September for the Chinese speaking region. When you understand that Amazfit is owned by Huami, you realize that the PACE is the same version of the watch, tweaked to suit an English speaking user-base.

In fact, we do have Huami’s Amazfit watch in possession and have been testing it since early October. Unfortunately, while the smartphone app has an English version, to understand the display on the watch you would need to enroll in some Chinese language lessons.

“The wearables market as a whole is at an inflection point — wearables hold great promise for helping people establish healthy habits, but they are cost-prohibitive for many people,” said Frederik Hermann, Head of US Marketing and Sales for Amazfit.

“As an industry, we must come together to focus on providing more utility that encourages habit-forming behaviors, and making the technology accessible to a wider audience. We saw incredible demand for PACE when it launched as Huami’s Amazfit Smartwatch in China and we are thrilled to bring it to a US audience.”

In terms of design, the PACE boasts a circular a 1.34 inch screen and a decent, 320 x 200 resolution always-on display. The ambient light sensor ensures the screen is clearly legible even in bright sunshine. The bezel of the device is made of ceramic, which makes it scratch resistant.

In terms of performance, the watch has pretty good specs under the hood. It runs on a dual-core 1.2GHz processor with half a gig RAM and 2.4 gigabytes of onboard media storage for phone-free running. A 280mAh battery powers the whole thing.

The watch automatically tracks your daily steps, distance, calories and sleep. For running, PACE captures a wide range of metrics including: distance, time, pace, heart rate, calories, speed, cadence, maximum/average moving pace, maximum/average moving speed, maximum/average cadence, altitude, elevation gain, elevation loss and minimum/maximum altitude.

All data is clearly displayed on the screen and synced afterwards and available in the Strava Run app. The built-in GPS and GLONASS tracks your route and distance.

To top it all off, the watch sports an optical heart-rate sensor for advanced fitness tracking. Flip the watch and you will see it in the back. The heart rate monitoring is not continuous throughout the day, but it is continuous when tracking workouts and runs.

Finally, as you would expect, PACE will provide you with notifications for incoming calls, messages, emails and other apps. There is also direct access to weather forecasts, a stop watch, compass, alarms, and more.

Amazfit’s running watch has a pretty good battery life, especially when you take into consideration its specs. The built-in Lithium ion battery promises 36 hours of battery life with all functionality, including real-time GPS tracking enabled. If you use it normally, running half an hour every day and with notifications active, it can reach 5 days. This goes up to 11 days if you use it just as a pedometer.

The device is certified IP67, making it resistant to dust and water, so don’t plan on going swimming with it.

Amazfit PACE can be purchased at Amazon or www.amazfit.com.

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