Despite Huawei launching a plethora of good-looking, high-spec'd and generally well received smartphones over the last couple of years, the Chinese company is struggling somewhat to establish itself as a desirable brand outside of its homeland.
Huawei Watch: Design and build
Huawei Watch: Activity tracking
Huawei Watch: Hardware and battery life
Its first few cracks at the wearable market – most notably its duo of TalkBand trackers – were pretty naff, so we raised an eyebrow when it unveiled what looked like being a real jewel in the Android Wear earlier this year.
The Huawei Watch packs scratch-resistant sapphire crystal glass, like the Apple Watch, and a cold-forged, stainless steel unibody design. It comes in gold, silver or black and there are both fine-grain leather and cold-forged 316L stainless steel strap options.
This is no rubber and plastic hatchet job - the Huawei Watch is stylish and well-made. With a diameter of 42mm and a thickness of 11.3mm, it's a touch more compact than the new 42mm Moto 360. The bezels are also just 0.6mm thick, so you get more display real-estate too – 1.4 inches compared to 1.37 on the littler Moto.
Obviously, this being an Android Wear watch, Google Fit is pre-loaded on the device and will do all the things it would do on another Google-powered smartwatch. However, Huawei has decided to have a crack at the fitness front itself, with the Watch pre-loaded with the Daily Tracking app.
Essentially, it does the same thing, but with slightly nicer graphics. Once you enter your personal metrics, it will keep score of your steps, calorie burn and the amount of times you stand up during a day. You can set all your own goals and Huawei also claims the Watch will know whether you are walking, running or climbing – we had mixed results on this front though.
So far, so pointless – but thanks to Huawei's partnership with Jawbone, the UP platform is compatible for Huawei's smartwatch. You can select the Huawei Watch as your device within Jawbone's app and tap into its rich graphs and personal coaching platform, which is great – especially if you don't own one of the latest UP bands. And it's the Huawei fitness stats that are imported, not the generic Android Wear ones.
There's no GPS on board though – so you can't treat the Huawei Watch as a dedicated running assistant, as you can with the Sony SmartWatch 3 and the new Moto 360 Sport. For the price-tag we'd have expected this connectivity to be included.
The IP67 water resistant Huawei Watch is powered by a 1.2GHz Qualcomm processor and 512MB of RAM and, like all Android Wear smartwatches, has 4GB of on board storage. That IP rating means dust shouldn't be an issue and it will survive a dunk in up to 1m of water for half an hour.
The other numbers are kind of irrelevant – we're not yet at a stage where processor clock speeds and memory affect the performance of a smartwatch. Especially one running software as vanilla as Android Wear is right now.
Huawei quotes a battery life of 1.5 days, and we can't really argue with that. We've had it on for a week now, with brightness up full-whack, and with all the connectivity options firing, and we've charged it five times.
The dock is a tad fiddly because you have to get the pins completely lined up before it will begin charging and it's easy to think it's connected when it's not. Once connected though, it's a quick charge – flat to full in just over an hour.
Huawei Watch
When we first laid our eyes on the Huawei Watch back in February, the next-gen Moto 360 models and the LG Watch Urbane sequel were merely a twinkle in Google’s eye, and it was easy to be blown-away by the Chinese contender. However, 8 months is a long time in the world of wearables and while the Huawei Watch is still a great looking Android Wear option with a cracking display, it’s no game changer. The delay between announcing and shipping will have dampened any chance of Huawei making a major dent at the Android Wear top table. Things would be much simpler if the price wasn’t so high. $349 for the entry-level model is about $50 too much and $799 for the top-model is plain daft. Huawei wants to take on Apple in the Western world – but it won’t do so by charging Apple-esque prices for its first-gen devices.
Hit
- -Great, vibrant display
- -Fashion conscious design
- -Lots of customisation on offer
- -Nice Jawbone compatibility
Miss
- -No GPS for running
- -Price-tag is too high
- -Heart rate monitoring is useless
- No ambient light
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