Amazfit Band 7 review

We tested the Amazfit Band 7 over a 10-day period, pairing it with an Android phone and wearing it almost continuously. We used it to track our general activity, exercise and sleep, as well as testing the heart rate and blood oxygen monitoring features. 

Alongside general use, we tried a variety of different workouts, including strength training, walking, yoga and high-intensity cardio. 

Alongside the Amazfit, we wore a Garmin Vivosmart 5 to compare measurements, and get a sense of the consistency and accuracy of this fitness tracker. This was both for general day-to-day tracking, and specific exercise and activity tracking. 

We also used the Zepp app to see how well the Band 7 syncs data and how clearly that information is presented. This allowed us to see whether the app offers any additional support or insight into the metrics measured by the fitness tracker. 

There isn’t much in the box: a proprietary charging cable, the fitness tracker itself, and an instruction booklet. The setup guide is one page long but tells you everything you need to know.  

Setting up the Amazfit Band 7 was fairly straightforward, albeit not quite as smooth as the best experiences we’ve had. You have to plug the Band 7 into the charger to turn it on for the first time. After this step, the process follows the usual template: download the Zepp app (iOS|Android) and create an account (if you don’t have one already).  

Next, create your profile by entering details such as your date of birth, height and weight, and then pair the app with your fitness tracker. Do this by going to your profile at the bottom of the screen, and next to “My devices”, select “+ Add”. 

It took a couple of tries for the app to detect the fitness tracker, and it only connected once we’d unplugged it from the charger and plugged it back in again. Once paired, we had to download and install a software update. It took around 15 minutes for this to complete, and then the device was ready to use. 

The Amazfit Band 7 conforms to the classic band-style design of fitness trackers. It’s noticeably larger than a lot of rival products, such as the Garmin Vivosmart 5 or the Fitbit Charge 5.

This has the benefit of providing a large 1.47-inch (3.7cm) colour AMOLED touchscreen with a 194×368 pixel resolution, which is bright and easy to read. The brightness can be easily adjusted and copes well in bright sunlight – though it lacks an ambient light sensor, so the brightness won’t automatically adjust. There are a few different display themes to select from, some with more data on display than others. 

The main unit can be popped out of the polyurethane strap, and while the band comes with either a black, pink or beige strap as standard, you can purchase alternative bands online to get a colour that suits your tastes. The strap itself is comfortable, although the button-style clasp is a little fiddly to put on one-handed. Maybe it’s just our personal experience, but we found it hard to get it into the Goldilocks zone – it was often too loose or too tight, but seldom just right.  

If you want to use the Band 7 more like a watch, you have the option of setting the display to always on, but at the expense of battery life. The default option is for it to turn off after a few seconds, though it can be woken with a flick of the wrist or by tapping the screen. The screen is touch-controlled, and there are no physical buttons on the device. Swiping and tapping was responsive. 

As we mentioned earlier, this fitness tracker is a considerably larger than many others we’ve tested. It makes the screen easier to use, but if you have delicate wrists or want something smaller, this might not be the ideal choice. It’s certainly on the bulkier side compared to, say, a Fitbit Inspire 3, or the Vivosmart 5 we mentioned earlier. Even the Fitbit Charge 5 seems svelte in comparison.  

Despite its size, the polycarbonate body means the tracker is light but still feels sturdy. The touchscreen is made with tempered glass and is water resistant to 5 ATM, so it’s fine to wear in the shower or swimming pool.

The Amazfit Band 7 offers plenty of features that mean it stands up well against more expensive fitness trackers, and for less than £50.  

All the usual health and fitness tracking features are here: heart rate and blood oxygen monitoring, sleep tracking, step counting, calorie burn estimates, and stress measurements. If the tracker detects particularly high stress levels, you’ll be prompted to do some breathing exercises to help lower them. It can also track 120 different types of sport, ranging from common activities such as running, walking and swimming to – somewhat bizarrely – bridge and chess.  

Additional smartwatch-style features include weather updates, music controls, an alarm, to-do lists, Alexa voice controls, and a calendar. You can also receive call, text and app notifications.  

While the Band 7 offers plenty of health and fitness tracking, it lacks built-in GPS, which means you’re reliant on connected GPS via your smartphone, in order for the band to track walks, runs and bike rides. Nor does it offer an altimeter, so it won’t count how many flights of stairs you’ve climbed in a day (although this seems to be increasingly absent from even more expensive fitness trackers).  

The Band 7 still wants to provide some extra insights for those who take their exercise seriously, offering VO2 Max estimates (an indicator of cardiovascular fitness), an exercise capacity score, and a personal activity intelligence score (PAI for short). 

Exercise capacity score is based on something called EPOC, which stands for Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption. This is, in simple terms, an increase in your metabolism after you’ve exercised. The Zepp app will tell you if your score is low, moderate or high, and it indicates how much strain your recent exercise has put on your body. 

If the number is low, it suggests you may not be doing enough to get fitter. If it’s high, you may be in danger of overtraining, which can lead to fatigue and injury. It’s a useful metric, similar to the Garmin Body Battery or Fitbit’s Daily Readiness Score.  

Like the exercise capacity score, the PAI metric gives you a score based on the previous seven days of activity. You are awarded points based on any exercise you’ve completed in that period, with anything that elevates your heart rate enough counting towards your score (including, presumably, any particularly energetic games of chess or bridge). The higher your heart rate, and the longer it’s elevated for, the more points you get. The goal is to maintain a score above 100, but this becomes harder to do as you get fitter.  

This is a metric we have also seen on the Xiaomi Band 7. It’s a way of monitoring your fitness levels as well as encouraging you to improve your fitness by hitting and then maintaining that score.  

It doesn’t have everything that the most dedicated of fitness enthusiasts might be looking for (especially with the absence of GPS). But for general, everyday fitness tracking, the Amazfit Band 7 will be enough for most people.  

We’ll say from the start that the Amazfit Band 7 isn’t designed to offer the depth of insight that you might expect from more advanced devices, for example, a dedicated running watch such as the Coros Pace 2. It’s much more about general insights into your health and fitness, and hopefully encouraging you to be more active in your day-to-day life.  

While this device can track plenty of different metrics, we weren’t overly convinced by their accuracy. 

In everyday tracking, step counts were reasonably close to measurements from the Garmin Vivosmart 5. The difference ranged from around 200 steps to more like 1,300 – still a relatively minor gap. But some days the Band 7 counted more steps and some days it counted fewer, meaning that across all the testing days the two devices were only 130 steps apart in total. Somehow, then, the average step counts were almost identical between the two devices. 

Calorie tracking was a lot less consistent. For some reason the Band 7 and the Zepp app will only show you the number of calories you’ve burned while being active, plus a summary of your resting calorie consumption. But this led to calculations which were lower than our basal metabolic rate (the calories your body needs each day to maintain essential functions). Typically, calorie burn estimates were significantly lower than those of the Garmin device, sometimes by more than 1,000 calories. We didn’t feel these were accurate. 

There’s also the risk that if you are trying to improve your body composition, you may try to create a calorie deficit in order to burn body fat. But these readings could potentially lead to you eating far less than is realistically sustainable.  

Exercise tracking was often slightly more accurate than everyday tracking, but not spectacularly so. Heart rate tracking was generally higher than on the Vivosmart 5, sometimes as little as one beat per minute different, and never more than 10. Tracking was reasonably good, and we didn’t notice any problems with heart rate monitoring dropping out during exercise. 

Calorie burn estimates tended to be higher on the Band 7 than on the Garmin tracker, which makes the total daily calorie burn estimates even more confusing.  

The Vivosmart 5 uses connected GPS, as does the Amazfit Band 7. But when we tested this, we found the Band 7 was wildly inaccurate. Sometimes the GPS would disconnect for no reason. We tried playing with the settings, and even started a walk via the app (the app has an option to track walks without using the fitness tracker itself). In theory, by being on the phone, tracking should have been much more accurate. But even then, it was consistently over a kilometre short of the 5.6 km (3.5 mile) distance we were covering. If you’re looking for a device specifically for tracking outdoor exercise, we wouldn’t recommend this one.  

If you want your fitness tracker to err on the generous side when it comes to sleep tracking, you’ll like the Amazfit Band 7. We found that it was consistently providing higher sleep scores than the Vivosmart 5, and barely registered any of the time we spent awake during the night.  

There are question marks around the accuracy of sleep tracking on fitness trackers generally, and this device did little to dispel those doubts. While it claims to track light sleep, deep sleep and REM sleep, the numbers were not consistent and there was little agreement between the two devices to suggest a degree of accuracy.  

There was more consistency in terms of the duration of our sleep, with sometimes as little as three minutes’ difference and never more than 20. Overall, we aren’t overly confident of the accuracy of the sleep tracking – but this affects most of the fitness trackers we’ve tested. 

The Zepp app is where you’ll go to track all your data and monitor your progress over time. It’s a reasonably straightforward app to use, although not the best we’ve seen. It presents a snapshot of your data on the home page (which can be edited to suit your preferred layout), including step and calorie counts, your last night’s sleep, heart rate, your PAI score, and further down your workout history, stress and blood oxygen levels, and your exercise capacity/training load score.  

Tap on any metric and you’ll be provided with extra insights. Some are more detailed than others, but overall they explain what you are looking at and what the numbers mean. We felt that the device synced fairly quickly with the app, and there were never problems with connectivity.  

There’s less guidance and support than we’ve seen on some other apps for other devices. But if you’re happy with just tracking your data and getting an explanation of what the measurements are, this does the job. 

According to the manufacturer, the Amazfit Band 7 offers up to 18 days of battery based on “typical usage”. “Heavy usage” offers closer to 12 days. In our experience, battery might struggle to live up to these expectations. When we first started using it, battery started at 55%; we were down to 8% by the middle of our fifth day of wear.  

We probably used this fitness tracker more heavily than might be considered “typical” – although the firm doesn’t define what is meant by this. We exercised each day, tracked walks and runs, and had features such as sleep breathing turned on (which drains battery more quickly). But after charging to 100%, the battery dropped to 66% in around three days, suggesting that we’d be around the nine or 10 day mark before the battery ran out. Typical daily battery drop was around 10%. A one-hour walk with connected GPS reduced the battery by around 1%, while a 30-minute workout tracking heart rate reduced it by about 2%. 

Charging from flat to 100% took a little over two hours. On that basis, a quick charge with the proprietary charging cable while you’re in the shower could add an extra day or two of battery life.

When you compare the Amazfit Band 7 with some of the best-known brands around, such as Fitbit, Garmin and Polar, then a fitness tracker for under £50 certainly looks like good value.

It offers all the essential fitness tracking metrics you need as well as extras. It’s solidly built and the display is excellent. 

It isn’t, though, the slickest design, and we certainly felt you could find better performance from other devices, albeit at a higher price point. There are still plenty of alternatives under £50 though, so it doesn’t especially stand out even at this price. 

Overall, you’re getting a competent fitness tracker that would serve a beginner well without breaking the bank. And given that it is sometimes available for nearer £40 than £50, it makes this an even better value buy. 

If you want to consider some alternative options to the Amazfit Band 7, here are a few to explore: 

The Honor Band 7 is another sub-£50 fitness tracker that offers a lot for the money. A bright, clear screen, with plenty of smartwatch and fitness-tracking features, it has a lot in common with the Amazfit Band 7. When we reviewed this, we felt it performed solidly in terms of its accuracy and battery life. 

It doesn’t have the sleekest design, and there are certainly more attractive options out there. But you’ll generally have to pay more for those. For a beginner who doesn’t want to spend a lot but still wants to track their fitness, this is an attractive buy.  

In our Huawei Band 7 review, we described this as a fitness tracker with a great set of features for the price. It offers all the essential metrics you’d look for in a fitness tracker, with a few extras (such as notifications) that mean it does more than just track your activities. The heart rate sensor is good during exercise, although less accurate during continuous tracking. 

It isn’t perfect. Setup can be tricky, especially if you own an Android phone. And iPhone users won’t get all the smartphone features available on the device. But for under £50, this is a good value fitness tracker. 

The Fitbit Inspire 3 has an RRP of £84.99, but we have seen it available for closer to £65 in sale periods. While a bit more expensive than the Band 7, you get a similar level of health and fitness tracking features. The package is a lot more stylish, with the Inspire 3 being considerably smaller (although for some, it may be a little too small). It has a beautiful bright screen and benefits from the superb Fitbit app, which offers plenty of additional information plus insights into your metrics.  

If you want access to everything, you’ll need to pay extra for Fitbit Premium, which costs £7.99 a month after the free trial period ends. In our review, we also felt that it could have been more accurate overall. But it’s a great option for beginners and is certainly a little slicker than the Amazfit Band 7.  

The Amazfit Band 7 is a fitness tracker that offers a lot for the money. Plenty of health and fitness tracking features, an excellent display and respectable battery life. Considering the price, we can see this being an attractive option for some users. 

It does come with limitations. We didn’t feel this was as comfortable as other trackers we’ve tested. While that large screen brings some benefits, it results in a fairly chunky unit that probably won’t be for everyone, particularly if you prefer something more delicate.  

Tracking wasn’t terrible, but it was far from the best either. We were particularly confused by the way it displays calorie consumption. At best it is difficult to understand, at worst it could lead to unhealthy eating habits. It was better at tracking during exercise than everyday life, so it may be more suited to you if you only want to track your metrics whilst working out. 

This isn’t a device that we strongly recommend. It doesn’t offer anything that makes it stand out, nor does it perform well enough for us to suggest this device over others available at a similar price point. We don’t think you’d be offended by it, but in our view there are better options out there. 

• Price is a major factor 
• You’re happy with basic tracking and insights 
• You want a really big screen 

• You’re looking for the most accurate tracking available 
• You need or want reliable GPS data 
• You want extra guidance and insight from the supporting app