Huawei Watch Review

One of the more aesthetically minded Android Wear smartwatches, the Huawei Watch does its best at incorporating reasonable performance into a sleek design. While this is by no means a poor choice, it fails to stand out in a particular area of testing and is a little pricey compared to other similarly scoring models, making it a poor choice in terms of value.

Ease of Use

This timepiece runs the Android Wear operating system. It's a relatively frustrating process to capture a screenshot of the content on the watch's screen. The Huawei had a reasonable level of water resistance, complying with the IP67 standard. This means that it can handle washing your hands or being out in the rain without issue, but isn't suitable for swimming, diving, or prolonged submersion.

The charging cable wasn't the most reliable, but it remained connected most of the time. The Huawei Watch uses magnets to aid in aligning the connector pins, but sometimes it did take a second try or some slight adjusting to achieve a solid connection.

This model lacks a crown scroll, leaving the side buttons and the touchscreen as the only interface methods available. This model has a nicely responsive touchscreen without being overly finicky and twitchy. This model was a little less responsive in terms of waking from its sleep mode, taking about a second for the display to light up when you raised your wrist from your side. This model allows you to swap wristbands.

Smart Functions

Out of our sample group of apps, the Huawei Watch was compatible with Strava, Spotify, IFTTT, and Shazam, but failed to work with Uber, Facebook Messenger, Evernote, WhatsApp, Instagram, or Twitter.

This model of smartwatch has not yet upgraded to the Android Wear 2.0 operating system, with the update planned for later this year, which should increase the app compatibility. You can make or receive calls on this model, with the sound quality being slightly above average.

This model has the identical music controls as the other Android Wear watches, with play/pause, skip, replay and thumbs up/thumbs down showing up automatically when Pandora or another music app began playing music.

However, this watch lacks a built-in GPS Module for standalone distance tracking or navigation, or NFC technology, making the use of Android Pay impossible.

Display

The Huawei Watch boasts a 1.4" 400x400 AMOLED screen — one of the nicest of the Android Wear watches. Our test team liked the fully circular, 286 ppi screen. This model lost a few points in our visibility test for being somewhat difficult to see the watch screen in bright outdoor conditions. It lacks an automatic brightness feature but does have the option to set the screen to be always on.

Fitness Impact

This was actually one of the more accurate step counters of the wearables we tested, only exhibiting a 0.94% discrepancy from the true count. The Huawei overcounted by 20 steps, showing 2355 instead of the correct 2335.

When testing the accuracy of the heart rate sensor by comparing the reading on the watch to a chest strap monitor, the Huawei averaged within 5 bpm of the true value. However, it doesn't update continuously, requiring you to manually hit the button again to have it refresh its value.

This model can't track flights of stairs climbed, but can monitor an average range of workouts using the Google Fit app. This app allows you to select between walking, running, or biking. It also has a push-up, sit-up, or squat challenge that you can select. The watch will track duration, distance, average pace, steps, and estimate calories burned for each activity.

Battery Life

This watch lasted for 33.2 hours of normal use in our test, right on par with the other Android Wear watches. It did a little better at charging quickly, only taking 32 minutes to charge to 50% — short enough that you can reasonably top it off before going out for the evening. Slowing down a little bit, it took 90 minutes to completely charge, but this was still better than the 105 minutes of the LG Watch Sport or the 123 minutes of the Moto 360.

Value

This average model with an above-average retail price makes it a poor value option, causing us to dissuade you from purchasing if you are looking for the most bang for the buck.

Conclusion