So what does a very affordable hybrid smartwatch that looks like a retro Casio watch get you in the way of smartwatch features? Well, not a massive lot, but there's a few surprising things that do make the cut. The name of the official app has changed, but the app itself (at least for Android) hasn't gotten any better and remains the same on the inside, meaning you still see shortcuts for the same settings at multiple locations and the ones that aren't supported by the device continue to be grayed out by Amazfit instead of being hidden. The retro-looking smartwatch also supports incoming calls and app notification alerts, but I didn't find the latter useful at all, because the smartwatch doesn't show the notification contents on the screen and all you get to see in the name of notification alerts is the notification count. Perhaps the most impressive feature of all is the Neo's battery life. Amazfit says that you should expect at least 28 days on a single charge under everyday use. That estimate jumps to 37 days if you activate the power-saving mode. I haven't had the watch for quite long enough to test these claims, but after a week of heavy use, I still had 75% battery life, so it seems spot-on.

Of course, to offer this aspect you have to eliminate the screen so that it has a totally traditional design. And this is where limitations come in. This type of smartwatches are capable of monitoring your steps, calories burned, have a notification alert system through vibration … Amazfit has a metric it calls PAI, which stands for Personal Activity Intelligence, which is a proprietary fitness metric that takes into account heart rate data in conjunction with daily activity intensity and other physiological measurements to generate a score to measure your overall fitness. The idea behind PAI is to boil down all the health data the watch is collecting into a single, understandable number. Personally, I don't find these efforts like Garmin's Body Battery very helpful, though it may be useful for others. What we found was that heart rate data displayed was generally much lower than what we recorded with a heart rate monitor chest strap. It simply wasn't very insightful data to use. The Amazfit Neo ships with a 160 mAh battery which is claimed to offer 28 days of autonomy in a typical usage scenario and 37 days in power-saving mode, which has the heart-rate monitoring, Bluetooth, lift-to-wake screen and buzzer tone disabled.The truth is that the offer of smart watches with a retro look is very limited if you want to keep absolutely all the functions of this type of wearable. But, if you are willing to lose some of them, the most reasonable option is to go for a hybrid smartwatch. In case you did not know these gadgets, say that they offer the appearance of a traditional watch, which makes them especially interesting for many people.

From an accuracy point of view, we pitted it against the Fitbit Sense and found actually that it did a pretty reliable job. It roughly recorded the sleep duration and breakdown of deep and light sleep stages. It even served up largely identical sleep scores.

Retro-looking smart watches

You can set a maximum of 10 watch display settings at any one time, which means you can pretty much get access to everything the Neo is capable of. The straps of the Neo are made of Polyurethane (PUR) and have a width of 20mm. These aren't detachable but are of good quality, and I didn't have any issues with the straps during the testing period.