Amazfit - Active

If you really care about your metrics, personally and if it's possible i'll choose an Amazfit Active / Active 2, or a second handed Balance

I've been using the Amazfit Active for a while now and I really like it. Before I bought it I was between that and the Bip 5. I ended up getting the Active because it went on sale for 80. The fitness items are really robust and IMO it looks nicer than the Bip 5. It also has some stronger materials than the bip 5 that I like cause I do a lotta work around the house and it helps to have a watch that can stand up a bit of a beating.

It went back up to $109, but that's temporary, because it's price history says its mostly been at $80, so I have it droplisted on Honey. Honey is annoying af, but I can droplist items and get notified if the price falls over 5%.

Just bought it when it dropped. Gotta be better than my fitbit charge 5, it was shutting off several times a day, and the only way to restart it was to plug it in to charge.

I bought an original Amazfit bip 4-5 years ago and still use it for the gym to track time between sets. That's about all it's good for.  A few months ago I went deep down the rabbit hole of affordable smart watches and weighed cost, features, battery life, ecosystem, HR monitoring accuracy,  developer support, etc. and I think the winner at the time was the Amazfit Active/Edge (now supersedes by the Active 2 for $100).  For less than $40 new you're not getting anything that's much worth using. Slow, laggy screens, HR monitoring will be way off, likely to have QC issues, GPS will lose tracking and be inaccurate, no chance of standalone music or Bluetooth connection to other devices, battery may degrade quickly, and they'll probably have proprietary OS with poor app options and support. I'm a big Amazfit fan, so I'd say maybe the Bip 5 on sale right now for $50 is worth it. Has Zepp 3.5 which has some nice features.  I'd say you're either seeing bot reviews or people with very low expectations. If all you want is to read notifications, see the weather on your wrist, skip music tracks, and read the time then sure, but beyond that you can't expect much. 

Could be fake reviews. Amazfit (by Xiaomi) are legit and very cheap as well.