To help us provide you with free impartial advice, we may earn a commission if you buy through links on our site. Learn more
- Comfortable and lightweight
- Sleep tracking is impressive
- Mini workouts feature is fun
- Nap tracking failed to capture my snoozes
- Huawei Health app is still a hot mess
Three years ago, when I first reviewed a model from Huawei’s Watch Fit range, I was blown away by how much the company had squeezed into a wearable so effective and so attractive. Fast-forward a couple of years and I’m still impressed, but with the Watch Fit 5 Pro, Huawei has stepped things up considerably.
It’s so much more than the cheap and cheerful health wearable I first tested back in 2024. With improvements in overall accuracy and, most notably, materials and design, the Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro is now a watch that competes with the company’s GT series and GT Runner 2 on features – and is a genuine alternative to Apple’s, Samsung’s and Google’s offerings in this space.
What do you get for the money?
Given the current financial climate in some parts of the tech world, the fact that the Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro costs the same as before, at a mere £250, is great news for prospective smartwatch buyers.
That makes it cheaper than most mainstream smartwatches, such as the Apple Watch, and keeps it competitive with lower-end fitness wearables like the Garmin Vivoactive 5 or Coros Pace 4.
The hardware
And, make no mistake, the Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro beats all of them when it comes to build quality, materials and looks. It’s available in three colourways – orange, white and black (pictured here is the orange version) – and all versions are built with a mostly aluminium body.
This time around, though, you’re getting thinner 18mm bezels, clad in titanium, with a larger OLED screen – 1.92in, compared to last generation’s 1.82in – that’s topped with sapphire crystal glass with rounded 2.5D edges. The display is brighter now, reaching peaks of 3,000 nits, and LTPO tech means the refresh rate can vary between 1Hz and 60Hz.
Inside, meanwhile, is a bigger battery that delivers a claimed 10 days of battery life (without always-on display enabled), and up to 14 hours of continuous GPS tracking.
As before, the watch has two physical controls: a rotating, clickable digital crown at the top right edge and a racetrack-shaped button in the bottom right, each separated by a small protrusion that helps prevent the crown from beaching on your skin or (for skinny people like me) the end of the ulna bone.
Also in the box is a wireless USB charging puck and a lightweight nylon hook and loop strap, which is an excellent choice for fitness fans as it makes it super-easy to get a snug fit.
New health and fitness features
As well as new hardware, the Watch Fit 5 Pro also comes with a range of new health and fitness tools.
Top of the list is that you can now use the Fit 5 Pro as a basic watch for free-diving. It’s certified down to a depth of 40m and has a new free diving workout mode that shows you your depth and has customisable time and depth alerts so you don’t go beyond your limits. There’s even an Apnoea test built into this mode along with CO2 tolerance and hypoxic training modes for improving the length of time you can hold your breath.
Slightly less niche – and useful to the more casual user – is that the watch now tracks short naps during the day, building that into a more holistic overall view of your sleep health.
The watch will also encourage you to take short breaks from your daily routine and perform basic, guided 60-second “mini workouts” throughout the day. There are thirty of these workouts, and they vary from simple upper body stretches you can do while sitting, to full body exercises.
What did we like about the Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro?
Accuracy, comfort and battery life
In general, I prefer a lightweight watch over a heavy one, mainly because smaller wearables are simply more comfortable on my bony wrists. But it’s also important because the lighter your watch, the less it moves around – and the less your watch moves around, the better chance it has of capturing your heart rate accurately.
It’s a simple matter of physics, really, and this is reflected in the accuracy of the Watch Fit 5 Pro’s heart rate monitor, which is pretty decent overall. As with all optical wrist-mounted heart rate monitors, it doesn’t read changes in your pulse as quickly as a chest belt, but overall averages show that it’s not far off. By my measurements across a series of bike rides and runs, the difference worked out at 2.29%; that’s three beats per minute difference on average – slightly better than last year’s Fit 4 pro, but not by much, and not quite as good as the Apple Watch Series 11.
The same goes for GPS accuracy, which is also very similar to the Watch Fit 4 Pro. The difference between this and my go-to for distance measurement and pace – the Stryd 3rd gen footpod – was, on average 1.48% different, or 148m over a distance of 10km. That’s extremely good and I would say well within the margin of error for this kind of measurement. Looking at the GPS map traces paints an equally impressive picture, with routes always plotted within a handful of metres of the track or road I was running on.
And battery life is simply excellent. Huawei claims up to ten days with the always-on display (AOD) disabled and I wouldn’t dispute that. In testing, I had the AOD switched on all the time and generally found that it would last between four and five days at a time, while tracking at least two hours worth of GPS workouts. That’s much better than most of the mainstream competition – the Apple Watch Series 11 won’t last you much more than a day and even the Apple Watch Ultra 3 is only rated at 42 hours under normal use.
Sports modes and general tracking
None of this, of course, is any use if the software running on the watch is poor, but I’m happy to report that’s far from the case here. Indeed, anyone who has ever used an Apple Watch will be right at home because the Watch Fit 5 Pro’s UI follows a similar pattern: click the crown to bring up the watch’s apps, pick the one you want and go from there.
A swipe right from the watch face brings up any events on synchronised calendars, the weather and music controls, a swipe right launches various health and fitness summary screens and swipes up and down bring up your notifications and the control panel, respectively. It’s all very easy to use, the larger screen size and extra brightness makes it readable in all conditions and it’s highly responsive, too.
There’s also a huge amount of depth here. The Watch Fit 5 Pro is able to track most of the standard health metrics you can think of – from steps and calories to resting heart rate and SpO2 – as well as some more advanced ones.
You can take an ECG with this watch and generate a report to send to your doctor; it will warn you if you’re showing signs of atrial fibrillation. It will measure your “arterial stiffness” – a feature previously restricted to Huawei’s more expensive wearable devices.
And the sheer number of sports modes available for use is mind-boggling in its extent. But ignoring the more esoteric stuff, there are modes for all the core sports types – and then some. I used the watch mainly for tracking my runs and bike rides, but there are also modes for pool and outdoor swims, a triathlon mode, a surprisingly effective ski tracking mode – I used this on the GT Runner 2 earlier this year and found it great fun on a trip to La Plagne.
Sleep tracking
The sleep mode is particularly good. It tracks the usual REM/light/deep/awake stages, but adds in stuff like your HRV (heart rate variability), SpO2 and breathing quality for good measure. I particularly like the way that you can view trends easily in the app, and the way it puts this data in context.
It’s super easy to see, for instance, if your sleep is good, bad or normal, or if your quality of sleep is improving or declining over time. This makes it nice and easy to see when lifestyle changes are affecting your sleep, either positively or negatively.
The app also ties your sleep data into general trends in activity or inactivity to try to explain why your scores may be improving or declining. As I write this, my sleep last night was 9 points higher than the previous night, which the Huawei app suggests “may be related to longer exercise duration and increased move calories”.
Training, mini workouts and third-party platform integration
In addition to all this, there are plenty of ways to work out and analyse your training, including plans to improve your 5km, 10km, half-marathon and marathon performance. I’m currently using the watch to train for a half-marathon, and its mix of heart rate and pace targeted runs and body-weight core training sessions seems spot on for my overall fitness level.
There are plenty of ways to look at your performance afterwards, too – you can use the Workout Status app on the watch itself to look at your overall running ability, training load and 7-day fatigue levels. There’s recovery advice, predicted race times and VO2 max measurement, too.
I’m also a big fan of the mini workouts: I did initially find it a little tricky working out what my Panda instructor was telling me to do, but that doesn’t take too much effort, and once I’d figured out what to do, I found carrying out short bursts of suggested exercises throughout the day really fun, especially on days when I was working at home. It’s much better than being reminded to simply stand up once in a while.
Third-party integration continues to get better with Huawei watches. You can sync with Strava and Komoot and Adidas Running as before, but there are also now partnerships with urunn and FIIT for workout and training plan synchronisation, and I’ve been tinkering with Intervals.ICU, which is a great way of looking at the data behind your workouts.
And FINALLY, it is at last possible to use a Huawei watch to make NFC payments. The setup process is a bit involved, as you need to set yourself up with third-party provider Curve and register a card with that, before installing their app on the watch via Huawei Health, but with a bit of patience, I got there. I’ve only managed to make one payment so far, though, and it took a while for the payment terminal to recognise the watch, so while this is a positive development in general, I’m going to withhold judgment for now.
What could it do better?
Any gripes I have with the Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro are pretty minor but they are certainly worth highlighting. First, I have to say that, so far, I have not been blown away with the new nap tracking feature.
In theory, it’s a great idea: a short 20 nap at lunchtime or in the early afternoon can really give you a recharge and helps with overall sleep health. However, I was unable to get it to recognise any of my lunchtime (or evening) sofa snoozes.
While there’s plenty of data to pore over in the Huawei Health app and on the watch itself, I’d like to see that put to use more proactively. There’s no workout suggestion feature, for instance, something that other manufacturers – particularly Garmin – do well. The training plans do adapt as you go along, which is nice, but it would be even better for more casual runners if the watch used your current training load and fitness numbers to suggest a workout when you click Run or Bike or Swim in the workout menu.
And while it is good that the watch tracks more advanced metrics like running and cycling power, there appears to be no way, either via third-party services or on the Huawei Health app to set those metrics as targets during an interval session. As it stands, the only intensity targets you can set for an interval are heart rate or pace.
Finally, have I mentioned before that I find the Huawei Health app confusing and messy? I have? Well, it hasn’t really improved lately, but I suspect that most owners will be perfectly happy learning their way around its various quirks.
Should you buy the Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro?
In my view, the Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro is a gem of a wearable, despite the various shortcomings detailed above. It’s not only a beautifully made thing that’s comfortable and looks great, but it’s absolutely stuffed with features.
The new mini workouts feature is – I think – a genius idea and the battery life is impressive, too. I think I may have forgotten to mention the fact that you can use the Watch Fit 5 Pro on Android as well as iOS, so you won’t have to dump your watch at the same time that you decide to make the switch next time you upgrade your phone.
In summary, the Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro is a fantastic wearable that gets more right than it gets wrong, and at a very tempting price. It gets the Expert Reviews seal of approval.
