The Garmin Fenix 8 may have only just landed to take on the Apple Watch Ultra 2, but a new rival has already emerged from the sidelines – and the leaked Amazfit T-Rex 3 appears to have an even bigger AMOLED display.
As spotted by Notebookcheck, the wonderfully-named T-Rex 3 appears to have been prematurely listed at the Singapore online store Shopee. The Amazfit T-Rex 2 was already a budget rival to the best running watches and Garmin watches, but its successor appears to include a few handy upgrades.
One of these is a generous, 1.5-inch AMOLED display with a 480 x 480 resolution and 326 PPI (pixels per inch) density. That’s slightly larger than the Fenix 8’s 1.3-inch display, though the Garmin watch packs those pixels in a bit tighter for a sharper 453 PPI display.
Still, that new screen is supposedly twice as bright as previous T-Rex watches (offering 2,000 nits of brightness) and the leak suggests a larger 700mAh battery is on board to help it last for around 21 days without charging. That’s a little short of the claimed 29-day battery life of the Fenix 8 in smartwatch mode, but still more than decent.
It looks like the T-Rex 3 will have even more sports modes than the 150 offered by its predecessor, with 170 modes listed in the leaked specs. While it appears to lack the Amazfit T-Rex Ultra’s diving features, the new sports watch otherwise looks like a fully-features Forerunner or Fenix rival thanks to heart-rate tracking, GPS and Sp02 sensors (which measure your blood oxygen saturation)
Naturally, there’ll also likely be some AI assistance on board, with the listings suggesting that the T-Rex 3 will have the Zepp Flow AI voice assistant. And while we don’t yet know when the sports watch will launch, the leak suggests it’ll have have the tempting price tag of S$359 (which converts to around $275 / £210 / AU$405).
A Garmin killer?
While the Amazfit T-Rex 3’s leaked specs look promising on paper, we also hope it fixes a few other issues we found with its predecessor.
Our Amazfit T-Rex 2 review concluded that while that model is a “great outdoors watch”, a few “small accuracy issues and some less intuitive on-the-fly controls prevent it from being a budget Garmin-killer”.
More specifically, those accuracy issues were related to its GPS, which appeared to record shorter distances than rival adventure watches when we were out in the wilderness.
We concluded that the watch was fine for “recording runs and rides”, but that more adventurous fitness fans might be better off with a Garmin Instinct 2 or Garmin Fenix 7.
While we like what we’ve seen from the Garmin Fenix 8 so far, that watch’s price does also start at $999 / £869 / AU$1,699. So if you’re looking for a more affordable adventure watch for tracking sports, and don’t mind a slightly less intuitive UI, it could be worth keeping an eye out for the T-Rex 3’s official launch.
