The Garmin Fenix 8 may have only just arrived to compete with the Apple Watch Ultra 2, but a new rival has already emerged: the leaked Amazfit T-Rex 3 appears to have an even larger AMOLED display.
As spotted by Notebookcheck, the wonderfully named T-Rex 3 appears to have been prematurely listed on Singapore-based 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 some useful improvements.
One of them is a generous 1.5-inch AMOLED display with a 480 x 480 resolution and a density of 326 PPI (pixels per inch). That’s a bit larger than the Fenix 8’s 1.3-inch screen, though the Garmin watch packs those pixels in a bit more for a sharper 453 PPI display.
Still, that new display is supposed to be twice as bright as previous T-Rex watches (offering 2,000 nits of brightness), and the leak suggests it has a larger 700mAh battery to last around 21 days without a charge. That's a little short of the Fenix 8's claimed 29-day battery life in smartwatch mode, but it's still more than decent.
It looks like the T-Rex 3 will have even more sports modes than the 150 its predecessor offered, with 170 modes listed in the leaked specs. While it appears to lack the diving features of the Amazfit T-Rex Ultra, the new sports watch looks like a full-fledged rival to the Forerunner or Fenix thanks to heart rate tracking, GPS, and Sp02 sensors (which measure blood oxygen saturation).
Naturally, there’s also likely to be some form of AI assistance on board, as listings suggest the T-Rex 3 will have the Zepp Flow AI voice assistant. And while we don’t yet know when the fitness watch will launch, the leak suggests it will be priced at a tempting S$359 (which converts to around $275 / £210 / AU$405).
A Garmin killer?
While the leaked specs of the Amazfit T-Rex 3 look promising on paper, we also hope that it fixes some other issues we found with its predecessor.
Our review of the Amazfit T-Rex 2 concluded that while that model is an “excellent outdoor watch,” some “minor accuracy issues and some unintuitive on-the-fly controls hold it back from being a budget Garmin killer.”
More specifically, those accuracy issues were related to its GPS, which seemed to record shorter distances than rival adventure watches when we were out in the wild.
We concluded that the watch was fine for “logging runs and walks,” but that more adventurous fitness fans might be better off with a Garmin Instinct 2 or a Garmin Fenix 7.
While we like what we’ve seen of the Garmin Fenix 8 so far, that watch’s price also starts 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 might be worth keeping an eye out for the official launch of the T-Rex 3.
