Huawei’s most advanced wearable ever, featuring enhanced activity monitoring, GPS, and offline music playback, is now available. It’s a good GPS sport watch, but it’s not available in the United States.The Apple Watch is the industry leader in smartwatches, and there is no other option if you want a watch that can run third-party apps. GPS sports watches with comprehensive activity monitoring, and offline music compatibility from Garmin and Samsung are popular. The Huawei Watch GT 2 offers several features and functionalities similar to those offered by Garmin and Samsung at a lesser price.
The Watch GT 2 is a high-quality wearable with GPS capability that can be used 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It also contains a speaker, so you can use it to make phone conversations with a connected phone, just like an Apple Watch or Samsung Galaxy Watch. It just receives basic notifications from your smartphone and does not have a third-party app store to add apps.
HARDWARE
The Huawei Watch GT 2 includes a black stainless steel case with smooth black high-quality polycarbonate on the rear, which I tested. Stainless steel and titanium grey stainless steel cases are also available from Huawei.
It boasts a fabulous AMOLED display with a very high resolution for a smartwatch. The glass gives way to a front bezel with huge numbers ranging from 0 to 22 and five tick marks between the even and odd digits. Other than giving it a sporty look, I’m not sure what these numbers imply.
The watch’s back is primarily matte-finish hard plastic, with a protruding heart rate monitor in the centre. The charging puck, which has magnets for precise alignment and a USB-C connection connecting to a charging cable, also fits into this middle region.
Two giant buttons and a speaker aperture are located on the right side. The Watch GT 2 contains a microphone and a speaker, allowing you to make phone calls directly from the watch using a linked phone. If your headphones die or you want to work out with background music, the speaker can also play music. It’s a reasonably loud and acceptable speaker.
The top right-hand button brings you to the app launcher and back to the watch face, while the bottom right-hand button takes you to the activity launcher. The bottom button can also be used to select items while on the exercise launcher screen. Holding in on the top button allows you to restart or power off the watch.
SOFTWARE TO WATCH
Huawei’s Lite OS, which is similar to Samsung’s Tizen OS in many ways, powers the Huawei Watch GT 2. It’s Huawei Health app is compatible with both Android and iOS devices.
The watch face is the initial screen you see when you turn on the watch. To see the available watch faces, press and hold on to the display. There are 14 different faces to choose from, with some of them having basic customising possibilities. With both digital and analogue alternatives, the variety is pretty comprehensive.
You may also choose between an analogue or digital always-on watch face, although Huawei claims that this will cut your battery life in half. I used it for about a week before switching back to raise-to-wake to get more battery life.
Swipe left or right from the watch display to view the various accessible widgets, in addition to utilising the two hardware buttons for navigation. Your activity report, music player, weather, stress summary, and heart rate summary are available. When you’re in one of the apps, a swipe from left to right will send you back. The choice can be selected by tapping on the display. You can go through the various lists by scrolling up and down.
To access fast settings, swipe down on display from the watch face. Do not disturb, showtime, find phone, alarm, and settings are among them. These quick controls also show the connection status, remaining battery life, date, and weekday.
SOFTWARE FOR SMARTPHONES
Install the Huawei Health app on your Android or iOS smartwatch to set up and utilise the Huawei Watch GT 2. The app is divided into four sections: health, exercise, gadgets, and profile. The health tab displays the most recent steps taken and active time recorded by your watch. Exercise, heart rate, sleep, weight, and stress are all represented as tiny thumbnails below. These can also be edited and rearranged.
SUMMARY
The Huawei Watch GT 2 is a powerful 24/7 activity tracker with advanced sleep tracking capabilities similar to recent Garmin, Polar, and Fitbit models (sleep score and REM). It even has an intelligent wake feature that allows you to set a band around your alarm time to wake you up while you’re in a light sleep cycle.
