Wrist Shot · No. 02
The Amazfit T-Rex 3 — a sub-$300 rugged smartwatch, a move to Utah that hasn't happened yet, and a watch that found other work in the meantime.
In this one: the T-Rex 3 · the stats · the faces · the new Dual Solar
A different kind of watch
Last time, it was an Oris — Swiss, mechanical, the kind of watch you hand down. This one is the opposite in almost every way. It's a computer. It has a battery, a GPS chip, a heart-rate sensor and an app. Nobody will inherit it. And I'm wearing it more than anything else I own.
I bought it for one reason: ski mountaineering. Skinning uphill in the dark, then skiing down — I wanted something on my wrist that could track all of it. Vertical, heart rate, pace, time on the skin track. The serious watches that do that tend to cost serious money.
Then I saw the Amazfit T-Rex 3, and the price. It lists at $279.99. I was amazed at the Amazfit, to say the least. I bought mine on sale on Amazon for $258, tax included.
Pickleball, Ski Mountaineering, Hiking. My three, right at the top of the list. Skiing, strength training and HYROX are waiting a scroll below.
The plan, revised
Our move to Utah has been delayed. So the ski mountaineering mode sits there in the menu, patient, and the watch has found other work: hiking the trails around Rancho Mission Viejo, and pickleball — a lot of pickleball.
It has more sport modes than you will ever use. Amazfit counts more than 170 of them. I use three. But it's oddly reassuring to know that if I ever take up cross-country ski orienteering, the watch is ready.
And here's the thing I didn't expect: I never notice it's on. The case weighs about 68 grams without the strap. It's a big, rugged-looking watch that wears like nothing. Three hours of pickleball, and I forget it's there.
The battery is really good, too. I usually charge it when it drops to 15 or 20 percent, and with the way I use it, that takes around ten days.
And if you get tired of the look, the band swaps out. You can change the color whenever you want.
On court with the RMV Mid-Week Pick'lers. The T-Rex rides along for every game — logging the swings, the heart rate and the calories while I worry about the kitchen line.
The Zepp app, after the fact. A three-hour pickleball session, the heart-rate zones, and a 4.29-mile hike the day before. Tap to enlarge
The part I actually love
The watch does the counting. The fun comes later, on your phone, in the Zepp app — scrolling back through everything you did. Calories burned, total steps, heart rate minute by minute, how long you spent in each zone, training load.
One Tuesday night in September, the numbers looked like this:
It sleeps, too — or rather, it watches you sleep. Wear it to bed and it records your night in remarkable detail: sleep stages, heart rate, your breathing. It's a little astonishing what this small thing does while you're out cold.
I'll be honest: I don't love sleeping in a watch every night. But it isn't uncomfortable, and when I'm curious, I wear it. The app will gently scold you when you skip a night — fair enough.
I bought it for the mountain. It turned out to be the most-worn watch I own.Wrist Shot
Six faces, one watch. Pickleball, skiing, Christmas, Thanksgiving, a data-heavy outdoor face and a classic analog. Tap to enlarge
A new watch every morning
This is the feature I didn't know I wanted. The Zepp app has hundreds of watch faces, and most of them are free. Pickleball face on Wednesday. Skier on a powder day. Something clean and analog when I want it to look like, well, a watch.
You can also make your own — your own photo, your own design — and it takes literally seconds. Save the ones you like and swap them whenever you want: Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year's, a birthday.
For a column about watches, that's a strange and wonderful thing. A mechanical watch has one face for life. This one has as many as you can dream up.
Just announced
On September 22, 2026, Amazfit launched the T-Rex Dual Solar at $649.99. It's a big step up from mine, and the headline is in the name: solar charging on both sides. There's a panel in the display, and a larger glass-ceramic panel built into the caseback — Amazfit says it's the first AMOLED smartwatch to do this. Take the watch off, clip it to your pack with the included lanyard, and the back panel charges in the sun.
Then there's the stuff you usually find on watches that cost far more. A sapphire crystal over the screen, where mine has Gorilla Glass. A Grade 5 titanium bezel. A display rated to 3,000 nits. Offline topo maps, with ski-map layers. Battery claims stretch to 51 days of typical use with the rear solar, and up to 180 days in its most frugal outdoor mode.
That's Garmin territory. Sapphire-and-solar flagships like the Fenix 8 typically list north of a thousand dollars.
I'd love to put one through a real ski-mountaineering season and report back. If Amazfit's PR team is reading — the door is open.
The verdict
I bought the T-Rex 3 for a mountain I haven't gotten to yet. In the meantime, it has quietly become part of every hike and every Wednesday night — light enough to forget, smart enough to remember everything I did.
It's not an heirloom. It won't make anyone's heart skip at a dinner party. But for under three hundred dollars, it does far more than I expected, and it has made the stats from every session something I genuinely look forward to. That's the spirit of this column: you don't have to spend a fortune to love what's on your wrist.
When the move to Utah finally happens, the ski mountaineering mode gets its turn. I'll report back. ✦