Huawei Watch Fit review - Cheaper, lighter, leaner - Android

The Huawei Watch Fit looks like what you’d get if you threw a Huawei Band 4 Pro and a Huawei Watch GT 2 into an Apple Watch blender. It’s arguably a more fashion-forward wearable than a traditional fitness tracker or standard smartwatch, but it still packs enough smarts to fit in the “Huawei Watch” line rather than the “Huawei Band” family.

I’ve been wearing the Huawei Watch Fit alongside the new “regular” smartwatch from Huawei, the Watch GT 2 Pro. The dual-wearable experience provided some interesting insights we’ll dive into more in our full Huawei Watch Fit review below. A spoiler: unless you really want wireless charging or titanium, sapphire glass, and ceramic on your wrist, the Huawei Watch Fit will serve most of your fitness tracking needs just fine for 200 bucks less.

Huawei Watch Fit design

Yes, the Huawei Watch Fit looks like a stretched-out, skinny Apple Watch. Sadly, this is an all-too-common design choice at cheaper ends of the wearable spectrum where recognizability trumps uniqueness. I would have hoped Huawei would be beyond Apple-emulation by this point in the company’s storied history but it is what it is, so let’s just note it and move on.

The diminutive appeal of the Huawei Watch Fit is not lost on me.

The Huawei Watch Fit will instantly appeal to those who generally like Huawei’s wearable offerings but aren’t into the bulkiness of them. I’m a fan of a chunky watch personally, but the diminutive appeal of the Huawei Watch Fit is not lost on me. One thing I immediately noticed is that the Watch Fit doesn’t get caught on t-shirts like my other smartwatches because there are no big buttons on the side.

Read more: The best fitness trackers

Hardware

You’ll find a single flat button on the right-hand side, and a proprietary magnetic pogo pin integrated into the USB charging cable, so be careful you don’t lose or break it if you decide to buy a Huawei Watch Fit. It connects to one side of the plastic back of the Watch Fit, right next to the heart-rate sensor. In case you’re wondering, yes, you can charge your Watch Fit while wearing it and still track your heart rate, get an SpO2 measurement, or monitor your stress.

Throughout this review you’ll be seeing what I consider the best color of the bunch, the eye-catching Cantaloupe Orange paired with a rose gold chassis. The Watch Fit also comes in versions with a Sakura Pink strap (rose gold body), Graphite Black band (black body), and Mint Green watch strap (silver body). The Huawei Watch Fit chassis is made of a polymer material with a matte look.

The simple silicone strap can be popped off by poking a fingernail into a little groove in the back to remove a plug that locks the strap in place. Unless you want to buy another official strap you’d best not lose the little locking plug because you can’t just throw another standard strap on the Watch Fit. It’s still early days, but this plastic locking mechanism doesn’t fill me with confidence.

The Watch Fit is super light, at just 34 grams (21 grams without the strap).

Display

The ever-so-slightly curved 1.64-inch OLED screen does a good job of fitting in all the same information a circular smartwatch does, but it does feel a little bit cramped at times. This is particularly noticeable on the screens that display heart rate or stress levels. You get used to it after a while and the only real difference is that the font can sometimes be much smaller than on larger watches and you don’t have as much horizontal space for displaying graphs.

The Watch Fit display offers a 456 x 280-pixel resolution (326ppi). You’ve got around a dozen pre-loaded watch faces to choose from, some of which are customizable, and you can download more via the Huawei Health app. There are six always-on watch faces available out of the box but using these will roughly halve the battery life. For the purposes of testing battery life for this review, I did not enable the always-on display.

While the curvature of the display made swipe gestures less “catchy” than on other wearables I’ve used with sharper edges, the refraction of light around the perimeter of the screen was a bit of a pain. I didn’t notice glare being too much of an issue generally though and the screen had nice poppy colors and deep blacks. Outdoor brightness was perfectly acceptable if not particularly notable.

See also: The best smartwatches right now

Lite OS and 10-day battery life

The Huawei Watch Fit runs Lite OS, the same wearable operating system you’ll find on other devices in the Huawei Watch family. The Lite OS UI has been slightly rejigged to fit the rectangular screen and looks good. I prefer it compared to the UI found on the much more cramped Huawei Band devices but as mentioned above, it’s a bit more finicky than Lite OS on larger Huawei watches.

Contrary to what I first thought, the Watch Fit is powered by the DK3.5+ST chipset, not the Kirin A1. I am unfamiliar with this processor and have reached out to Huawei for additional information. While I assume it’s a cheaper chipset than the A1 considering the Watch Fit’s price tag, I actually found it to be more fluid and responsive than the Huawei Watch GT 2 Pro (which uses the Kirin A1). If jankiness has put you off other Huawei smartwatches, it doesn’t seem to be an issue here.

The Huawei Watch Fit will indeed get you 10 days of battery life.

Huawei promises 10 days of battery life from the 180mAh battery in the Watch Fit. I charged it fully when I first got it a week ago, which surprisingly took a little over an hour, and am on 15% while writing this review. That should pan out to a full 10 days or so of battery. By comparison, the GT 2 Pro I was also wearing for the same duration was at 10%, on track for around 9 or 10 days rather than the promised 14 days.

What’s the software like on the Huawei Watch Fit?