We unbox Huawei’s latest smartwatch!
Smartwatches are useful gadgets, but their limited endurance make them a pain to use for most people. Having to place them onto a charging cradle after two days of hard use is an annoying part of owning them, something that most people can’t stand.
Huawei aims to change all of that by offering a smartwatch that they say has an internal battery that lasts around two weeks. The Watch GT certainly sounds interesting on paper, but is it any good?
Unboxing and contents:
Huawei’s smartwatches have always had this air of sophistication as far as packaging is concerned, and that hasn’t changed with the Watch GT. The watch comes in a black box with Huawei’s logo on the top and a small, half illustration of the device on the left side.
Once you open the box up, you’ll see the watch, the magnetic charging pad, cable plus documentation.
Gorgeous and easy to use but doesn’t use Android Wear
First things first: if you have small wrists, then the Watch GT isn’t for you. It has a 46mm watch face, which makes it quite substantial, even on someone as large as me. The watch will probably look comically large on daintier wrists.
Despite being on the large side, the Watch GT looks pretty elegant for what it is. The watch uses a ceramic bezel design, a stainless steel shell, and DLC coating to keep the watch face scratch free.
The display is a gorgeous 1.39-inch AMOLED touchscreen that has a sharp 454 x 454 resolution. We’re not exactly sure how bright it gets, but it’s enough to be readable even under direct sunlight.
Huawei offers the Watch GT in several band styles, and the review unit I received for testing came with a stylish leather band.
Like any other smartwatch in the market nowadays, the Watch GT comes with an optical heart rate monitor, as well as an accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, ambient light and barometer sensors, and a stand-alone GPS module.
The watch also has 5 ATM water resistance, which means it can be submerged in water up to 50 meters without anything bad happening to it.
Controlling the watch is easy, and is primarily done via the touchscreen, and through the two crowns on the side.
The Watch GT runs on Huawei’s own wearable OS, which is a departure from the previous smartwatches they’ve done that ran Android Wear.
Inside the stylish exterior of the Watch GT beats the heart of a custom Cortex-M4 chipset that keeps everything running smoothly.
To be able to use the watch, you’ll have to install the Huawei Health app and pair your device through there.
From there you’ll be able to see your fitness stats, including time slept, how many steps you’ve taken, etc.
As far as functionality goes, the Watch GT is a little bare. Sure, there’s a fair variety of workouts available, including running, swimming, climbing and others, but there’s no way to link the information gathered by the Watch GT to other apps aside from Google Fit and MyFitnessPal.
Another annoying limitation was the inability of the Watch GT to control music on your phone, which means you’ll have to take out your phone whenever you have to lower or raise the volume of your tunes.
Despite these annoyances, the Watch GT has a lot of potential, thanks to Huawei’s promise of a two-week runtime. That puts the battery life of the Watch GT above and beyond most fitness wearables in the market. We’ll have to see for ourself if the Watch GT really reaches the 2-week mark in terms of battery life during our full review.
Unfortunately, Huawei hasn’t told us how much this particular wearable will retail in the market, as well as the official local release date for it.