I’ve been something of a watch enthusiast for over 20 years. This is the first smartwatch I’ve owned.
In my case, I was primarily interested in a watch that could be used for swimming (i.e., it had to be fully waterproof — which a lot of smartwatches aren’t), to monitor my heart rate, and, of course, serve as an actual watch that could tell the time! I wanted something with GPS, lightweight, with more than a few days’ battery life, and that charged quickly. A decent UI and responsive app were also high on my list, as this seems to be a hit-and-miss when it comes to smartwatches.
I can safely say this Huawei watch ticks all of these boxes and goes above and beyond in every single category. Upon opening the box, the first thing I noticed was the build quality. The AMOLED display is comparable to the quality of the Retina Display on my iPhone. The strap is excellent quality too — it’s flexible yet tough and extremely comfy. There are numerous holes in the strap, which means it would fit anyone’s wrist. The strap itself is actually more of a red color, as opposed to the orange advertised. Personally, I think the red/black combination looks great and was actually considering replacing the orange advertised strap with a red one, so for me personally, this was a bonus as I got what I wanted with the item.
The watch battery came charged to 75%, and the battery life is outstanding. I’ve only charged this once in the week I’ve owned it, and the charging was rapid — it went from around 50% to 100% in under half an hour. Quite incredible. The Huawei phone app (I’m using it on an iPhone 12) is pretty good. Easy to set up, and what I really liked is how many different watch faces you can find. There’s literally a face for every type of activity/sport, as well as a number of “dress watch” faces. I can’t imagine anybody would struggle to find a watch face they liked. It seems simple to update the watch software via the app. Notifications on the phone produce a subtle vibration; looking at the watch face will activate it and show you the notification, e.g., a WhatsApp message or call. You can configure how many seconds the watch face stays active before going to sleep. This is a nice feature, although be aware that the longer the duration, the more battery it uses. There are 2 buttons on the right-hand side, and these can be used to go through the options menu or start recording an activity, e.g., swimming/running/treadmill session, etc. All options are clear, and the UI is simple and intuitive.
In summary, this is an incredibly well-built watch. It offers high build quality, a decent app, rapid charging, excellent battery life, loads of watch faces, and is lightweight. Looks-wise, it looks like a professional watch, comparable to Tissot’s £800 T-Touch model but with more smartwatch features (admittedly, the Tissot and Tag Heuer models are intended to be watches first, smartwatches second, whereas this Huawei is a dedicated smartwatch and doesn’t pretend to be anything but that).
Can I fault it in any way? The only thing I came across is that the step counter doesn’t seem to record the same number as either my iPhone or when manually testing it (e.g., walking 15 steps and seeing the number reported wasn’t 15). Personally, I don’t use this feature of the watch as I bought it for the previously stated reasons, so it’s not too big of an issue, and I’m not sure if it would calibrate eventually.
Overall, it’s really hard to knock this, and given the price, I can’t see any real competition. I don’t think you can go wrong with this, and would say it’s an absolute steal. @Amazon Customer

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