Watch Review: Neither Good nor Bad, the Amazfit T-Rex 3 Pro Is Just Fine

Over the past three months, I have been training on and off with the Amazfit T-Rex 3 Pro. This is one of the newest watches from Amazfit, and it is supposed to be able to do it all. Whether you’re a trail junkie who needs a rugged watch for your off-road runs and rides, or a triathlete who sticks to the comforts of smooth roads and calm pools in training, the T-Rex 3 Pro should have you covered.

And, for the most part, it does. If I were to sum up my experience with this watch, I’d say it was just fine. Nothing more, nothing less. I wanted to love it, but if I’m being honest, this is not a product that I would end up purchasing myself. Here’s why.

Tracking Workouts with the T-Rex 3 Pro

My first few workouts with the T-Rex 3 Pro were pool swims. Similarly to my tests with the Amazfit Balance 2, this watch was not great in the water. It took only a few laps for the T-Rex to short me on my distance tally. In multiple 2,500-metre swims, it never recorded more than 2,000 metres.

To be fair, there were a couple hundred metres of kick in each of those workouts, and many GPS watches tend to miss that part of pool swims. However, I don’t know where the other few hundred metres of my swims disappeared to. They were standard swims with nothing fancy — mostly freestyle — but the watch consistently missed full laps.

You’re not likely to buy a watch specifically to take it for pool swims, so my opinion of the T-Rex was not decided by those workouts. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, any open water near where I live in Canada is still quite cold, so I have not been able to take the T-Rex for any outdoor swims. I have, however, taken it on plenty of outdoor rides and runs, so let’s get to those.

Firstly, the watch took its time acquiring a GPS signal for every run and ride. There were times when I got tired of waiting around and started running or biking without the watch recording. The T-Rex 3 Pro always caught up and made that GPS connection eventually, but on a couple of occasions, five whole minutes passed before the watch told me it was ready to record.

Whenever the watch did finally connect to GPS, it was quite accurate with its recordings. I made sure to go on routes for which I knew the exact distances, and I also wore a rival company’s watch that I know to be very accurate with its GPS tracking.

Other than the few times when I started riding or running before the watch was tracking me (which meant it of course missed mileage in the final recording), the T-Rex 3 Pro was always bang-on with the distances. It matched the other watch, and they were both true to the route distances that I had anticipated before the workouts.

That’s a big pro for this watch, especially for the trail community for whom it is designed. No matter where you’re riding or running, you want the best and most accurate tracking. The T-Rex 3 Pro will give you that. 

The Cons of the T-Rex 3 Pro

There were several other negatives that came with this watch. These may not be deal-breakers for other athletes, but personally, I don’t want to have to worry about my watch glitching out on me before, during or after a workout — and that is exactly what happened on multiple occasions.

Firstly, the watch screen locks during workouts. This is a feature included in many sport watches, and it’s one I can get behind. This way, if you accidentally touch the screen, you won’t unintentionally pause, end or disrupt the recording. It’s the way that you unlock the T-Rex 3 Pro that frustrated me.

With other watches I’ve used, you maybe have to hold a button down to unlock it, but the T-Rex requires you to double-tap the screen. When this works, it’s way quicker and simpler than those other watches with the button-holding, but the issue is that it didn’t work quite a few times. This left me unable to stop the recording between sets, at coffee stops on rides, or for whatever other reason. Any triathlete can imagine just how annoying that is to watch the time tick by when you’re resting and not moving, therefore skewing your final workout metrics.

Another issue I ran into was actually caused by this glitch, at least initially. I had taken the watch for a run, and when I was finished, I couldn’t unlock the screen to end the session. I tried for several minutes, but ultimately gave up and left the watch on my bedside table, where I forgot about it and the unfinished workout for a bit.

Cut to the middle of the night a couple of days later and I was awoken by the watch speaking to me. It was telling me the final workout totals before it shut off. (The battery drained quicker than usual since it was recording a run that entire time.) This didn’t seem like a big deal, but in the subsequent workouts, it came back to be a much bigger annoyance that has persisted since then.

My next session was a bike ride. It recorded it just fine the whole way through, but when I ended the workout, I got a report from that run that I never wrapped up. Instead of a 90-minute bike ride, the watch told me about my 34-hour run (it died just after the 34-hour mark) from more than a week earlier.

This was sort of strange at the time, but I shrugged it off. That is, until my next workout, which was a three-mile run. Once again, it tracked just fine during the run, but when I completed it, I got a report for those same 34 hours during which I couldn’t end that other run. This has been an ongoing issue that hasn’t resolved itself, even after I cleared the watch’s workout history.

All watch and tech companies have products that suffer glitches, and they are often fixed by doing a system reset or update. Ultimately, that isn’t the biggest deal, but at the same time, it’s an annoyance that Amazfit patrons would of course rather not have to deal with.

More Pros of the T-Rex

There is one more big positive that comes with the Amazfit T-Rex 3 Pro, and that is its tremendous battery life. As I’ve said, the watch recorded that one run for 34 hours before tapping out and dying, and it hadn’t been at a full charge before I started the recording.

There were stretches when I was using other watches and I didn’t touch this one for two weeks or more at a time. I eventually went back to the T-Rex to find it still with plenty of life left. This is of course when it wasn’t being used at all, but even so, that’s impressive. The watch comes in two face sizes (44 mm and 48 mm), with the smaller of the two boasting 17 days of battery life and the larger lasting up to 25 days on a single charge.

The Verdict

The cons I’ve listed may very well be nit-picky. Maybe I’m not patient enough and should chill out a bit while my watch tries to locate a GPS signal before workouts. Likewise, maybe I’m too easily annoyed by a slight glitch like the watch screen not unlocking when I want it to. Perhaps a factory reset on the watch isn’t too much to ask to fix a technical error like the recurring case of the 34-hour run.

In my opinion, though, if you’re spending hundreds of dollars on a sports watch (the T-Rex 3 Pro retails for $399), you shouldn’t have to put up with silly issues like these ones. I’ve used many watches that connect to GPS in seconds, I’ve never had an issue unlocking my watches and I have most certainly not been required to reset everything to fix a bug in any other watch. The watch does some things very well, but I don’t know if that’s worth the negatives you’ll have to put up with.

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