Amazfit Cheetah 2 Ultra 测评：钛合金机身与精准导航的越野手表

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Amazfit might be the busiest brand in running watches these days when it comes to releasing new models, and the Amazfit Cheetah 2 Ultra ($600) is the pure running watch in the family. Fresh off testing the Amazfit T-Rex Ultra 2 —which we include in our updated Best GPS Running Watches guide — the Cheetah 2 Ultra feels like the slightly smaller, streamlined device I’ve been waiting for from the brand.

Unlike many other high-end GPS watches built for adventure, the Cheetah 2 Ultra puts much less emphasis on tracking other sports; there are no wild claims about its submersion depth in water, for example. It’s oriented around your experience running: maps and navigation, training metrics, durability, and battery life. To me, it’s their most successful watch to date — even more so than the flashy road-running-targeted Amazfit Cheetah 2 Pro in terms of accuracy, features, and aesthetics.

Shop the Amazfit Cheetah 2 Ultra

Amazfit Cheetah 2 Ultra Build and Design

The Amazfit Cheetah 2 Ultra finds a niche in being both highly functional and more elegant than many other GPS watches, especially any previous Amazfit. If the T-Rex Ultra 2 was more Garmin Enduro, the Cheetah 2 Ultra is more Garmin Forerunner 970 (review). While it’s not quite as light as the Forerunner 970, it’s certainly not the wrist-swallowing, adventure-gulping size and footprint of an Enduro or the T-Rex Ultra 2.

At $600, the Amazfit Cheetah 2 Ultra — coming from a brand once thought of as the budget alternative to Garmin and Suunto — starts to demand a more scrutinizing eye. Does a GPS watch for trail running need to look good at the dinner table, too? The answer is no, but many watches suffer from a real lack of all-day wearability. Around your colleagues at work or your non-running friends, you might not want an 8,000-meter-peak-expedition computer on your wrist when all you really want is to record your morning run and then just tell the time the rest of the day. On this front, the Cheetah 2 Ultra is exceptional.

With the Cheetah 2 Ultra, you get a tidier case than the T-Rex Ultra 2, but with the same Grade 5 titanium and sapphire display as its heartier siblings, a detail that will give trail runners confidence when tripping or colliding with rock or other hazards. There is no plastic anywhere on the external frame, and even the buttons are titanium. It gives the watch a huge aesthetic boost compared to nearly any GPS running watch I’ve tested, particularly other Amazfit devices that suffer from a Casio G-Shock vibe.

That refinement extends to how you interact with the watch day to day. Voice activation lets you start a run, set a nap timer, or trigger a countdown without button-pushing through menus — it’s a useful feature when you’re standing at a trailhead in gloves or half-asleep for an alpine start.

The AMOLED display is incredibly vibrant at 1.5 inches and 3,000 nits — the watch handles the transition from darkened canyons to exposed saddles extremely well. It’s part of what makes the display so striking — it’s just so damn bright, and in this case, that’s unambiguously a good thing.

Amazfit Cheetah 2 Ultra Battery

The slightly smaller Amazfit Cheetah 2 Ultra case doesn’t cost you battery life. Amazfit claims 33 hours in Trail Running mode on the Cheetah 2 Ultra, which is three hours more than the T-Rex Ultra 2, and nothing in my testing gave me reason to doubt it.

With a couple of two-hour runs per week, bookended by daily one-hour outings with everything activated — dual-frequency, all-satellite GPS, heart rate, always-on display, and full day/night health suite tracking — I found I was only reaching for the charger every ten days or so. That kind of endurance in daily use is one of the watch’s best qualities; you stop thinking about battery life entirely, which is exactly what you want from a tool you’re supposed to depend on.

The Cheetah 2 Ultra also includes a flashlight with four levels of white brightness, plus a red light option, so the early starts and late finishes that eat into the battery are at least well-lit ones.

Amazfit Cheetah 2 Ultra Navigation and GPS

Like most $500 to $700 GPS running watches that aren’t Garmins, the Amazfit Cheetah 2 Ultra doesn’t come with pre-loaded maps. Instead, you can upload your route to Zepp, Amazfit’s app, and it will download only the maps around your route. This results in a smaller, faster file transfer than downloading an entire state’s worth of maps. For me, transfer times were about four to six minutes, and this system makes better use of the watch’s 64 GB of onboard storage.

While navigating routes, I found the Cheetah 2 Ultra GPS chipset and mapping to be simply phenomenal. With navigation alerts activated, it can predict switchback turns with pinpoint accuracy just meters before you approach them. The watch includes a dual-band GPS chipset that uses all six satellite systems, giving the most reliable coverage possible in remote terrain with mixed sky exposure. This has become an industry standard for trail running watches.

The one frustration came during interval sessions. When I hit the lap button, the watch can take a beat to catch up, so the first few seconds of a new split often drag the average pace down. This didn’t happen on every split, and it’s not a dealbreaker for trail use — and it’s likely fixable by a firmware update in the future — but it’s worth noting if intervals are a big part of your training.

Amazfit Cheetah 2 Ultra Trail Features and Metrics

Some trail runners would rather not have the gory intricacies of their route on full display six hours into a mountain run — but should you want all the details, the Amazfit Cheetah 2 Ultra has the tools for it.

Running power, lactate threshold, and recovery tracking keep tabs on how hard you’re actually working versus how hard it feels. While these are great, the feature that stood out most is the Elevation Overview, which color-codes slope difficulty across the entire route. It’s the kind of feature that sounds like a spec-sheet detail until you’re depending on it in a race or deep into a long run, deciding whether to push or conserve on the next climb.

Amazfit Cheetah 2 Ultra Overall Impressions

At $600, the Amazfit Cheetah 2 Ultra won’t dethrone the Garmin Forerunner 970 on raw feature depth or GPS accuracy, but it matches it on price while offering something Garmin still hasn’t cracked: a watch that looks and feels genuinely refined on and off the trail.

The watch is Amazfit’s most serious bid yet for the premium trail running market — and it’s largely pulling it off.  If you’re already in the Amazfit ecosystem, this is an easy call. If you’re not, the Cheetah 2 Ultra is the first Amazfit I’d recommend to bring you into the fold.

Shop the Amazfit Cheetah 2 Ultra

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Check out our Best GPS Running Watches guide to learn about our current favorite GPS running watches for running!

Call for Comments

• Have you tried any Amazfit watches? What were your thoughts?
• What’s your go-to running watch at the moment?

Amazfit Cheetah 2 Ultra Review by Craig Randall.