I took advantage of a rare sunny but cold day in January to test out the GPS on the Amazfit GTS. I was expecting similar results that I obtained from the Amazfit GTR but something strange happened, well actually a lot of weird behavior occurred while using the GTS and I’m not sure how to explain it but hopefully I found the fix.
The first half of the test against the Apple Watch Series 5 performed well. Heart rate and GPS data was very similar between the two watches and then I noticed the heart rate sensor got stuck at 135 bpm while the Apple Watch was still recording the variations of my heart rate as a traversed through the woods, an open grassy meadow, and residential streets.
The GTS remained at 135 bpm for several minutes and then went up to over 160 bpm at got stuck there for a while.
The estimated distance the the GTS remained fairly close to the Apple Watch. The Apple Watch Series 5 sometimes has inaccurate GPS tracking but it’s usually not off by a significant amount.
The final distance on the Apple Watch was 1.01 miles while the GPS estimated .96 miles. Which one was closer to the actual distance? It’s hard to say since I was wandering around through the woods part of the time but the data synced over to the Amazfit app on my Google Pixel 3a, which I had left at home during this test, showed a map of what looked to be that of a previous test.
The heart rate data also wasn’t consistent to what the watch had been showing me and the graph of the heart rate showed something different than the heart rate data indicated elsewhere through the app.
I wasn’t sure what to think because I had never seen any watch do something so weird. It really looked like the app was showing data from a previous walk but had synced over some of the data of the walk.
Really, really strange. So I did some Googling to see if others were experiencing the same issue and their are known GPS issues with the Amazfit GTS. I didn’t really find any solutions to the fix it so I decided to see if there was a firmware update through the app but the app showed that the watch was running the latest firmware version
So then I checked to see if the Amazfit app in Google Play had an update and it did so I updated the app which after installing prompted an update to the watch’s firmware as well.
This firmware update apparently required that the Amazfit app be updated first.
Since I was still thawing out from my January mini-hike I didn’t feel like going out and testing the GPS again on this particular day but I did check to see if the GPS track in the app had corrected itself and it did.
As you can see the GPS of the Amazfit GTS and the Apple Watch Series 5 behaved similarly.
I’m going to test the heart rate sensor some more because my main interest was GPS accuracy on this particular day and I also possibly wasn’t wearing the watch correctly on my wrist since I had a jacket on which placed the watch too low on my wrist.
So for now, I’ll wait to make a verdict on GPS and heart rate accuracy but if you are having issues I would highly recommend updating the Amazfit app and the firmware and hopefully that fixes things. I’ll keep you updated.
