Amazfit Helio Band In-Depth Review: $99 & No Sub Fee, But Worth it?

Amazfit has (once again) fired shots across the bow of mainstream competitors. This time taking aim primarily at Whoop, but also equally as much against a flotilla of other companies entertains the display-less tracking market (recently Polar’s announcement of a unit coming in September). Unlike Whoop, this device requires no subscription, and a one-time cost a mere $99 (less than half the cost of a year of Whoop).

While the company announced the Hyrox version a few weeks back, it didn’t actually make that unit for sale. It was given out to participants at the Hyrox World Championship. Further yet, they didn’t even announce a non-hyrax version. That changes with today though, with the main product simply called Amazfit Helio, and of course, priced at $99. It’ll ship immediately to anyone with a credit card.

I’ve been using it for the last few weeks, seeing how well it works. Most notably, comparing it side-by-side with the Whoop band as well. Thus, I can pretty easily compare where things work well, and where they fall short. The answers might surprise you.

The Hardware:

In terms of the hardware, it’s pretty straightforward. You’ve got an adjustable nylon band, and a tiny little USB-C charging puck:

For the record, you are totally going to lose this roughly penny-sized charging puck. The only good news is the battery life, claimed at 10 days, does seem pretty legit in my testing. So, hopefully you lose it immediately after charging, and can then acquire another one before it dies again. I’m half tempted to glue an AirTag to it.

In an case, the band is super lightweight, just a mere 20g:

By far the lighest band out there, with the Whoop 5.0/MG coming in at ~28g:

However, one (pretty substantial) gap is that it doesn’t have any sort of other band options at this point. Notably, no bicep/arm band option. That super popular option is key for many people to wear devices like this out of sight. In asking AmazFit, they’re optimistic they’ll get one out in July at some point, which is good to hear it’s in the works.

The Basics:

Starting off with the nylon band, overall, it’s quite comfortable. I barely notice it, given its lightweight as well as overall design. That  said, I will note that the strap is actually kinda small, and requires fully undoing the strap (beyond the buckle) to slide on my not-very-big-wrist. Best I can tell there’s only a single size SKU, so this could be a challenge for folks with larger wrists. Time will tell. Officially it expands from 145mm to 205mm.

As with all nylon/fabric straps, it’ll retain moisture. I point this out because it’s something a lot of people don’t think about when they then do a workout and shower afterwards, the result of which is wet shorts/couch/pants/shirt/etc if you lay your wrist down on yourself/objects. It’s the same problem Whoop has with their band (or Apple/Garmin/COROS/etc with theirs), except in the case of all of those companies, they sell alternative strap designs.

The good news is the Helio band uses a 22mm common watch band connector, so technically you could put it on anything you wanted.

Now with that said, it’s really as simple as wearing it. There’s no buttons, no display, no user-facing LED’s…nothing. Though, there is a vibration motor internally, which you can use to set alarms. The vibration is OK, a bit more gentle than I’d prefer (both in terms of strength, and the pattern). You can double-tap to end the alarm.

Meanwhile, on the back/underside of the device is an optical heart rate sensor:

This sensor stays on 24×7 to measure heart rate during both daytime activity and workouts, as well as sleep. It also includes the ability to measure blood oxygen levels, as well as stress. Further, it has high/low heart rate alerts, and can broadcast via Bluetooth Smart to 3rd party apps (e.g. Zwift, Peloton, etc…). All of this is reasonably inline with their competitors.

All of these things are configured in the settings panel of the Zepp app, which is Amazfit’s confusingly named app.

However, we’re probably getting ahead of ourselves, so let’s back to the main ‘Home’ page, and walk through the stats it gets:

The Helio band gathers, or otherwise records, the following data:

– Heart Rate (24×7, resting, workout)
– Heart Rate Variability
– Sleep metrics (Sleep Times, Sleep Stages/Phases, Sleep Score, and Naps)
– Respiration/Breathing Rate (during sleep)
– Steps
– Calories
– Stress
– PAI
– Biocharge (sorta like Body Battery)
– Exertion (total energy expenditure each day)
– Skin Temperature (except, it’s fiddly on when it works)
– Sleep Apnea estimation (non-medical though)
– Training Status
– Training Load

Notably, within the Amazfit ecosystem, it doesn’t calculate/handle a ‘Readiness’ score, which is something you’d see on some of their other watches. But otherwise, it’s basically everything else you’d get normally.

So, looking at a given day, on the Home Screen (seen above), you’ll see there core things at the top, they are:

– Sleep Score: In my case, this was 80 for Sunday. That seems roughly inline. More on the exact sleep metics in a moment.
– Biocharge: This is your body battery ending point at the end of the day, though, throughout the day it’ll update it from the starting value when you woke up. This is basically identical to Garmin’s Body Battery.
– Exertion: This is how much activity you’ve done for the day, with the goal being to get to 100%. Though oddly, you can’t get beyond 100%. So…every day I end up at 100% pretty easily.

So, before we talk about how some of this compares to Whoop and what they are doing, let’s briefly look at some sleep stats for fun. Here’s what you’ll see each night (last Wednesday I ran out of wrists for that night and some comparison testing).

All these stats are basically inline with what we’d see from their competitors, and of course, their other devices.

But more importantly is how they compare to reality, and of course other devices from an accuracy standpoint. Taking a look at last night:

Actual/Reality: Feel Asleep ~3:05AM, Woke up: 9:10AM
Amazfit Helio Band: 2:28AM to 9:18AM
Apple Watch Ultra 2: 3:04AM to 9:10AM
Garmin Index Sleep Monitor: 3:49AM to 9:10AM
Oura Ring V3: 2:58AM to 9:15AM
Whoop MG: 3:02AM to 9:13AM

If we look at a longer sleep period, Sunday night, we see:

Actual/Reality: Feel Asleep ~12:50AM, Woke up: ~10:35
Amazfit Helio Band: 1:03AM to 10:35AM
Apple Watch Ultra 2: 12:49AM to 10:37AM
Garmin Index Sleep Monitor: 12:52AM to 10:52AM
Oura Ring V3: 12:49AM to 10:36AM
Whoop MG: 12:53AM to 10:32AM

In general, looking at stats over the last few weeks, the Helio tends to be pretty close most nights, enough that it’s inline with others in most cases.

If we look at HRV values from devices from last night for example, we see:

Amazfit Helio Band: 56ms
Garmin Index Sleep Monitor: 55ms
Oura Ring V3: 56ms
Whoop MG: 54ms

Note that Apple uses a different scale for HRV than the rest of the companies, hence not included that in the above comparison.

And if we look at Sleep Scores for last night, we get:

Amazfit Helio Band: 78%
Garmin Index Sleep Monitor: 69%
Oura Ring V3: 62%
Whoop MG: 74%

Looking at last night, I’d say AmazFit’s being a bit generous on that sleep score with barely 6 hours of sleep, and the others are more inline with reality.

Ok, with sleep behind us, let’s talk about Biocharge, which is the main metric they stick in the center of their app. If you’re familiar with Garmin’s Body Battery, this is essentially the same thing. Each night when you sleep it’ll charge back up again (to what level depends on how much you sleep), and then throughout the day it’ll decline, depending on how much activity, workouts, or stress you have. You can increase it again with naps. You can see this ebb and flow below:

And from a structure standpoint this all works reasonably well, and I don’t have any meaningful issues here. However, this isn’t the same as what Whoop does, and so let’s briefly cover exertion, and then explain how this all differs.

Lastly is Exertion, which is basically how much activity you’ve done that day. As I’ve noted earlier, this tops out at 100%, and there isn’t a way to go beyond 100%. That’s a bit silly, since I can do a ton more activity one day than another day, and they both equal the same total exertion. Further, the totals directly below it clearly shows me going beyond 100%.

In the case of Amazfit, your exertion score is essentially just the sum total of the time it assigns to activities, and as we’ll see in a second, what it assigns to activities is pretty…umm…robust (read: not right).

However, now is a good time to cover a core difference between Amazfit and Whoop. Amazfit is basically focused heavily on giving you the BioCharge (energy level) and Exertion (activity quality) metrics, whereas Whoop is heavily focused giving you total training load (Strain) and Recovery metrics. Both companies also have sleep included. You can see these shown at the top of each app:

While Amazfit has Training Status stats (see the next section), they aren’t the centerpiece of the Helio band. They appear more an afterthought, at least relative to Helio and the Zepp homepage. I’m not saying they aren’t valid, but simply that *everything* in Whoop is about Strain and Recovery. EVERYTHING. Whereas here, Helio seems more aligned to an activity tracker than a sports training tracker. At least in how it drives/bubbles that information up.

Which, is a good time to move into the next section.

Workout Usage:

There are two core ways to record workouts with the Amazfit Helio. The default method is automatic workout recognition, which will automatically detect workouts and create workout/activity files within the Zepp app for each of your workouts. This matches what Whoop does, and is arguably the most critical part of Whoop’s success.

Here, we can see within the Zepp app, how you can configure this (including turning this off):

However, this immediately segues into the single biggest problem with the Amazfit Helio band: It’s horrific at this.

More specifically, it’s horrific at creating endless activities that didn’t exist. Now, to its credit, it’s never missed a workout of mine, but equally, each day is littered with countless numbers of workouts that didn’t exist. Sunday apparently had 10 workouts (I only did 2, a bike and a run). Saturday had 7 workouts (I actually did none).

The problem with this is that it basically floods the app, and your notification center, with ‘A Activities’. Even worse, it does it at totally random times. For example, in the Notification Center above, at the top right you can see it just gave me a notification for an activity that happened yesterday. Usually they’re clustered right after the activity, but many times I’ll get them many hours later (or a day later in this case).

Meanwhile, for competitive context, for all the things we can complain about on Whoop, I virtually *never* get unexplainable automatic activities. Sure, I might get a bunch of sweat-inducing yardwork categorized funny, but I’m OK with that, because I was actually doing something. Here, I’m just…well…doing nothing, and it spits out activities.

And that then gets to another key difference to Whoop: Whoop is focused entirely on what your heart rate is doing 24×7. Whether or not it/you properly categorize your activities is irrelevant to that. If your heart rate is high, it gets added to strain and thus impacts your day (and eventually downstream your recovery score). Versus with Amazfit, if your heart rate is high…well…it’s just high. It’s not really being computed against they key metrics correctly.

Let’s take a look at Sunday, which had both a 30-minute trail run at noon (incorrectly assigned 48 minutes), and then a 40 minute trainer ride at ~10PM (assigned 49 minutes). Here’s those three activities, and most critically, how they impact the Biocharge:

There are so many things wrong here in terms of how the dots connect, it’s mind-boggling. Setting aside that weird heart rate strap in the middle of the run, let’s look at the following issues:

#1: Why does the run have a Biocharge impact of -25, but the trainer ride only impact it -2?
#2: After all, both are very close in terms of calories (523 vs 590kcal)
#3: Both are relatively close in terms of average heart rate (137bpm vs 145bpm)
#4: Yet the trainer ride supposedly had a training load of 392, versus 137 for the run!?!

None of this adds up. Like, literally, it factually doesn’t add up mathematically. There’s no scenario here were the trainer ride should have been only “-2”, and the run “-25”. In every category of the trainer ride, it was more impactful.

And this gets to the most critical difference with Whoop: Whoop’s total strain is cumulative, at least up till 22 (we won’t get into the stupid of Whoop’s max 22 score, that’s been debated for years, and is a hill they want to die on). Nonetheless, with Amazfit putting their eggs in the Biocharge basket, it kinda falls apart. One could also try and assign this to Exertion, but that’s equally as messy, due to the random 100% cap and things just piling up by the hundred there each day:

Now, the good news is that if you ignore all the main things in the Amazfit app, they still have training effect, and Training Status.

 

Now in terms of that automatic activity detection, you could turn that off and only do manual workout starting/stopping, which would solve the duplicates issue.

Though, I don’t know why sometimes when I do manually started workouts, it’ll show null (zero) heart rate (like seen above). Restarting the app usually fixes the problem.

Heart Rate Accuracy:

Overall, I’ve been super impressed with the heart rate accuracy during workouts, actually beating some other devices in the accuracy department. Let’s look at three workouts for the moment, but I’ll pull more into here when I finish up my review video (for YouTube).

First up is an outdoor run I did. This was a trail run with some steep downhill sections as well as uphill sections. This is notable because many optical HR sensor struggle on steep (and fast) downhill sections, but this nailed it. Kudos!

Next, an outdoor ride. Again, an area that many optical HR sensor struggle with, and this one nailed this 2hr 30 minute ride without any issues. In fact, as you can see, it easily beat the Garmin Venu X1, which had the worst day of its life. Note that the Helio file got split into two pieces, because automatic workout recognition decided I had stopped for too long (literally just ran inside a tiny cafe and ran back out again). The Wahoo ROAM file is the Garmin HRM-600 chest strap.

And then we’ve got this indoor trainer ride, which again, was spot-on here. Really happy with the results I’m seeing:

(Note: That dropout you see at 31mins was…umm…when I went to adjust it while riding, and managed to accidentally undo the strap and had to put it back on. Sigh. So, not its fault.)

Again, I’ve got more data to pull in from the last 2-3 weeks, but all of it is basically identical to what we’re seeing above here. And more critically, the above workouts were actually some of the more ‘challenging’ ones in terms of optical HR sensor conditions. While not the hardest/longest workouts I’ve done with the Helio, they were the ones that make optical HR sensors struggle a bit – and it did perfectly fine.

I suspect part of the reason it did so well is simply the super lightweight design, alongside the snug wristband. Both of those things are key factors when it comes to optical HR sensors, because it reduces bounce of the sensor pod. When an optical HR sensor pod bounces, it tends to struggle with accuracy.

Wrap-Up:

Ok, so where do we stand?

Well, it’s kinda complicated. On one hand, the headliner aspect here is just $99 and no subscription. And certainly in comparison to Whoop’s ever-ballooning subscription fees, that’s super appealing. And notably, the base hardware here is well done, with strong battery life. Sure, it’s missing an armband/bicep band option, but that sounds like it’s on the way for July.

The challenge isn’t the cost (or a subscription fee), the hardware, or even the accuracy.

Instead, the challenge is that this isn’t really a Whoop Killer, or even entirely a direct Whoop competitor. At least, not today. This is much more akin to a Fitbit Charge 6 competitor than a Whoop platform competitor. Sure, the Fitbit Charge 6 has a screen and the Amazfit Helio doesn’t. And as such, the Helio obviously gets better battery life (and, even better optical HR accuracy). But every core feature of the Amazfit is seemingly targeted more at daily fitness than it is workout and training load

Which might be a weird thing to say since the Amazfit Helio has those features, but notably, doesn’t drive you towards them. Or at least, do them in a front and center way. Instead, everything on the main dashboard page of the Amazfit Helio is about sleep, general/total activity levels (Exertion), and general energy levels (Biocharge). That’s a core difference from the Whoop mantra which is ‘Strain’ (load) and ‘Recovery’. Whereas Amazfit mostly hides their training load/status pieces much more deeply, and as I showed in the sport comparison section, has some serious double-take moments on how they arrive at their totals.

Still, if you’re looking for something that has more sports focus than a Fitbit Charge 6, but equally don’t want to pay for the Whoop subscription cost, this is probably a reasonably good middle ground. And at the very least, it’s an inexpensive middle ground with good heart rate accuracy.

With that – thanks for reading!

FOUND THIS POST USEFUL? SUPPORT THE SITE!

Hopefully, you found this post useful. The website is really a labor of love, so please consider becoming a DC RAINMAKER Supporter. This gets you an ad-free experience, and access to our (mostly) bi-monthly behind-the-scenes video series of “Shed Talkin’”.

Support DCRainMaker - Shop on Amazon

Otherwise, perhaps consider using the below link if shopping on Amazon. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, but your purchases help support this website a lot. It could simply be buying toilet paper, or this pizza oven we use and love.