Huawei Watch Fit review: A good-looking fitness tracker with a few flaws
With built-in GPS and a larger screen than most of its fitness tracker rivals, the Watch Fit is excellent value for money
Pros
- Built-in GPS
- Animated workouts
- Good-quality screen
Cons
- No altimeter
- Heart-rate monitoring not always accurate
- No third-party app support
Huawei has been making fitness trackers that offer excellent value for money for a few years, and the Watch Fit is the latest example. It takes some of the best features from its Watch GT 2 series and packs them into a device that looks and feels a bit like a squashed smartwatch.
The tracker offers built-in GPS, an AMOLED touchscreen display and animated workouts. That’s a feature set you’ll be very hard pressed to find on other trackers available at its current price of £68.
Huawei Watch Fit review: What do you get for your money?
As I’ve already touched on, Huawei has included features from its pricier smartwatches, and this includes using the same interface and a similar way of navigating your way around the device. For interacting with the tracker, there’s a bright, colourful, 1.64in 280 x 456 resolution AMOLED touchscreen display and a single physical button.
In terms of design, the polymer case is coupled with a silicone strap that’s removable and comes in a choice of black, pink, green and orange colour options. There’s also a Huawei Watch Elegant Edition that swaps polymer for stainless steel, if you want higher-quality case materials on your wrist.
Inside, there’s a 6-axis motion sensor that lets you track steps, sleep quality and a variety of indoor activities including pool swimming. Meanwhile, the device’s TruSeen optical heart-rate monitor enables continuous heart-rate monitoring and stress tracking, which is offered alongside guided breathing exercises available to help get you back to a calmer state.
That TruSeen sensor also enables blood-oxygen monitoring, with support for on-the-spot measurements, and there are also period-tracking features that can be found in the Huawei Health companion phone app.
As for fitness tracking, there are an impressive 96 workout modes, with core activities such as running, cycling and pool swimming offering the richest array of metrics. Built-in GPS means you can accurately track outdoor workouts such as running and cycling while leaving your phone behind; meanwhile, if you take your exercise seriously, Huawei also offers “training effect” insights to help you better understand how hard you’ve worked in a session and make informed decisions about the duration and intensity of future workouts.
New runners can also make use of the running courses, which offer structured sessions that you can follow directly from your wrist. Huawei has also included animated quick workout videos, which offer bitesize sessions like ab workouts that you can easily fit into a busy day.
While it works with both Android and iOS, the tracker is fairly light on smart features. You can view notifications (but not respond to them), control music that’s playing on your smartphone, view weather forecasts and set alarms and timers. As with other recent Huawei wearables, though, there’s no app store.
As you might expect, the Huawei Watch Fit’s battery life varies depending on your usage. You can expect to get close to ten days in what Huawei deems “typical usage”. That’s with basic sleep tracking and heart-rate monitoring enabled, but if you track lots of workouts and enable advanced sleep-monitoring features, you can expect something closer to seven days.
When it comes to continuous GPS recording, the Watch Fit offers around 12 hours’ battery life. That’s not as good as the 14 days promised on Huawei’s Watch GT 2, but it should outdo something like the Fitbit Charge 4.
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Huawei Watch Fit review: What does it do well?
For the price, the Watch Fit is a really smart-looking and practical wearable. With a polymer body, it’s light at just 21g (without the strap) and comfortable to wear 24/7. It’s also waterproof to 5ATM (50m), making it suitable for showering and swimming at up to 50 metres depth.
What’s really appealing, however, is the screen. The 1.64in AMOLED screen offers more real estate than your typical fitness tracker and it’s bright enough that it offers good visibility indoors and outdoors in bright light.
When it comes to tracking your daily activity, sleep and stress, the Watch Fit offers a good experience both on the device and inside the companion Health mobile app. Step counts were usually within a few hundred steps of a Fitbit Sense smartwatch I was wearing at the same time, and sleep tracking is detailed, with a breakdown of sleep stages, a sleep score and even breathing-quality data. Readings were never identical to the Fitbit, but insights relating to sleep duration and sleep stages felt accurate enough.
While most of the 96 sports modes offer very basic metrics (primarily heart rate and workout duration), the core modes for activities such as swimming and running deliver everything you really need.
Indeed, when it comes to running, the tracker will help you keep tabs on pace, cadence and even VO2 Max scores. The on-board GPS is accurate, too. During several outdoor runs, the Watch Fit measured distances and average paces either the same or very close to what I logged with my Garmin Fenix 6 Pro.
As for pool swimming, it captures distance covered and number of laps, and also recognises stroke types. Although it occasionally varied from the Fenix 6 Pro by a lap or two, I generally found the Watch Fit worked well during swimming.
Two of the device’s best software features are Huawei running guides and the animated workouts. The running courses are brought over from the Huawei Watch GT series and offer easy-to-follow running workouts such as intervals. These are well explained to help beginner runners understand why they’d want to add these sessions to their training.
Animated workouts, on the other hand, are designed with more casual fitness folk in mind, or those who believe they are too short on time to exercise. These bitesize workouts include neck exercises for those who sit at a desk all day and simple ab workouts. The tracker counts reps automatically and the animations are nice and easy to follow. It’s not the most extensive collection of exercises, but it’s a decent starting point if you want to do workouts no longer than 20 minutes in length.
The device’s large AMOLED screen is a nice place to view notifications, and it doesn’t feel as cramped to read messages as it can be on other similarly priced fitness trackers. The music controls work well, too, but what really stands out is the nice selection of watch faces you have at your disposal. If you like data-rich faces, or something a bit more playful, Huawei offers plenty of good options here.
Huawei Watch Fit: How could it be improved?
Unfortunately, the Watch Fit falls short on a few fronts. My biggest gripe lay with the performance of the optical heart-rate monitor, particularly during exercise. For workouts such as indoor rowing, as well as steady and high-intensity interval running, the sensor reported maximum heart-rate readings notably higher than a chest strap.
That’s a shame, because there’s no option to pair an external heart-rate strap as you can with most Garmin running watches. And it was a similar story for continuous heart-rate monitoring, with the sensor giving high readings both during the day and while asleep, even when the strap was tightly done up.
Staying on the sensor, blood-oxygen measurements readings could also be temperamental, even when taking on-the-spot measurements. I found that sitting down and keeping my arm very still usually delivered the most reliable results.
While Huawei is starting to open up the platform on its smartwatches, it’s unfortunately not the same story for the Watch Fit, so you’ll need to live without sharing data to other apps such as Strava. Everything you track on the Fit is stored in the Huawei Health app, which is at least well designed, with clear info regarding the myriad data the tracker captures.
Elsewhere, there are a few other omissions that might put some prospective customers off. There’s no always-on display mode option, for a start, which means you’ll need to wake up the screen every time you want to check in on the time or your stats. There’s also no NFC for contactless payments and no music player, with the former being the most disappointing omission, though you’d be hard-pressed to find those kinds of features on a fitness-focused wearable at a similar price to the Watch Fit.
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Should I buy it?
On the whole, the Huawei Watch Fit is a very likeable device. While it does falter in some areas such as heart-rate accuracy during exercise, it’s otherwise a smart-looking fitness tracker with a great screen, mostly reliable sports tracking and solid, week-long battery life. With other great features such as animated workouts and running guides also thrown in, it makes for a fairly compelling offering.
At the time of writing, you can pick up the Watch Fit for £68 at Amazon, and at this price it offers better value for money than most pricier GPS watches. As such, if you want a fitness-tracker-cum-smartwatch that offers solid fitness tracking, sports watch features and value for money, it’s a good bet. If you can live with slightly flaky heart-rate data and not being able to share your data to third party apps like Strava, it will serve you well.
If you compare what £90 can get you elsewhere, you’re looking at devices such as the Fitbit Inspire 2 and the ageing Garmin Vivosmart 4. The Huawei Watch Fit might not boast the same third-party integration, but it certainly offers more features and a better-looking design.