Amazfit took one for the team. That’s probably the best way to describe the new Amazfit T-Rex Dual Solar, which features a combined AMOLED display with not just one solar panel, but two entirely different solar panel systems. Since the first AMOLED displays came out years ago, people have been asking for companies (well, asking for Garmin, I suppose) to make a Fenix AMOLED Solar combo-dish.
But Garmin has long-resisted that idea, stating simply that the power equation just didn’t make sense, and that it was better to take that extra space and simply stick a bigger battery in there. Still, many fans really really really wanted an AMOLED watch with solar panels nonetheless, doubting Garmin’s team of battery and solar engineers.
To which Amazfit said: Hold my beer. Actually, two beers.
And thus, here we are, with probably one of the geekiest watches of 2026, including both a front and rear solar panel (yes, on the back). And yes, we finally got an AMOLED-Solar hookup, rejoice!
Let’s dive into it, as I suspect it might be the only one we’ll ever see. Still, I’m all here for the geeky!
Some Quick Spec Differences:
Now, the Amazfit T-Rex Dual Solar is essentially a T-Rex Ultra 2 watch from a features standpoint, though there are some notable hardware differences. Still, Amazfit says it’s basically a twin to that watch.
Key Amazfit T-Rex Dual Solar vs the Amazfit T-Rex Ultra 2:
– Has a smaller 660mAh battery vs 870mAh on Ultra 2
– Has a smaller 1.3” AMOLED display vs 1.5” AMOLED display on Ultra 2
– Has deeper depth gauge allowance (50m, vs 45m on Ultra 2)
– Waterproofing spec of case is still 100m
– Has a white/red LED flashlight, vs white/green LED flashlight on Ultra 2
– Gains new LiveShare feature, though all Amazfit watches will gain this via App
– $649/649EUR ($100 more than Ultra 2 at $549/549EUR)
And then from an overall standpoint here’s how the Amazfit models differ – including notably the battery claims:
And then here’s a much deeper chart of battery details on the solar model:
At this point, it’s probably worthwhile noting that Amazfit says they aren’t trying to compete here with a MIP-based Fenix MIP/Solar model. Instead, they say that most people want that AMOLED screen, but the idea here being to offer that option to provide some extra battery gains via solar, if required.
The Solar Panel Features:
Now, I want to point out up front that while it’s clear the overall solar to gains equation here simply doesn’t work for any real-world scenario, what Amazfit has done around the user interface of the solar gains is so much better and more detailed than Garmin’s watch-based solar units. So, if there’s anything to take away from this watch, it’s probably that.
Still, we have to take a moment to appreciate what Amazfit has put together here. As I’m not aware of any other watch on the market that has both front and rear solar panels on it. So, let’s start there, on the back of the watch.
This panel is obviously normally against your wrist, but the idea being you can take the watch off your wrist during a break in a long adventure (such as a lunch break, or after your’ve hiked many hours and are done for the day), and then face it towards the sun. At which point, you’re gathering double the solar gains as the front panel. Amazfit says that the solar area is pretty close to double that of the front area, and equally, the gains are 2x that of the front panels.
There’s a few things you’ll notice as result of this. First, they’ve shifted the charging connector to the side of the watch, and gone with a different connector that all their other current-get watches. This is a little bit of a bummer if you have something like their Amazfit Helio band for sleep instead (since now you need two different charging connectors), but, I wouldn’t say it’s a deal breaker.
Next, is that with this rear-facing design, there’s a new ‘Solar Boost’ mode that gets activated when the rear facing panel starts getting sun. You can technically also manually enable it too, but practically speaking once this thing ‘sees the light’, it pretty much activates immediately. That Solar Boost mode makes the rest of the watch inaccessible, unless exited.
Now, the main downside here is simply that the watch overheats in this flipped over mode really darn quick. Like, within 10 minutes quick in the toaster temperatures I live in (80-90*F/27-32*C). And once it does that, it doesn’t make any solar gains at all. Amazfit says in cooler temperatures (such as the top of a mountain), it’ll likely keep from overheating but still get plenty of solar juice.
Still, if you do the math here, even if I have to switch to the front panel, just 21 minutes of that is better than 10-minutes of the back-panel which then shuts off until it cools down. Nonetheless, that back panel, and the curvature into the optical HR sensor is super pretty/stunnng:
And certainly, in temperatures cooler than mine, it sounds like you won’t get overheating at all (such as in cooler alpine mountains temps).
When it comes to seeing those product gains, there’s a dedicated Solar widget. This widget starts off with a glance within the widget roll. From there, upon opening you’ll see the last 4-hour graph, and the current/instant inbound power. Again, this is *NOT* total gains for the 4-hour duration, but rather, the exact to-the-second current solar gains coming in:
However, that chart actually shows more than you might realize. It actually has two colors on it, such as below, showing both front panel and rear panel solar gains separately. I like this. Below you can see this where it was a bit breezier in the afternoon and I managed to keep it cool enough:
In any case, below that you’ve got the Solar Index, which looks at the quality of the solar gains coming in. Again, you’ll notice the color coding.
And then finally within this widget, there’s gains materialized in the three core modes: Regular smartwatch mode, battery saver mode, and the watch-only mode (just time basically). I *really* like this, as it’s something that Garmin doesn’t do on their watches. Not so much the different modes, but they don’t show the battery % gains.
Note however, this doesn’t account for your battery ‘loses’. Meaning, if you ‘lost’ 4% battery through just using the watch, but gained 2% from solar, you’re still at a 2% loss. Also note, along the top you can change the timeframe 1d/7/30d, which again, I rather like.
And all of this is also visible on the companion app too:
Next, back on the watch itself, there’s a few final things I want to mention. First is that when you flip over the watch, it’ll automatically engage the rear panel. But, you can manually control that in the settings:
Likewise,you can manually force it into Solar Boost mode from the settings:
In the same place that you can force Battery Saver mode, as with any other Amazfit watch.
Now, for lack of anywhere else to mention it, the watch can indeed charge from completely dead (0%) using purely solar. So if you manage to kill it off, and then have a bunch of time to sit in the sun, it can jumpstart it and get you back and cooking.
Ok, with that, let’s talk about some workouts, as well as general results from non-workout activity.
Real World Workouts and Gains:
I feel like every section here kinda has to start out with a ‘even if this boat sinks, at least they went down trying’. And in the case, I appreciate that Amazfit is pretty honest with the minimal gains you’d expect to see here in real-life conditions. In many ways, the solar aspects of this watch are really only useful if you’re
Day out in sun with mostly back gains (roughly 6 hours):
Start day battery: 53% (9:45AM)
End day battery: 55% (3:15PM)
Note: Numerous overheat messages, don’t have battery % photos after 3PM, so just left gains above from 9-3PM
Another day out in sun with mostly back gains (roughly 12 hours on back), I didn’t take a photo in the morning, but did take an evening photo with the solar gains listed:
Total time gained: 2.8% Smartwatch time
Total time gained: 8.4% Battery saver time
Total time gained: 14.0% Watch time
Note: Numerous overheat messages
And in fact, looking at each day I left it outisde, it was almost always 2.5-3.0% in smartwatch time gains via solar, regardless of whether it was front or back. That’s because on the back, it’d basically overheat (oscillating back and forth), whereas the front it didn’t overheat (only once I think), but gained less solar power (half the amount, but did it for consistently longer).
Next, a few different workouts. For fun, let’s actually start in the dark for an hour at night on a bike alongside my wife who was doing a run for about 80 minutes. In this case we can baseline the power draw (not always-on display, gesture-based, default GPS mode), with no solar gains:
Start battery: 45%
Duration: 1hr 20 mins
End battery: 42%
Loss per hour: ~2%
Note: At night, GPS enabled, no always-on display (gesture-based)
Next, we’ve got a 1-hour run yesterday. In this case there was some initial scattered thin clouds, and I was getting about 30-40lux through that, then that single thin cloud moved on, and I was around 70-80lux. Obviously, occasional trees or body blockage, though I had tried to structure the route so that my wrist was mostly facing the sun.
Start battery: 43%
Duration: 1hr
End day battery: 41%
Loss per hour: 2%
Note: No overheat messages, generally quite sunny conditions, GPS enabled, no always-on display
Next, I went out for a 2-hour ride on a blue-sky sunny day. I even structured the route so that I had the watch facing the sun as much as possible for the ‘slower’ portions (gravel/ascending), and then more mixed for some of the faster descents.
However, for reasons that aren’t clear, it looks like the solar panel entirely failed to charge here. You can see when I returned, the exact times the workout was going on, it showed zero solar power:
Amazfit is digging into it. There’s some theory that perhaps the automatic solar panel selection algorithm failed here, and was actually activating the rear panel (they can’t operate concurrently), which would have been against my wrist. Still, even the moment the ride was saved/ended, solar charging resumed normally. Either way, here’s those numbers:
Start day battery: 51%
Duration: 2hrs 12mins
End day battery: 46%
Loss per hour: ~2%
Note: No overheat messages, but also, seemingly no solar gains
Anyways, I’ll likely add in some more workouts with more data, though I think at this point there’s enough details to get a relatively clear picture of battery gains from solar across various scenarios. Obviously, if you have less sun than I do, you’ll get less battery gains. Equally, if you have colder weather thxfat’s still as sunny, you might get more gains from off-wrist scenarios.
Wrap-Up:
As I alluded to at the beginning, the Amazfit T-Rex Dual Solar is in many ways the very definition of form over function. But that’s OK. It delivered on the oft-asked request to merge together an AMOLED screen with solar, gains and battery life be damned.
And look – I appreciate Amazfit’s willingness to try and make this work. I think the back solar panel, and how it blends into the base of the optical heart rate sensor bump looks great. Admittedly, I’ll almost ever see it on my wrist, but hey, that’s kinda like having fancy underwear. Likewise, I really like Amazfit’s way of showing the battery gains in the solar widget. Though, I do wish they showed total cumulative lux hours throughout the day, similar to Garmin. But otherwise, the solar gains widget is just way more data practical/useful on Amazfit than Garmin.
Still, we can’t overlook the obvious here: The solar gains are, even in a best case crazy-sunny stick your watch outside all-day scenario…basically negligible. IN the days I stuck it outside all day, I gained a mere 2-3% of battery life. But equally, remember on those days I wasn’t wearing the watch (which would have consumed far more power with the display turning on optical HR sensors, algorithms, etc…). Once you put it on your wrist, as I showed during a GPS workout with body vs sun position/trees/etc… you quickly get to a near wash in battery gains between a sunny day and a night activity.
In other words, the reason AMOLED+SOLAR was resisted historically because it simply didn’t make sense. You had to shrink your battery considerably in order to fit all the extra solar pieces in there (just like Amazfit did). And then you have to shrink your display to fit the solar ring around that (which Amazfit did). And then once you did those things, with the power draw of AMOLED, you were left with a watch that actually gets less battery life than what you started with (which is where Amazfit lands now). And that ignores that it’s also more expensive.
Nonetheless, as I said, first attempts don’t always work out. But hopefully Amazfit takes another swing at this down the road. I certainly don’t expect Amazfit to venture into MIP-based displays, especially as that market further dwindles. But I do like seeing a company push the bounds of things, even if it’s not quite a product I would buy.
With that, thanks for reading!
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