Amazfit Balance 2 Smartwatch Review: A Feature-Packed Fitness Watch Takes On The Golf Course

Golf watches are becoming more and more detailed, venturing out from giving simple yardages to greens and hazards to becoming fully-fledged fitness companions for your wrist. However, with the Amazfit Balance 2 Smartwatch it's actually the other way around - this is a smartwatch which has been dedicated to being a detailed fitness wearable that now has golf capabilities. Curious to see how this 'all singing, all dancing' watch could do, I wore it over the space of a month both on and off the golf course to see how it performed.

Although I'd tend to lean more towards using one of the best golf rangefinders on the course, I really enjoyed testing the Balance 2. I'll begin by telling you what you get with this watch because there is a lot, and I mean a lot. This is a watch built for the active, fitness-focused individual with over 170 sport modes built-in which include everything from running and hiking to golf and tennis - you can even track your scuba diving if that's what you're into (and yes, it's waterproof).

I prefer my sport to take place on land and thus leaned more into the fitness tracking aspects in relation to my gym workouts but also used it a lot out on the golf course. Pleasingly, the Balance 2 offers great detail in terms of your recovery and day-to-day health status. While you wear it you'll get 24/7 recovery monitoring, of which receiving a sleep score each morning was the highlight for me. It helped me diagnose the days I got better sleep than others and why, helping me to tweak my routines to enhance my rest overnight - it turns out eating three bowls of cereal at 11pm negatively impacts my sleep, who would've known?

What's also pleasing is how customizable this watch is. The userface can be as detailed or simplistic as you like, ranging from simply the time and date to a range of other fitness statistics. I have fiddled around with the plentiful options available through the Zepp app and landed on one with plenty of data, partly because I'm a bit of a stats nerd. My current watch interface tells me the date, time, UVI rating, temperature, current weather, step count, calories burned, heart rate and even what phase the moon is in so I know when to go into my garden at night and howl at it. Considering how many features are included and the cost (under $300), I'd argue it's a contender for one of the best value golf watches.

The most important feature for me though, given you are reading Golf Monthly, is the golf capabilities - how would it match up against the best golf watches and those that are solely built for on-course play? Well, pretty well in fact.

You have over 40,000 golf courses to choose from, although it's worth noting you'll have to download these from the app onto your watch which only takes a few seconds. Once loaded up you can fill in your handicap to receive a slope and local handicap rating as well as all the other features you'd expect from a golf watch - yardages to the front back and middle, relatively detailed course previews and yardages to each and every hazard on this hole which I found to be pleasingly accurate. You can also move the pin on each green to get a more accurate yardage to your target, a feature not seen on some of the best golf GPS devices.

After over a dozen rounds of testing, the majority of which were shared between the Championship Links and Annesley Links at Royal County Down, I concluded that the golf mode is good but can be even better with a little fine tuning. As with the rest of this watch, there is a lot going on which can lead to a slightly overwhelming feeling during use. After weeks of use I'm still not exactly sure how to navigate every feature and menu, so I'd recommend having a good read of the instructions manual and keeping it in a handy place for the first few uses.

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The score tracker also felt clunky, sometimes appearing when I hadn't finished the hole I was playing on, requiring me to press buttons in the hope it would go away. A score tracker system like on the Garmin Approach S44 which vibrates as you leave a green to remind you to enter your score is something that would enhance the golf mode on offer here.

I did find the crossover with the Zepp app an excellent feature in relation to golf, but this can be said about any of the sport modes you use.

The moment I've entered my score and concluded my round, it appears on the app, telling me how many putts I had, how many greens I hit in regulation and even gives a map on where I've walked during my round - who doesn't love a good map?

To conclude, I'd say this is a really good smartwatch and can prove really useful to the golfer who also dabbles in other sports or puts a lot of time and effort into their fitness. It's a great watch to wear day-to-day thanks to the slick, modern looks and comfortable straps (of which you have two to choose from) but I wonder will it appeal to all golfers out there.

Some golfers will want a watch more specifically built for golf and that's fine. This is a watch that performs well in a lot of areas and facets but maybe doesn't quite reach the heights if terms of golf capability than some of the best golf watches that are built specifically for the game and nothing else. Nevertheless, it's the most feature-packed watch I've ever used and could prove perfect for the very sporty individuals out there that want a well-rounded fitness companion that ticks plenty of boxes.