Latest news with #Active2
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Business Standard
22-04-2025
- Business Standard
Tech Wrap April 22: Vivo T4 launched, Amazfit Active 2, Google Messages
Vivo T4 5G smartphone with 7,300mAh battery launched. Amazfit launches Active 2 smartwatch. Google Messages rolls out Sensitive Content Warning. Vivo unveils X200 Ultra and X200S BS Tech New Delhi Vivo T4 5G smartphone with 7,300mAh battery launched in India at Rs 21,999 Vivo, the Chinese smartphone maker, has introduced its T4 5G device in India. Priced from Rs 21,999, the smartphone runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 processor and comes equipped with a 7,300mAh battery. Vivo asserts that this model is the thinnest smartphone in its category to house such a large battery capacity. Amazfit, known for its smart wearables, has added a new model to its Active lineup by launching the Active 2 smartwatch in India. Initially showcased at CES 2025 this January, the smartwatch is positioned for users who prioritize health tracking within a premium design package. Google Messages is said to be introducing Sensitive Content Warnings that automatically blur explicit images on Android devices. As reported by 9To5Google, this function is activated by default for users under 18. For adult users, the feature is turned off by default and can be enabled manually. Vivo has revealed its high-end X200 Ultra and X200S smartphones in China. The company touts the Ultra as its most capable camera phone yet. While the X200S is fitted with a MediaTek Dimensity 9400+ SoC, the Ultra model incorporates Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite processor. It's still uncertain if these models will be released in the Indian market. Apple has released the third developer beta for iOS 18.5, resolving several bugs and performance-related issues flagged by users. Though no new features are introduced, the update brings iOS 18.5 closer to final rollout, expected in early May. With iOS 19 slated for debut at WWDC 2025 on June 9, Apple appears to be finalizing development of 18.5 with minor tweaks. Social media platform Bluesky is launching a blue checkmark feature to help authenticate user accounts. The feature is intended to enhance user trust by highlighting verified accounts. Furthermore, the system allows 'Trusted Verifiers,' including organizations, to assign these blue checks, which are distinguishable by a scalloped design. OnePlus is preparing to release its 13T smartphone in China on April 24. Prior to launch, the company has shared key specifications on its website, such as battery size and display dimensions. Samsung seems to be expanding its foldable device offerings with two new models reportedly on the way, though they may arrive later than anticipated. According to 9To5Google, citing Korean outlet The Bell, the tech giant is getting ready to introduce a cost-effective Galaxy Z Flip FE and a tri-fold device, likely by Q4 2025. YouTube Music is reportedly adding a lyrics sharing capability to its Android app, enabling users to share specific song lines on third-party apps. 9To5Google notes that this feature allows text highlighting and includes a variety of customizable background colors, resembling Spotify's current lyrics sharing functionality. Tech company Nothing, based in London, has revealed the complete design of its upcoming CMF Phone 2 Pro—marking the second handset under its CMF label. Shared via a Flipkart microsite, the design showcases a dual-tone rear and modular layout, reminiscent of the CMF Phone 1. The new phone will also include AI features similar to those found in the Nothing Phone 3a lineup. The iQOO Z10x is now available for Indian customers, starting at Rs 17,499. Buyers can find the phone on the brand's official website and select e-commerce platforms, along with special launch offers. Powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 7300, the phone includes a 6.72-inch LCD FHD+ display and several AI-enabled productivity tools. A new report from 9to5Mac indicates that Apple is set to bring an upgraded Siri experience as part of iOS 19. Initially anticipated in iOS 18.4, the Apple Intelligence-enhanced Siri will now likely debut with iOS 19, bringing features like personalized replies, contextual awareness, and the ability to interact across apps. Delta Force video game now live on PC, Android, and iOS The third season of Delta Force is now active across both PC and mobile platforms. SportsKeeda reports that this seasonal update not only introduces new content but also includes rebalancing of operator skills and weapon mechanics. Players can now access the updated version globally on Android, iOS, and PC. Google India has agreed to pay Rs 20.24 crore to settle a probe by the Competition Commission of India regarding allegations of anticompetitive behavior. The investigation centered around claims that Google imposed restrictive conditions on original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) producing Android TVs. As geopolitical tensions and dependency concerns mount, global laptop manufacturers are increasingly looking to India for production. Backed by the Rs 17,000 crore Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme, companies are shifting away from Chinese suppliers to local Indian partners. The Economic Times notes that the initiative, slow to start, is now gaining meaningful traction. Krafton has launched official redeem codes for Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI) for the first time, valid from April 22 (00:00) to June 6 (23:59), 2025. These codes, distributed on a first-come, first-served basis, will unlock exclusive in-game items such as skins, outfits, and weapon enhancements to enrich the gaming experience. According to Google's vice-president of global ads, Dan Taylor, YouTube is the leading streaming service on connected TVs (CTVs) in India and Japan. This dominance is driving more advertisers to integrate CTV-focused campaigns into their media plans, as they respond to increasing viewer engagement on the platform. Bethesda has officially announced the remaster of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion after much speculation. The news was confirmed through a mysterious social media teaser showing the Roman numeral 'IV,' signaling a return of the iconic fourth installment in the Elder Scrolls series. Priced from Rs 27,999, Lenovo's Idea Tab Pro stands out as a solid entertainment-focused tablet. With a large display, immersive audio, vivid visuals, and fluid performance, it caters to users seeking a larger screen experience than smartphones offer. While its size may be cumbersome for some, the enhanced multimedia benefits make it a worthwhile trade-off in the midrange tablet space.
The Hindu
22-04-2025
- Health
- The Hindu
Amazfit launches Active 2 smartwatch with AMOLED display and 10 days battery life
Amazfit on Tuesday (April 22, 2025) launched Amazfit Active 2 smartwatch in India. The new Active 2 will be available in Standard version with silicone strap and Premium version with both leather and silicone strap featuring sapphire glass screen. Amazfit Active 2 features a 1.32-inch AMOLED display with a peak brightness of 2,000 nits. It uses the BioTracker 6.0 PPG biosensor with a dual-LED and 5PD build. The Active 2 claims up to 10 days battery life. The smartwatch comes with over 160 sports modes, while the women can personalise their wellness insights and hormonal cycles with the mini app. The PulsePrecision algorithm tracks heart rate with accuracy, while the RestoreIQ algorithm gives sleep monitoring a similar accuracy boost. (For top technology news of the day, subscribe to our tech newsletter Today's Cache) A daily Readiness score summarizes mental and physical recovery and provides actionable insights, while the HRV feature delivers specialised recovery data. Users can also use their voice to control their watch settings, adjust their calendar. Android users get the ability to reply to instant messages with either keyboard or speech-to-text input. It supports 5 satellite systems, with ease of importing offline maps and route files with turn-by-turn directions, which can be followed on-screen or broadcast via the built-in speaker or the user's connected Bluetooth headphones. The Amazfit Active 2 starts at ₹9,999 (sale price) for the Standard version and ₹11,999 for the Premium version. It sells on Amazon and across leading retail outlets including Reliance, and Helios.
Yahoo
03-03-2025
- Yahoo
Amazfit Active 2 review: The $100 smartwatch I almost love -- here's why I merely like it
With apologies — wait, no... with admonishment — to Apple, Google and Samsung, a feature-packed smartwatch doesn't have to cost $500, $400 or even $250. The Amazfit Active 2 puts the proof on your wrist, offering fitness tracking, health monitoring, an AI assistant, solid battery life and a gorgeous design, all for just $100. And the "premium" model is only $30 more. Reality check: Like many of the Amazfit watches I've tested over the years, this one is really solid in some areas and limited or frustrating in others. The good news is, its strengths are sufficient that I can easily recommend it, and the price tag mollifies most of the other stuff. In other words, a low cost makes it easier to forgive a few quirks. Here's my Amazfit Active 2 review. The Active 2 is stunning, with a bright, colorful 1.32-inch AMOLED touchscreen embedded in a stainless-steel casing. The aforementioned Premium version nets you sapphire glass atop that display; Amazfit says it's all but impossible to scratch. That might be worth the extra $30, especially if you engage in a lot of rugged outdoor activity. For most users, however, the standard tempered glass is probably sufficient. The watch has two wide buttons on the right edge. The top one takes you to the apps page; the bottom, to workouts. Weirdly, you can modify what happens when you long-press the top button or the overall function of the bottom button, but that's it. (Why not allow changes to short- and long-presses for both?) Amazfit supplies either a black or red silicone wristband, but the aforementioned Premium version nets you a leather band as well. The latter looks nice enough from a distance but a little flimsy up close. You'll likely want to stick with silicone for exercise and water-based activities. (Speaking of which, the Active 2 can survive at depths of up to 50 meters, according to Amazfit.) I tested the Active 2 with my iPhone 13. The experience is virtually identical if you're an Android user, with one key exception: The iPhone doesn't support text-message replies from the watch. You can merely view them. (To be fair, that's true of nearly all non-Apple smartwatches.) Charging it requires a small magnetic dock that, annoyingly, has weak magnets and works in only one orientation: If you don't place the Active 2 the right way, you'll have to turn it 180 degrees. And Amazfit supplies only the dock itself; no AC adapter, no USB-C cord. I get that we're trying to reduce the world's cord-clutter, but if you don't have a spare lying around (and a port into which to plug it), you won't be able to charge the Active 2 out of the box. Few smartwatches come with decent instructions, which is unfortunate because a lot of them are fairly complicated — and the Active 2 is no exception. What appears to be a substantial, if narrow, printed setup guide has exactly two pages of actual instruction: one a series of cryptic icons, the other a list of pairing instructions with print so tiny it should be illegal. The few additional pages are legalese, followed by the same in multiple languages. (That's why the booklet is so thick.) There's a detailed user guide available online, but it's nearly all text — not great for a device that's entirely visual in operation. The majority of the setup lifting is left to the Active 2's companion app, which is confusingly called Zepp. There's nothing too complicated here, but before I could start using the watch, I had to wait on a firmware update — which took 45 minutes to install. And the app had to stay running in the foreground on my phone (i.e. I couldn't use it for anything else), which was inconvenient. There was also a curious discrepancy between the two: the app would say "35 minutes remaining"; the watch, "Please wait for 5 minutes." I had a similar experience later while downloading a map to the watch; it took over 20 minutes and displayed some contradictory messaging. Why are file transfers so slow? Because they're happening over Bluetooth; if the Active 2 supported Wi-Fi, they'd be significantly faster. Thankfully, they're mostly a once-in-a-while activity. Usability often starts with visibility, and many inexpensive smartwatches struggle outdoors, especially under bright sun. I was pleased to discover I could see the Active 2's screen just fine — though I did need to crank the brightness. (AI assistant Zepp Flow, discussed below, came in handy here, because rather than trying to navigate menus on a dim screen, I could simply say, "Set brightness to maximum.") The watch is pretty easy to operate once you learn the basics. Swipe left/right for shortcut cards, down for settings, up for notifications. Press the top button for apps, the bottom one for workouts. I strongly disliked the default app view, however; mimicking the Apple Watch, it's a huge circular corral of icons (34!) that I found largely indecipherable. Thankfully, you can switch to a list view with text labels, but you'll need to visit the phone app if you want to put them in any kind of a useful order. (You can also remove unwanted ones.) One option I couldn't find was a way to change the font size for notifications. It's readable, but some users might prefer larger or smaller text. The Zepp app has improved considerably in its latest iteration, and I'm glad; I always found it clunky and confusing. It's more streamlined and attractive, with much easier access to watch functions and settings (which are numerous). Unfortunately, I still encountered a few bugs. When I visited the app's FAQ page for Zepp Flow, there was no back button, no way out except to close and restart the app. When I reorganized the shortcut cards (which appear when you swipe left or right from the watch face), the changes didn't sync to the watch. I even rebooted both the app and watch; no luck. There's very little this watch can't do, from displaying notifications from your phone to letting you actually take calls, Dick Tracy-style (as long as your phone is within Bluetooth range, so around 30 feet). It tracks your steps, sleep, stress, heart rate, blood-oxygen level, menstrual cycles and more. It can find your phone (again, when within Bluetooth range) and display your choice of hundreds of stylish watch faces. I like the always-on mode (which is enabled by default), a feature that's often available only in pricier watches. Instead of turning off the display entirely when there's no activity, the Active 2 dims most of the watch face, leaving just the time illuminated. Take note, however, that as with all smartwatches, using this does have an impact on battery life. And then there's AI. Long-pressing the watch's top button invokes Zepp Flow, an AI-powered assistant not unlike Siri or Google Assistant. She can not only answer questions, but also control or activate watch features: screen brightness, sleep mode, find my phone, check heart rate and so on. Just be prepared for occasional hiccups. There were a few times during my testing when she wouldn't start, instead returning an error message. Some questions she answered just fine; others, like when the Oscars would be on, stumped her. I asked her to start tracking a pickleball game; she offered ping-pong or tennis instead. I said no and was informed she couldn't track pickleball — even though the sport is indeed one of the 160+ you can access manually (see below). But Zepp Flow can actually learn, which is kind of cool. When I asked for the outdoor temperature, she gave it in Celsius (even though the Zepp app is set for Fahrenheit). I repeated the request and specified that I wanted the numbers in Fahrenheit. She complied, and I followed up with, "Always give me temperatures that way." She said okay, and, sure enough, the next time, she did. Even if she's not quite as robust as other AI helpers, Zepp Flow can be nice to have on hand (er, wrist). I like the feature. True to its name, the Active 2 aims to capture any and all activity: It has over 160 sport modes, though some of them are pretty laughable: darts, foosball, even board games (no, I'm not making that up). Leveraging built-in GPS, it can show your position and provide turn-by-turn directions on a live map (provided you've downloaded it first), a decidedly helpful feature for hikers, bikers, skiers and runners. My activity testing included treadmills, outdoor walks, bodyweight exercises and a trip to the gym. Unfortunately, the results weren't always consistent. For example, Amazfit says the watch can automatically detect 25 different exercises. But in the Zepp app's Workout Detection settings, there are only eight exercises listed, and only one is active by default: walking. I learned that the 25 number refers to strength-training exercises: squats, bench presses, jumping jacks and so on. I started with a simple set of bodyweight squats; the Active 2 recorded them as "triceps pushdowns." Then I used it while performing the 7-Minute Workout, but it recorded only one long "set" and wasn't able to differentiate between the exercises. It turns out you have to manually pause the app in between sets, and actually end the activity and start a new one between exercises. This wasn't documented anywhere; I discovered it in a YouTube video specific to another Amazfit watch, the T-Rex 3. At the gym, I ran through my typical "chest day" routine, which included chest presses, pectoral flys, pulldowns, rows, etc. Most of the time, the Active 2 correctly captured the number of reps I did of each (though it would occasionally log 9 when I know I counted 10). However, when I reviewed the collected data in the Zepp app after the workout, it correctly identified only about half the exercises. I could manually edit them, sure, but between that and having to do all the manual starting and stopping between sets and exercises, it became more work than I was willing to do. Meanwhile, when I hopped on my home treadmill for 20 minutes of brisk walking, the watch never detected it. I realized later that while "walking" was toggled on in the auto-detection settings, "indoor walk" was not. (The former undoubtedly relies on GPS to help indicate forward movement; indoors, there is none.) Unfortunately, toggling other exercise-detectors (outdoor running, pool swimming, elliptical, etc.) will "greatly reduce battery life," according to Amazfit. When I enabled indoor-walk detection for future treadmill sessions, the watch did start capturing the movement — but not in a consistent (or accurate) way. The first time, it activated after I'd been walking for five minutes, but showed only four minutes of activity. The second time, it didn't kick in for a full 10 minutes, but again showed I'd logged only four minutes on the machine. Later, on the pickleball court, it confused my warmup with an indoor walk. The watch performed better outdoors, accurately detecting and logging my outdoor walks. And it does capture a lot of metrics for those who like to quantify their exercises. (It was interesting to see my heart-rate variations during 90 minutes of pickleball, for example.) I haven't even scratched the surface of all the Active's health helpers and reporting, which feel a little eclectic. For example, there's the Readiness score, which calculates various sleep metrics to help determine how, er, ready you are for the day's activities. But there's also Aura, a subscription service ($77 per year) for even more sleep data, plus analysis, guided breathing exercises and so on. There's Zepp Coach to help you create personalized training plans; something called PAI, which monitors heart-rate changes and assigns you points; and a HYROX race mode for people who know what that is (I don't, but it occupies the first two slots when you access the workout page). Finally, there's (not to be confused with Zepp Flow AI), an app that offers diet and workout recommendations based on hormonal and menstrual cycles. I felt like I'd need to take a class to better understand all these things. You don't have to bother with the ones you don't want, of course, but I came away with a feeling of feature overkill — at the expense of a simpler, more straightforward fitness experience. Anyone who struggles with tech is likely to feel similarly overwhelmed by the Active 2's overabundance of health tools. I have mixed feelings about using a smartwatch to capture sleep data, in part because I feel there's not a lot of use to having that data ("Oh, I didn't sleep well last night? No kidding...") and in part because it's uncomfortable (to me, at least) to sleep with something strapped to my wrist. That said, based on a few nights of anecdotal testing, I think the Active 2 works about as well as my Apple Watch Series 9 (but with much better battery life, meaning fewer worries about it dying during the night). After each night I was able to see a detailed breakdown of the various sleep stages, my heart rate along the way and so on. Now, if you're someone looking to diagnose some real issues, perhaps to share with your doctor, all this data might be helpful — and you might benefit from the aforementioned Aura subscription, which, among other things, promises to "assess your risk of 4 major sleep disorders." Battery life is difficult to measure because so many things can impact it: screen brightness, always-on mode, GPS usage, exercise-detection and so on. Obviously I put the watch through its paces during my tests, meaning using these and other features extensively. But I can't conclusively say, "If you do x, your battery life will be y." Instead, I'll say that depending on how you use the watch, you might get close to 10 days before needing the charging dock and you might get only a few. Sometimes it might fall in between. (Example: If you look at the lefthand screenshot, above, you'll note that the watch shows a 72% charge remaining after being fully charged just the day before.) As an Apple Watch user, I'm already accustomed to dropping it on the charger every night, same as I do with my phone; it doesn't bother me. But I also don't use it to track sleep, obviously. The key takeaway here is that the Active 2 should last you at least a few days longer than much more expensive models from Apple and Samsung. And you have at least some control over how many days that will be. For all its quirks and limitations, let's remember the Amazfit Active 2 is $99. Maybe its reach exceeds its grasp, especially when it comes to things like detecting and logging exercises. But it's a gorgeous watch with a superb screen, and it can handle the basics quite well. Indeed, for my money, the greatest value in wearing a smartwatch — beyond knowing the time, of course — is getting notifications from my phone without having to pull out my phone. Beyond that, I like tracking my step count, setting reminders, finding my misplaced phone and checking the weather. The Active 2 works very well for all that and more. The only thing that really gives me pause is not being able to respond to text messages, something I use my Apple Watch for pretty regularly. But if you're an Android user? Not a problem.
