Smartwatches that cost more than an actual car are all the rage at the moment. Just look at Apple’s Watch Ultra 2, Samsung’s, er, Galaxy Watch Ultra or the newest timepiece on the block – the Garmin Fenix 8. Amazfit, if the rumours first spotted by Notebookcheck are to be believed, will challenge the paradigm with a budget-beating ‘Ultra-like’ rugged smartwatch of its own. Enter the Amazfit T-Rex 3.
Unfortunately, Amazfit has yet to even acknowledge the T-Rex 3’s existence. Thanks to what appears to be a premature listing over on Shopee in Singapore, we’ve at least got an idea of the sort of specs it’ll rep. Expect an AMOLED display up front, enough battery life to keep it going for days, and a pricetag that (hopefully) won’t make you faint.
Without the attitude
Being a continuation of the Amazfit T-Rex Pro that passed through our offices a while back, we’re glad to see the return of the AMOLED display, now measuring a massive 1.5in rather than the 1.3in we saw last time around. It’s got a 480×480 resolution and 326 PPI density, while Amazfit reckons it’ll more than double the brightness of its older models with over 2,000 nits of brightness.
Keeping that display alive won’t be easy, but Amazfit’s managed to pull out a figure most people will be happy with, promising 21 days of juice off a single charge. It may not match the month-long life you’d see in the R25,000+ Fenix 8, but the whole idea is to not sell a kidney to get the T-Rex 3 on your wrist.
Read More: Garmin unveils its Ultra-like Fenix 8 alongside fitness-centric Enduro 3
Other features include the obvious additions of GPS tracking and Bluetooth notifications, as well as 170+ sports modes, trumping previous iterations which offered no more than 150 training modes. It is, however, missing the diving functionality that makes a watch like the Watch Ultra or Fenix 8 such an attractive proposition, so you’ll need to drop the necessary dough if that’s all you’re after in your rugged smartwatch.
The lack of proper diving functionality makes more sense once you peek at the rumoured $275 (roughly R4,800) price, massively trumping the $1,000 price tag we saw on the recently announced Fenix 8. There’s still no word on an official launch, but we can’t imagine Amazfit will sit on what appears to be a complete product for all that much longer.