Alongside the Mate 20 series launch in London overnight, Huawei’s Consumer Business Group CEO Richard Yu unveiled “one more thing” in the form of the Huawei Watch GT. Available in both Sport and Classic designs, the companion to the Mate 20 features at 1.39-inch OLED display at 454 x 454 resolution.
Though it won’t run Android Wear, it offers many of the same features customers have come to expect, including customisable watch faces, notifications, GPS integration and more. There’s been no mention of mobile payment functionality, but with NFC built-in, there’s no reason they couldn’t make this possible down the line.
At just 11.8mm thick, the Huawei Watch GT is one slender smartwatch – it’s 1.3mm thinner than the Apple Watch 4, for example. Don’t let that fool you, though, with 14-day battery life on offer, or a full 22 hours using GPS.
There’s a range of other features including real-time heart-rate monitoring with 1-second sampling with 94% claimed accuracy, a built-in smart running coach, the ability to recognise four different swimming strokes and even open-water GPS mode to track your ocean swims. For those that never grew out of climbing, there’s four sensors on board for the climbers, including barometer and compass with software features for trail runners too.
With TruSleep 2.0 mode, Huawei Watch GT users will be able to monitor their sleep length, quality and more, and it does so using infrared to avoid light disturbing the user e.g. from an active heart rate monitor. Featuring personalised straps, a sports model and a classic-design model too, Huawei is making a big new pitch in smart wearables, and making a break away from Wear OS and alternative wearable platforms.
We’re looking into Australian availability and pricing, and will update when we know more. European pricing is pegged at E199 for the Sport variant and E249 for the Classic variant, which translates to roughly $325 and $400 AUD respectively.
This is why it sucks to be an early customer. You don’t get any of the freebies that later customers do :/