The Huawei Watch Fit: A Stylish Smartwatch with Flawed Fitness Tracking
The Huawei Watch Fit is an intriguing proposition in the burgeoning wearables market. Priced at Rs. 8,999 in India, it’s marketed as a smartwatch with fitness features, blurring the lines between traditional wearables and more feature-rich smartwatches. Its sleek design and appealing AMOLED screen make it an attractive option on paper. But does it deliver on its promise of being a reliable fitness companion? This review dives into the Huawei Watch Fit’s strengths and weaknesses, exploring its design, software, performance, and battery life to determine whether it’s a worthwhile purchase.
Huawei Watch Fit Design: A Blend of Style and Functionality
The Huawei Watch Fit’s design straddles the line between a smartwatch and a fitness tracker. It boasts a large 1.64-inch AMOLED touch screen with a resolution of 280×456 pixels, offering a vibrant and crisp visual experience. Its sleek, narrow form factor and focus on fitness-centric features lean towards a fitness tracker, while its overall appearance and substantial casing point towards a smartwatch aesthetic.
The Watch Fit is available in three colors in India – black, blue, and pink – and comes with matching detachable rubber straps to complement your style. A single button on the right side of the device controls most functions, while the bottom houses the charging contact points and the optical sensor for heart rate and blood oxygen measurements. The device feels comfortable and light on the wrist, even during sleep, thanks to its 21g weight (excluding straps).
Beyond its aesthetic appeal, the Watch Fit also incorporates essential sensors for comprehensive tracking, including an accelerometer, gyroscope, capacitive sensor for wake-up gesture, ambient light sensor, optical heart rate sensor, and built-in GPS. Its 5ATM water resistance makes it suitable for swimming, while Bluetooth connectivity ensures seamless synchronization with your smartphone.
Huawei Watch Fit Software and Interface: A Smooth and Intuitive Experience
The Huawei Watch Fit runs on a custom operating system and user interface, seamlessly connecting with the companion app via Bluetooth (available for Android and iOS). This app serves as the central hub for synchronizing fitness and health data, providing a comprehensive and easy-to-use experience.
The watch interface is remarkably clean and intuitive, navigating through various screens effortlessly using touch and tap gestures in conjunction with the physical button. The Watch Fit’s AMOLED display takes full advantage of its black background, enhancing contrast and conserving battery life. While there’s no option to install third-party apps, the pre-installed applications cover the essentials, including support for notifications from apps like WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Phone, and Messages.
The Huawei Watch Fit offers an array of customizable watch faces, allowing you to choose from a variety of pre-installed options or download additional ones through the Huawei Health app’s face gallery. While some of the downloaded faces lack polish and seem tacky, there are several well-designed options to find the perfect style for your taste.
The Huawei Health app proves itself to be a capable companion, facilitating a stable connection with the smartwatch and storing fitness and health data for easy access. It allows users to start workouts directly from the app, configure device settings, update the smartwatch’s firmware, and manage other essential features. The Health app is undoubtedly one of the best in its class, offering a smooth and comprehensive user experience.
Huawei Watch Fit Performance and Battery Life: A Mixed Bag of Results
Despite being marketed as a smartwatch, the Huawei Watch Fit leans more towards a premium fitness tracker in its functionality. With its impressive hardware and software capabilities, it holds the potential to deliver accurate tracking of various fitness and health parameters. However, the device falls short in certain aspects of fitness tracking accuracy, while excelling in smartwatch features like notification management, music controls, and caller identification.
The Watch Fit boasts the ability to track an impressive 96 different types of workouts, spanning diverse activities such as indoor and outdoor walking and running, cycling, swimming, rowing, elliptical, dance forms, yoga, pilates, strength training, martial arts, tennis, cricket, football, water sports, extreme sports, and winter sports. While the accuracy of tracking for niche activities remains questionable, the wide range of options provides a useful tool for tracking almost any physical activity.
In our testing, the Huawei Watch Fit exhibited inconsistencies in accuracy for essential metrics. During manual step counting, it recorded 1,071 steps for a manually counted 1,000 steps, resulting in a notable error margin of around 7 percent. Comparatively, the Watch Fit consistently recorded 75 more steps per 1,000 steps than the Apple Watch Series 5 when walking in a covered area. Furthermore, the Watch Fit calculated significantly different distances for the same route, recording 1.14km compared to the Apple Watch’s 1km, although it’s worth noting that the Watch Fit allows manual calibration for indoor walks to improve accuracy over time.
The GPS sensor activation for outdoor workouts, including walks and runs, did not guarantee improved accuracy. In testing, the Watch Fit recorded 1.18km for a route measured by Google Maps and the Apple Watch as just under 1km.
While the Watch Fit’s fitness tracking capabilities fell short of anticipated accuracy, particularly when compared to more affordable devices like the Realme Watch 2 Pro, it performed well in other areas. Heart rate readings consistently matched those from a pulse oximeter and the Apple Watch. The device also provided reasonably accurate sleep tracking, delivering more detailed data than the Apple Watch.
One of the Huawei Watch Fit’s strongest aspects is its excellent battery life. The device effortlessly lasted for nine days on a single charge with regular usage. While turning off regular heart-rate monitoring and limiting GPS usage can further extend battery life, even with more intensive usage, the battery consistently performed well. Convenient and quick charging with the included charging cable adds to the user experience.
Huawei Watch Fit Verdict: A Stylish Watch with Mixed Performance
The Huawei Watch Fit offers a compelling blend of design and functionality. Its impressive AMOLED screen, stylish aesthetics, smooth software, and intuitive companion app contribute to a positive user experience. However, its inaccurate fitness tracking dampens the overall appeal. While heart-rate and sleep tracking performed adequately, the significant errors in step counting, distance measurement, and blood oxygen saturation readings raise concerns regarding its reliability as a fitness companion.
For those seeking a stylish smartwatch with basic fitness features, the Huawei Watch Fit might be a suitable option. However, its shortcomings in fitness tracking accuracy make it a less compelling choice for serious fitness enthusiasts. Alternatives like the Realme Watch 2 Pro and Mi Watch Revolve Active, offering comparable features at a similar price point, might be more reliable choices for those prioritize precise fitness tracking.
