By Charles Paw Up until now, there is only one brand that is synonymous with activity tracking. Founded in early 2007, Fitbit has since become one of the strongest tech companies in the U.S., with sales raking in the hundreds of million each year, the company is now worth billions. And even though there have been some struggles, Fitbit continues to chug along at a strong pace with their most recent smart watch, the Versa, launching with much fanfare that the company has trouble keeping up with the worldwide demand. The list of companies who made activity trackers and subsequently went bankrupt is a long and depressing one, each going strong at the start and then dying a slow and painful death near the end of their arc. It is only until now that there seems to be a viable alternative to Fitbit’s products and surprisingly enough, it is not from Silicon Valley. Sister company to China’s Xiaomi, Huami has been making waves with their range of activity trackers which has been branded with the playful name Amazfit. Similar to the Xioami business model, Huami has churned out a credible line of feature-rich activity trackers that are priced significantly lower than competing brands. Xiaomi has proven that the Chinese can do more then just copy products and quality need not be synonymous with being expensive, Huami continues with this trend and in my honest assessment, I think the Amazfitline of fitness tracker will disrupt the market, which is a good thing. Having a more affordable alternative to any industry is good to both the retailers and consumers. At around Php 10,000, the flagship Amazfit model is called the Stratos, and it has every feature you’d ever want in an activity tracker. It has GPS, Bluetooth, Wifi, submersible in water up to 50 meters, can track almost every sort including running on an elliptical machine, has sleep tracking capabilities, can also track steps, has an optical heart rate monitor and even 4GB of storage so you can store music and audio books on the watch itself. On the software side, the Stratos can be paired to an iOS or Android smartphone which will enable it to show notifications for email, SMS, calls and other instant messaging apps. Sports enthusiasts would be happy to know that the Stratos can be synced to the very popular Strava application. It is easy to go overboard with the features and neglect the hit on battery life, but the Amazfit line of activity trackers seem to be no slouch in the battery life department. The feature-rich Stratos can last from 5 to 11 days, depending on how active the user is. Not bad considering it has both GPS and a heart rate monitor. Amazingly enough, the Bip (Amazfit’sPhp 5,000 GPS smartwatch) can last a whooping 30 days with just a single charge. The Amazfit brand is one of the best that I have seen, and similar to Fitbit, I decided to make it available in the Philippines in an official capacity. Yep, by the time you’re reading this, Amazfit’s line of activity tracker and smartwatch will be available in most Digital Walker stores, sold alongside Fitbit. I don’t think that those 2 brands compete with each other, I think Fitbit and Amazfit will be filling their own niche and both can coexist in the market. Which Brand do I prefer, hard question to answer. But since most of my friends are on Fitbit, I’ll mostly likely be wearing my Fitbit Ionic more often.  Although, that still won’t stop me from wearing an Amazfit smartwatch every now and then.