Huawei’s Watch GT combines a smartwatch’s features with a fitness band’s battery life

Besides Huawei‘s big smartphone launches, the Chinese company also unveiled their brand new smartwatch called the Huawei Watch GT. And the best thing about this wearable is a smartwatch with a fitness band’s battery life.

Let’s start with the specs. Huawei’s Watch GT features a 1.39″ circular AMOLED display up front with a 316L stainless steel case and a DLC Ceramic Design. Inside, the device is powered by a Cortex-M4 chipset and runs on Huawei’s own proprietary software. Yup, in a bold move, Huawei’s left Google’s Wear OS in favour of its own.

Of course, as a smart wearable, the device supports features like fitness tracking, heart-rate monitoring, GPS tracking, swim tracking, sleep monitoring and daily activity tracking. Additionally, this smartwatch also has something called TrueSeen 3.0 that has a self-learning algorithm for more efficient health tracking.

But, the best thing about this smartwatch has to be its battery life as Huawei claims you can get up to two weeks on a single charge, with typical usage. That typical usage encompasses heart-rate monitoring plus 90 minutes of exercise per week, which sounds pretty reasonable. If you’re not into fitness tracking, you can just enable notifications without heart-rate monitoring and GPS and get up to 30 days on a single charge. However, if you’re a baller and want everything to be on the Watch GT will still be able to power you through 22 hours of continuous usage.

That’s mighty impressive for a smartwatch so kudos there.

My biggest concern with any smartwatch running on proprietary software is always app support. As useful and functional as Tizen on Samsung’s smartwatches are, it just doesn’t quite have the app ecosystem you’d find on something like Apple’s WatchOS. And that will be very disappointing for the Huawei Watch GT if it falls into the same trap of having nice hardware, without actually being useful as a smartwatch. After all, it’s always the app ecosystem that makes or breaks a smartwatch.

That said, if all you’re interested in is fitness tracking, Huawei’s got a new fitness band for you too, and it’s called the Band 3 Pro. This little guy’s got a 0.95-inch AMOLED touch display, heart rate sensors and GPS built in. It’s also 5ATM waterproof like the Watch GT so it has pretty much all the fitness aspects covered.

Watch GT will retail for EUR199 (around RM956) for the Sport variant and EUR249 (around RM1,196) for the Classic variant. Meanwhile, the Huawei Band 3 Pro will retail for EUR99 (around RM475).