Huawei Watch Fit 3 review: An Apple Watch lookalike with good battery life

The Huawei Watch Fit 3, according to the manufacturer, is a fitness tracker, and the price certainly indicates that it sits in the same category as devices like the Fitbit Charge 6. It costs £139 and is targeted at casual fitness fans, just like the Fitbit, but its more watch-style design will appeal to those who prefer to wear something less plasticky on their wrist.

It launches alongside the considerably more exotic Huawei Watch 4 Pro Space Edition, but I’ve been using the Huawei Watch Fit 3 for a week now and I think this is the more interesting device of the two.

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Huawei Watch Fit 3 review: What do you get for the money?

• 1.82in OLED 2.5D display
• 1500 nits peak brightness
• 10-day battery life

The Watch Fit 3’s £139 price (£159 with the Pearl White leather strap) seems deliberately pitched to target customers considering buying a Fitbit Charge 6 and if you were making your decision purely on looks, there would be no contest.

The Watch Fit 3 may be moving away from the band design of the Huawei Watch Fit 2 – which had a tracker-style rectangular screen, but it looks and feels like it’s a much higher-quality thing.

It’s only 9.9mm thin and has a nylon strap that helps keep it nice and snug, too; it’s also available with a leather strap for an extra £20 but I prefer the nylon strap. If you have skinny wrists like me, you’ll love the way this fits.

The screen is larger, brighter and sharper than you get with the Fitbit Charge 6 – I had no problem reading it while out on a run – and the UI is super responsive.

Battery life beats the Fitbit, too, with up to 10 days per charge, and it tracks all the usual metrics, from steps, heart rate and stress to SpO2 and sleep. And it comes with GPS on board so you don’t need to take your phone out on your runs or rides to get accurate pace and position readings.

The Watch Fit 3 also comes with a host of new features, which make it one of the most fully featured fitness trackers around. These include the ability to broadcast your heart rate over Bluetooth to compatible fitness machines, so you can get a view of your effort levels on the display of your treadmill, stair stepper or whatever without having to constantly glance at your wrist.

If you miss your activity goals, there are now daily suggestions for workouts and the sleep tracking gets sleep breathing awareness, indicating how often your breathing was interrupted during the night.

Huawei Watch Fit 3 review: What do we like about it?

• Great battery life
• Accurate and fast GPS
• Great design and display

I’ve been wearing the watch for around a week at the time of writing and the battery life claims seem to be spot on. With 2hrs 10mins of GPS tracking, I’m on schedule for a week of battery life, perhaps a bit more.

It charges quite quickly, too, with Huawei saying 10 minutes attached to the charger is enough to give you an extra day’s worth of use. It might look a lot like an Apple Watch but stamina is on a different plane.

I’ve also been impressed by the accuracy of both the GPS and the heart rate monitor. There’s no fancy dual-band GPS so reception in built-up areas might suffer, but when I took it out on a couple of hikes and a 7km run last week, overall accuracy was spot on. On the run, it was only 0.14% different than my third-generation Stryd running pod and it was an average of 1.3% different from the Garmin Forerunner 955 on my other wrist during the walks.

The watch locks onto GPS quickly, too, which is great for those chilly morning runs when you just want to get going and don’t want to wait around for the GPS to get a lock.

It wasn’t quite as good with heart rate monitoring, but it’s good enough. Across those three activities, the average difference compared to my Polar H10 chest belt was 3.2% with no big issues that I could see. Another thing I liked about the watch is the new warmup feature. Before you hit “Go” on the workout screen, you can swipe up for a quick guided warmup – handy to ensure you avoid injury on hard days.

There’s also plenty of hidden depth here. You can just use the Watch Fit 3 for tracking your steps, sleep and general activity, but if you were to target running a 5km event like Parkrun, or perhaps even longer, there are training plans you can select through the Huawei app that will set up a structured plan for you.

You can use the Huawei Health app to set up structured training sessions, and the Watch Fit 3 also provides a whole selection of analytical tools borrowed from Huawei’s more serious fitness wearables, such as load analysis and recovery monitoring. Just tap workout status and it will give you a “running ability index”, a training load score and a training index score, plus an estimation of the time needed to recover before training hard again.

Plus, there are tracking modes that cater for a huge variety of sports and activities, from the core running, cycling, walking and pool swimming modes, right through to more specific sports such as open water swimming, track running and various gym and strength training workouts.

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Huawei Watch Fit 3 review: What could it do better?

• App can be confusing to use
• Sleep tracking is a little inaccurate
• Works on both iOS and Android

The Huawei Watch Fit 3 nails most of its fitness tracker brief but there are areas I’d like to see it do better. The app, for one, remains fiddly to use compared with its rivals. It’s packed with features and it’s great that it works on both iOS and Android – but it’s not the easiest thing to find your way around.

Setting up a custom structured interval workout for running, for instance, is buried in the Exercise tab under All Courses > Custom. And although setting up the watch so it syncs with Strava is possible, it’s also in a weird place that’s hard to find. You might think it would be under Me > Settings > Third party services, but no, you have to navigate to Me > Privacy management > Data sharing and authorisation instead.

I’m also not too keen on the layout of the app. Where the Fitbit and Garmin apps are clean and easy to find your way around, the Huawei Health app just feels a bit of a mess of cards – the watch is capable of gathering all the relevant information – it just doesn’t present it in a particularly accessible way.

And, if I’m going to be picky, the sleep tracking isn’t the most accurate I’ve come across, either. At one point, it mistook me lying on the sofa watching TV and then grabbing seven hours of shuteye for an amazing ten-hour sleep session. Then again, there are plenty of wearables that fail in this way, so it’s not alone.

Huawei Watch Fit 3 review: Verdict

Aside from these small niggles, and the fact that I’ve only been wearing and testing the Huawei Watch Fit 3 for a week, it looks pretty good so far. The battery life is excellent, it’s slim and attractive, responsive, and has accurate GPS and heart rate monitoring.

Moreover, it’s packed with the sort of fitness features that you’d normally only get from proper fitness watches such as the Garmin Forerunner 55 or Coros Pace 3.

It’s a cracking little wearable and soundly beats the Fitbit Charge 6 for features, looks and accuracy. If you can put up with a little faffing in the app, it’s well worth making the switch.