With the New Year, sports tech companies are trying to get ahead of CES next week, with their announcements. While I don’t expect much notable in the endurance sports hardware realm next week at CES, I do expect we’ll see various software updates. Generally speaking, CES has lost prominence in the sports tech/fitness industry over the last 5 years (from a huge peak in 2018 or so), as companies largely realize that launching products at CES mostly just results in lower views and content depth, because there’s so many things being launched that most new products get buried in the avalanche of one-paragraph news stories.
In any event, with CES next week, let’s talk about these tidbits first.
Apple Fitness+ Updates:
Apple has announced a smattering of Apple Fitness+ updates, as they usually do around this time of year. Everything below is available as of Monday, January 5th, unless noted otherwise.
Adding 4 new multi-week workout programs:
— “Make your Fitness Comeback”: Includes HIIT, Strength, and Yoga, with three workouts per week for each type, at 10 minutes long per type.
— “Build a Yoga Habit in 4 Weeks”: Two workouts of 10 minutes each per week, one slow and one energetic, where they are designed to pair up to your existing workouts
— “Back-to-Back Strength and HIIT”: Three workouts per week of 20 minutes each, split into 10 minutes each of Strength and HIIT.
— “The Strength Basics in 3 weeks”: Three workouts per week, each focused on a different body area, and aiming to establish correct technique. Note, this one is available from January 12th.
Adding New Artist Spotlight: There are five new workouts from KAROL G, and then on February 2nd, there will be three new workouts from Bad Bunny.
New Time to Walk Episodes: These include Penn Badgley, Mel B, and Michelle Monahan (later in the year for her).
New Guests in Workouts in 2026: For Fitness+ workouts, there will be new workouts with social media stars included in some workouts, including Allie Bennett (Treadmill), TwinSauce (Dance), and Remy Park (Yoga)
In addition, they released some data from an Apple Watch study involving 100,000 participants from 2021 to early 2025. That study showed that Apple Watch users tend to keep up their streaks longer than the so-called ‘quitters day’ milestone, which is the 2nd Friday in January, when people give up on New Year’s resolutions and go back to eating ice cream (to be clear, I fully support eating ice cream). Below, you can see the spike occurring in January, after the holidays.
Specifically, Apple stated:
“During the first two weeks of January, over 60 percent of Apple Watch users increased their daily exercise minutes by over 10 percent from their December average.
Notably, many Apple Watch users kept up those exercise levels through Quitter’s Day and into the following months. Nearly 80 percent of those who increased their exercise minutes maintained those increased exercise levels through the second half of January, with 90 percent of that group also maintaining elevated levels through February and March.”
Speaking of which, if you close all three rings 7 days in a row in January, there’s a new ‘Ring in the New Year’ reward.
Meanwhile, and perhaps most interesting to folks on this site, will be iOS 26.3, likely releasing to public availability later in the month. That should allow 3rd-party smartwatches to start to receive actionable smart notifications. Up until now, that’s been limited to simply dismissing a notification, but not responding to it (e.g., responding to a text message). Of course, while companies like Garmin and others have had access to this in beta for a bit, it remains to be seen how they expand for support for this feature, which rolled out to the public. Further, at present, this notification-forwarding as described does have a notable downside for sports tech reviewers: You can’t receive notifications on more than one device at a time (today, all devices get a notification).
Amazfit Active Max Quick Thoughts:
Amazfit announced the new $169 Amazfit Active Max a few days ago, though due to some customs delays, my unit spent about a week enjoying the holidays in Barcelona. Nonetheless, it has now arrived, and I’ve started testing it out. The most notable specs are:
– 1.5” AMOLED Display @ 3,000 nits (the same brightness as an Apple Watch Ultra 3)
– Offline mapping
– Claimed 25 days of battery life (10 days with always-on display, and 64 hours GPS)
– 39.5g (including band) with 5ATM water resistance
– Includes voice control bits
– About 170 sport profiles
– 4GB of storage for offline podcasts/MP3s/etc…
– Technically has NFC for payments (but in practice, that only works with Curve accounts in Europe)
If you’re familiar with the Amazfit Active line, this is essentially taking the Active 2 watch, and making it bigger (in all the ways).
This seems like a super compelling offering from Amazfit. As I’ve noted in the past, much like COROS, Amazfit does best when they focus on the budget segment. Whereas (like COROS), when they try to go upscale, the value prop tends to fall apart. In this case, the most appealing aspect of the Active Max for outdoors folks is that it’s got offline mapping and the approximately 170 sport profiles that Amazfit has (though most of these are just categorization, rather than unique sport detection/metrics features). Still, if you need to track Chess, Tug-of-War, and Bucking, it’s there for you. Note that the Amazfit Active 2 also had maps, and it’s about $100 (though, with a smaller screen, smaller battery life, etc…). Note, I will likely be unable to test the Snow Shoveling sport mode.
The screen here is definitely large and in charge. A pretty significant contrast to the COROS Pace 3, for example, which saw its price recently reduced to $199.
Interestingly, the watch band attachment poles actually rotate with the strap, which is kinda interesting. I’m undecided if I have any opinions on that one way or the other, but it caught my attention since I can’t remember the last time (if ever) I saw the watch poles themselves move.
As for the COROS Pace 3 vs the Amazfit Active Max, I might do a bit of a comparison between the two. Obviously, the Amazfit Active Max is cheaper and on paper seems like the better deal if you want AMOLED, but I’ll do some poking around into what the real-world differences are when it comes to runners/cyclists/etc… For example, COROS has more buttons, which might make it better, especially in winter usage. Generally speaking, with Amazfit, there tend to be tons of features per the spec sheet, but they also tend to be super thin in implementation. For some scenarios, that’s totally fine, whereas for others (e.g., offline maps re-routing), that’s not so fine.
Still, I like seeing Amazfit push the boundaries here on what’s possible, either via hardware or software. I’ll circle back in a week or two with a bit more in-depth thoughts on it.
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With that – thanks for reading!
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I’ve spent the past 3 years trying to decide whether to commit to the Apple Watch Ultra 3 or the Fenix 8 Solar. As of this morning, I was 90% sure I was committing to the Garmin, but I was curious about Apple hyping up new Fitness+ features. Could it be improvements to Workout Buddy? Maybe some kind of adaptive training plan?
I think this has convinced me that Apple is never going to take serious athletes seriously. I’ve dabbled around with WorkOutDoors, Bevel, Athlytic etc but I just don’t trust the kinds of metrics developed by small teams. They mostly just copy Garmin and Whoop anyway.
This is a pretty big letdown. I logged onto Garmin’s website and they have 20% off bands. I spent way too much money on a very nice watch band, and threw my AWU3 onto the pile of things I’m listing for sale this month.
Apple are interested in the mass market. That’s the relatively casual athlete. Maybe sprint or Olympic distance triathletes, or the weekend marathon runner, but nothing more serious than that. Going for the more serious end of the market is a higher degree of complexity, for relatively little gain in revenue.
Which is not to say that the Apple Watch fitness features are utterly useless. Only that they are targeted towards the majority, rather than the more ‘hardcore’ minority. I don’t think Apple are likely to do anything more than token support for, for example, a full distance Ironman triathlete.
I was a Garmin user for several years (first with a Forerunner 920, then a Fenix 5). I switched to Apple when the first generation Ultra came out. For a while I was able to turn a blind eye to the pretty minimal sports concentration of the Apple watch. I decided that the integration with my phone was a worthwhile offset. Enough that I upgraded to an Ultra 3 last year. Then about a month ago I realized that I kind of hated having an extension of my phone on my wrist. I sold my Ultra 3, and got a Fenix 8 (grabbed it while it was on sale post-holiday, thanks for the heads up, Ray!). Now that I am back in the Garmin ecosystem, I find myself wondering why I ever left. From a sports standpoint, Apple doesn’t even come close to Garmin (and I say that as an Apple user dating back to the 1980’s). Just the simple ability to turn my Fenix into a heartrate monitor to broadcast my HR data to TrainerRoad yesterday was a breath of fresh air. I turned off all smart notification on my Fenix, so now it’s just a good-looking watch until I need it to track a workout. Your milage mary vary, but personally I’m very happy to be back in the Garmin fold.
If the notifications on third-party devices will work at least half as good as they do on Apple Watch, Apple Music will be left as a final straw. Sure, inability to use Siri and control my smart home from the wrist would be annoying (though I assume I would be able to leverage the microphone in my 970 for that), but at the same time I would be able to wear just one watch instead of two.
I’m curious if the notification forwarding will be dynamically adjustable. For example, when I’m cycling, getting the notifications on a watch (whether it’s an Apple Watch or a third-part watch) is inconvenient, but getting the same notifications on my bike computer might be much better.
If notifications are improved for Garmin, my Ultra 3 starts to look a bit less attractive than upgrading my
7XSS to an 8/8 Pro/9 (when it appears). My wife’s now discarded Series 5+Garmin HRM Pro will do Fitness+ classes just as well. Hmmm. Interesting.
Is notification forwarding available outside the EU and (possibly) the US? I’ve heard it may not be a worldwide offering.
There was some early confusion saying it was EU only, but then it became available for US users too.
At the moment it’s showing on my unit, which is a US account, but in the EU. Not sure what that means I am.
Of course, who knows for final production where things will land.
Hi following your link about amazift T-Rex 3 offline map re-routing, what was the System version during your test ?
Amazfit quickly pushed enhancement and fixes after release.
–> Changelog spreadsheets for TR3 & TR3P – link to bit.ly
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Version Date Type Description
4.2.4.3 17/12/2025 Improved Optimized the performance of the Map app and the workout track page, resulting in noticeably smoother rotation when adjusting direction
4.2.4.3 17/12/2025 Improved Optimized the display rules for imperial units in route navigation: when the distance to the next turn is 0.1 mile, it will be shown in miles
4.2.4.3 17/12/2025 Improved The default navigation view during workouts has been changed to “Advance up”, so the route direction now aligns with your actual movement *
4.2.4.3 17/12/2025 Improved Improved the sensitivity and distance accuracy of turn reminders during route navigation
4.1.6.7 1/12/2025 Improved Improved automatic route re-planning after deviation during navigation
4.1.6.7 1/12/2025 Improved Streamlined initialization interaction for the Map app
3.3.4.1 16/11/2025 Added Added navigation support for more outdoor sports
3.3.1.8 1/11/2025 Improved Improved the route creation speed and success rate in the Terrain Map app for faster and more stable path planning
2.4.2.1 29/9/2025 Fixed Fixed an issue where offline route planning could generate reverse directions.
2.2.3.3 18/09/2025 Improved Optimized offline route planning for more reasonable route selection
In this case, it was upon release, so basically last half of august and then re-tested the day of launch on the final production firmware in early September (and re-tested a few days later for fun).
I know a few reviewers had retested again in later September without any real improvement. But not sure about since then. I’ll pull it out and see where things are.
I’ve been testing the Helio again the last few weeks to see how it’s improved, mainly focused on automatic exercise recognition (which, I’d argue is the single most important thing for a display-less band to get right). It’s gotten far better in that regard. Gone are the days of 15-30 workouts per day, and now I’m down to roughly 2-3 per day (with one of which being real). The real ones are almost always overshot (too long). For example, last night I did a trainer ride for ~55 mins. It shows 1hr 24mins. The day prior, a 40-minute tempo run, and it shows 1hr 11mins.
But again, this is a big improvement compared to the past. Setting was ‘Standard’. It seems to do a good job at not missing the start of the workout, but doesn’t seem to ever correctly figure out the end, even though my HR typically falls to 90bpm and lower within 1-2 mins after my cooldown.
Really a lot of updates for the navigation/mapping sector. Seems that they have changed their infrequent update behavior? That would be good…
Thanks for this complete reply !
Amazfit seems to improve their software support, it’s more clear than all actual product, with similar “power” receive most of the latests features.
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for all firmware (use this this tag to filter) release by date
link to ze.mmk.pw
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for bench results
link to ze.mmk.pw
Hello Volker, Garmin forum are not the only place to exchange with you ;-)
See my comments for more information about release :-)
So, quickly looking at the key routing things that were failboats back in September (from my review then), they were:
1) Creating routes on watch immediately put me onto a massive highway…every time.
2) Round-trip routes were wonky AF, as if a drunk person created them
3) Couldn’t actually navigate back to start via offline re-routing (only could do as crow flies)
4) Can’t recalculate route if you go off-course automatically, and would produce errors.
5) Had to end activity to do any offline re-routing/can’t route from in-session activity
I’m probably going to run later today, we’ll see. But, in the meantime, testing a few of these with the updated/current firmware.
1) Still goes onto the highway. Although less than before, but very much visits the highway. Of course, inversely, it’s now going onto private property (literally through a construction company’s backyard, followed by running through a greenhouse company) to make some crazy routes. While running across private lands is pretty common in Spain where established trails allow, this is yolo’ing it on places that the Strava heatmap shows literally nobody has ever gone (and there are very large fences in between).
2) Round trip routes, in doing an 11KM one, very much wonky AF. Arguably worse than before, cause this time it added some random private establishment stuff, plus a few weird out and backs.
3) Navigate back via routes: I’ll need to test this out there, but a quick look at this doesn’t seem to allow it (which is basically the single biggest use-case for offline re-routing)
4) Still fails when going off-course and choosing recalculate. I went about 15m off-course, it said off-course, and then I told it to recalculate, and it immediately failed with an error. Tried again, failed again.
5) Still can’t do any re-routing/new routes from within an activity, have to end it still.
So basically, it’s essentially as bad as before. Undecided if I’ll write anything about it. Not sure the Amazfit Fanboy hate is worth listening to, seems people don’t really want to hear about actual Amazfit issues (unless it’s Garmin issues, in which case when I write/talk about those, nobody gets upset at least).
Many thanks for this feedback ! Again !!!
i only have TR3 non-pro, so i can’t check it by myself and this new informations against latest “improvements & fixes” are important.
I was thinking that this would have been better, you said “as bad as before” and this is clear.
Amazfit tried to improve the routing experience, and this seems not better …
At my side i found the map theme not enough detailed/accurate to quickly view the difference, between roads/trails/etc.
Also if the Turn by Turn are played accurately (like my Fenix 7Xss) we have less indication and sometimes nothing when the trail could need it. I can’t explain that difference for the moment because i import the same GPX from Plotaroute on each plkatform but the process on Zepp App is implicated.
Thank you !
I would never buy an Amazfit product. Also. has the Rivo review been cancelled?
Nope, not been cancelled. See here: link to dcrainmaker.com
Rode on it again last night. No issues, save an odd Zwift loss of control thing for a moment. Unclear if that was a Zwift thing, a laptop thing, or an Elite thing. First time in 2-3 months I or my wife has seen that on the Rivo.
Thank you for the update. I am a long, long time Garmin user and also an apple ultra 2 user. Still struggling with won’t wear on a daily basis. #watchfatigue.
Has any one managed to switch on the notification forwarding for their Garmin. UK user but no toggle button showing for me
iOS 26.3 isn’t out yet. Are you running the beta? And I’ll bet something has to be done on the Garmin side.
Yep running the beta but have seen posts suggesting it’s working on the 970 already with no Garmin change (I have F8)
Hmm, I’m not seeing anything in the Garmin app/side that’s showing/enabling that trigger (which would require the Garmin app to show up in the ‘Notification Forwarding’ list).
Ok thanks Ray I wondered if the posts are misunderstanding the functionality