It’s gorgeous but not smart enough

Huawei’s new smartwatch, the Huawei Watch GT 2, is one of the nicest-looking smartwatches around. It has a large, crystal-clear AMOLED display and amazing battery life. 

Its software is nice, too — but only up to the point where your usage patterns overlap with Huawei’s idea of how you should use it. Stray outside of that, and nearly any Android Wear smartwatch will be better. 

I felt odd writing the sentence above, as the last time I’ve reviewed a Huawei smartwatch — that was the Huawei Watch 2 in 2017 — I wasn’t very happy with Android Wear either.

But now that Huawei’s moved away from Android Wear and equipped the Watch GT 2 with its own Huawei Lite operating system, the situation hasn’t improved. In fact, it’s way worse. 

Sporty but not too sporty

Let’s start with the nice things. The Huawei Watch GT 2 is fairly light and comfortable despite its size (my unit was the 46mm version, but you can also get a smaller, 42mm variant). Its bezel doesn’t rotate and is mostly useless, but it looks sleek and, thankfully, sits flush with the watch’s face, meaning it doesn’t get in the way of swipes as it did on the Huawei Watch 2. 

And while the wristband and the bezel are sporty, the Huawei Watch GT 2 doesn’t scream “sports” at you, and it wouldn’t be out of place paired with a suit. 

Plenty of power, amazing battery life

Huawei’s new smartwatch is actually one of the most powerful on the market. Its 1.39-inch AMOLED display has a 454×454 pixel resolution (better than Apple Watch Series 5’s 368×448 pixels), and it’s sharp and bright, even in direct sunlight. 

The watch comes with 4GB of RAM and speakers, meaning you can load it with music and play directly from the watch, without the need for a smartphone. You can also make calls from the watch thanks to Bluetooth 5.1 connectivity, though you do need a phone nearby to do that. 

Huawei’s Kirin A1 chip’s power-saving capabilities give the GT 2 a two-week battery life, which is a lot better than, say, Apple Watch, which barely lasts two days. I have no reason not to trust Huawei on this: I got the watch with 69% battery, and that lasted me six days with 10% left. I did notice that the battery gets depleted far quicker during workouts, so forget about two-week battery life if you’re doing a couple of runs every week.  

Finally, the watch is loaded with different sensors, including an optical heart rate monitor, gyroscope, accelerometer, and an air pressure sensor. GPS is also on board for location tracking.

One big omission, however, is NFC, meaning you can’t use Huawei Watch GT 2 to make contactless payments. Interestingly, the device has an NFC chip, but it hasn’t yet been fully enabled outside of China, so maybe this will change in the future. 

Controls-wise, the GT 2 retains the old Huawei Watch’s way of doing things, meaning there are two buttons to complement the touch screen. But the behavior of these two buttons is confusing. The top button sometimes functions as a “back” button, but not always. Press it from the default watch face, and you’ll get a list of apps. Press it again, and it’ll bring you back to the home screen. If you want to actually launch an app, you have to tap its icon on the screen. 

The lower button can be customized to launch different things; by default, it launches a workout. But here, if you keep pressing it, it’ll get you deeper into the menus. Not always, though — in the Settings menu, it does nothing. 

As a result, figuring out what function or feature you can access with the top or down button or via taps and swipes takes a bit of getting used to. After a day or two, you’ll get the hang of it, but ideal it is not. 

Plays with Freebuds

Huawei sent me a pair of its new Freebuds 3 wireless earphones, as they can be paired with the watch to play music, even when you don’t have a phone. The Freebuds are a decent AirPods clone, with great, punchy sound, plenty of range, and decent battery life (helped by the case, which doubles as the charger). 

They also boast noise cancellation, which I found to be very timid (read: they didn’t noticeably cancel noise), and the navigation, which is done with double and triple taps on the earphones, didn’t always work. 

But yes, pair the Freebuds 3 with the Huawei Watch GT 2, and you can listen to music without a phone, which is cool for shorter runs or workouts. 

You can also listen to music (and answer calls, if a phone is nearby) directly on the watch, without the buds, but it’s the type of feature you’ll show to your friends once and never use again. 

Fitness and health tracking that looks really nice

Huawei Watch GT 2 tracks basic health info like heart rate, steps, calories burned, distances walked, and sleep patterns, and while I don’t personally care about any of that, it seems to do its job well. Kudos to Huawei for the look and feel of some of these tracking apps; on the watch’s beautiful screen, heart rate measurement looks really great. Same goes for workouts; it’s satisfying to go check your recovery times, heart rate zones, and other data after a grueling workout, because it all looks so pretty. 

The Huawei Health app is where you review all this on your smartphone. It’s something I wouldn’t normally use, as I’m used to other apps with the same purpose, and on the iOS it just feels too basic. The Android version of the same app is far more advanced (more on that later).

As for accuracy, GPS worked well, but the heart rate monitor wasn’t very accurate for me — it’d often randomly jump up to 120-130 while my actual heart rate was far lower. It’s an issue that most smartwatches have — if your primary use for the watch is sports and fitness tracking, you should get a dedicated sports watch. 

And now, the flaws

So the Huawei Watch GT 2 is powerful, looks great, has a bunch of sensors, and the battery lasts forever — what’s not to like? Plenty, and it’s a real pity. 

There are several issues here, but all of them stem from Huawei’s limited wearables ecosystem and the lack of features in the Huawei Lite OS. Let’s start with those that limit the standard smartwatch functionality. 

For example, the watch comes with 14 predefined watch faces, some of which offer limited customization. If you have an Android phone, you’ll be able to add more from the Huawei Health app. On iOS, the app simply doesn’t have that option — the only way to get more watch faces is to pair the watch with an Android device, get some faces, then pair it back to your iPhone. Ouch. 

And remember the Freebuds pairing? Sure, it works, but adding music to the watch is done through the Huawei Health and that only works on Android. Short version: If you have an iPhone, this watch is not for you. 

Another example: The Huawei Watch GT 2 doesn’t have proper always-on functionality. It has something called “Standby watch face” and it works, but it has several limitations: It only shows a default analog/digital watch face, which may be nothing like the watch face you’ve chosen, and it disables “raise to wake” functionality. 

The Huawei Watch GT 2 is advertised as an excellent sports watch, and with all its sensors and 50m water resistance, it should be one. But competing with specialized brands such as Suunto and Garmin is tough, as the watches from those manufacturers come with zillions of features and micromanagement options that the Huawei device just doesn’t have. 

Case in point: There’s no way to directly connect the Huawei Watch GT 2 to Strava, which is my favorite app for recording workouts. Strava is one of the most popular apps among runners, so this is a big omission, one that immediately dissuades me from using Huawei’s watch as my primary fitness tracker. 

There’s no app store of any kind, either. Yes, Android Wear apps aren’t extremely useful, but there’s always one or two that you end up using all the time. Here, you’re stuck with Huawei’s preloaded apps, but at least those include Google Fit and MyFitnessPal. 

Finally, the Huawei Lite OS isn’t very fast. Sometimes transitions between menus will be smooth; sometimes they’ll stutter, and sometimes you’ll get the feeling the watch hasn’t registered your touch at all. 

A very narrow niche

The Huawei Watch GT 2 could be a very capable competitor to something like Samsung’s Galaxy Watch. But due to software limitations, it’s not. In fact, it doesn’t play particularly nice with iOS, and trails behind Android Wear devices in terms of features, which leaves it somewhere in the middle. It’s also not a replacement for a dedicated sports watch. 

It is a gorgeous smartwatch with solid health tracking features and some advanced functionality, like being able to pair it with Huawei’s FreeBuds and listen to music from it directly. That’s a pretty narrow niche, but I’m sure it’ll work for for some people. 

However, these days, when Apple’s Watch Series 3 starts at $199, the Huawei Watch GT 2’s price of 249 euros ($274, though you’re unlikely to find it in the U.S.) is just too high.