TLDR; The Huawei Watch GT 4 is a great fitness smartwatch with a beautiful design, impressive display, and excellent health and fitness tracking features. You do need to mess around a little bit to get the Huawei Health app and Strava to sync, but I think for the cost it is worth it. You get a lot for your money, and the battery life is amazing. I would recommend this watch to anyone looking for a smartwatch that looks great and has a lot of features.
Pros:
- Looks amazing for a reasonable price
- Accurate GPS and Heart Rate monitoring
- Decent battery life(6 to 7 days, with 10 to 15 hours of GPS use)
- Holds up to consistent use...Other watches have not lasted this long
Cons:
- Huawei is banned from the Google store, so no support for Google Apps
- Less customisable than competitors on the market
- You need to mess around to sync to Strava
- NFC Payments are not available in all countries
For a while I've been a little jealous as my Amazfit GTR-4, although functional and still love the brand, is just not as nice looking as some of the competition on the market. Since I purchased the Huawei Watch GT 4 just over a month ago, I look at my watch and can honestly say, there is no competitor out on the market, at the moment that looks better. And with the rumoured GT 5 release in the coming weeks and months, there's a chance you can pick one of these up for a decent price.
Before we go into more detail, lets get one major thing out of the way. Huawei have been banned from using Google services, which means the watch doesn't have access to the Google Play Store. So you can't download apps like Spotify, Google Maps, or any other app you might be used to using on your smart watch. This includes Huawei Health, so you'll need to download the app directly and install it onto your smart phone. This wasn't too difficult, but could put some people off buying the watch.
I actually didn't know much about the GT 4 when I purchased it at a local tech store. It cost me $298 NZD, which is about $180 USD, which is a pretty reasonable price, when you look at what is currently on the market. The watch has a stainless steel body, which looks amazing, and has a big AMOLED screen, with a smooth refresh rate, and has impressive visibility.
Fitness and Sports
This is the main purpose for a watch like this, so I give it a good hit out before writing up any report or review.
Swimming - One of the first things I look for is how responsive it is in pool. Lap counting is mostly perfect, even when swimming different strokes. As with most watches, you might loose a lap or two while doing drills, but this is nothing major. Open water swimming is also good, providing accurate GPS.
Biking - Getting in some longer rides(over 4 hours), the GT 4 has not had any trouble keeping up while staying accurate with distance, even in built up city areas. I haven't used it with my mountain bike, but have not had any issues with GPS so far, so don't think it will be an issue.
Running - I only had this watch for about a week, when I did my first marathon. It's usually a big risk to do something new on race day, but had no issues with the watch keeping up with heart rate and counting the kilometres. I nice man with an American accent gives you a breakdown of your speed/pace/time/distance as the kilometres tick over, but I am happy to keep the volume off during any of my runs.
Indoors - As well as pool swimming, a lot of my time exercising does happen indoors, weather it be on a spin bike, weight room or treadmill, and the GT 4 doesn't have any issues keeping track. Even if your treadmill run is a little inaccurate, the watch allows you to calibrate the run afterwards to make sure the correct distance is recorded.
General GPS - I have not had to wait much longer than 10 seconds for the GPS to pick up, even when I first started using the watch. When using the watch, side by side, with my Amazfit GTR-4, I had similar distances recorded, and when I run or ride with my wife, using her Suunto, again we have a similar result for distance. It has been consistent for me, over my standard runs and rides over the past few weeks.
Race Predictor Times - This is actually a little funny. My race time predictions are listed below in the image. But have have done a faster marathon time, using this watch, about 25 minutes quicker in fact. I have also done a faster half marathon, and hit the 10km mark during that half marathon about 5 minutes quicker than the prediction. Obviously, this must be based on training runs, but I guess it is better than giving an over estimate of an olympic qualifying time, which I usually see.
Sleep/Health/Skin Temperature - I added these in here with fitness and sport as a lot of these rely on the optical heart rate monitor. I found the sleep and health trackers all relatively good, providing good information on health markers like stress, sleep, heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygen levels. The skin temperature sensor is also pretty fun, but if your skin temperature is under 20 degrees celsius, or over 40 degrees celsius, it will not give you a value.
Weight Training - This is one thing that is a little outdated or maybe the developers at Huawei forgot about this one. The workout gives you your usual heart rate and calories burned etc, but a lot of fitness watches these days also give you a breakdown of the muscles used during your workout and this is probably something that could be improved on in coming releases.
Training Plans - Plans are only available for running, from what I can see, but there seems to be some good options to give you running plans to get your ready for your goal race. There is also an AI option to generate training plans more suited to your ability and training, but I have not tried this option yet.
Huawei Apps and Eco System
The Huawei Health app, is actually pretty easy to install, even though you cannot install it using the Google Play Store. It has a pretty clean interface and I found it intuitive and didn't need to mess around with the app too much to set it up and find all the relevant information I needed. There are quite a few apps available to do almost everything you need. I have had to pay for one or two already, and these apps are usually standard on other watches, but I haven't found it to be too much of a cost.
Watch Faces - There are plenty of free watch faces available and you have the option to create your own, which I don't really have the time to look into, but again I am happy with the watch faces I have found available.
Music - You are able to add and store music directly on the watch to then stream to bluetooth headphones.
Calls and Message - I have only used the basic calls and messaging features of the watch, but you can take and make calls and perform basic messaging from the watch via bluetooth.
Hardware Specs
[Hardware Specs Courtesy of Huawei]
Summing Up
In the past I've done similar reviews, and I have specifically looked for fitness watches that are both cheaper and are something a little different from the norm. But take a close look at the images we have above, then look at the square or round watch you have on your wrist right now. One more time, look at the images of the Huawei Watch GT 4, and hopefully you can see, you don't need to always go for something everyone else is using, or the watch that integrates perfectly with your smart phone, or the most practical. I think its a metaphor for life that the easiest option is now always the best. You can get a beautiful watch that not a lot of other people have, for a really reasonable price, that is also responsive and functional.
All pictures and screenshots where taken by the author, except for the hardware specifications, provided courtesy of Huawei