The existence of the Huawei Watch GT has been known for a while but very little detail has been known about it until now. WinFuture heard from a little bird some interesting details regarding the smartwatch and received a high resolution image to boot.
The most interesting tidbit that Winfuture heard was that the operating system will NOT be WearOS as expected but instead a Huawei proprietary operating system — it seems it is not just us that is getting fed up with the mess that is WearOS. The operating system will require less power to run than WearOS and will instead offer a much longer battery life (14 days, 20 hours with GPS activated) from the 420mAh battery. The operating system will still allow health and tracking features and notifications.
Requiring less power means that Huawei have not opted for a Qualcomm chipset such as the new Snapdragon 3100 but instead an ARM Cortex-M4 based SoC which delivers less power than a Snapdragon — but it is not required with the different OS. Along with the new chipset the watch will include 4GB of onboard storage and have a 1.39 inch OLED display. The watch’s display resolution will be 454 x 454 pixels and will be waterproof to 50m.
Health feature-wise, the watch will include an optical heart rate monitor on the back which is no surprise but will also include pressure and light sensors as well as an infrared blaster and GPS sensor. Add to this a 3 + 6 axis gyroscope, a compass and acceleration and gravity sensors as well as a geomagnetic sensor and you have a watch packed full of sensors looking for use — possibly a much more health-focused watch.
As for accessories, the watch will support standard 22mm watch bands which will be easily interchangeable. The price of the two variants is expected to be around the EURO199.90 and will go on sale in the next few weeks.
Samsung have shown that you do not need WearOS to sell a great smartwatch so it will be interesting to see how this watch goes. Given the rumoured sale date we expect it to be announced alongside the Huawei Mate 20 in London on October 16. Stay tuned as we bring you all the details on the ground from London as well as local release information.
As much as we complain about Wear, I don’t see how anyone could consider a watch with a proprietary OS as competitive unless it’s a fraction of the price and has massive app support. Even the Galaxy Watch, for all its hardware’s impressiveness, has pretty limited appeal unless you’re using a Samsung handset and a lot of Samsung apps. We complain about Wear’s clunky UI, poor battery life and limited app support, but for Android users there’s nothing else in the price bracket that is remotely competitive.
I’ve got a Galaxy Watch on my wrist as I write this, and it does the main things I need. Notifies me of calls, emails and messages, shows me the time and weather, upcoming calendar appointments, and can pay for things.
Plus the fitness features are much better. Wear Schmear.
Oh, and I’m not using a Samsung handset with it.
It’s fine for notifications but interactions are a bit limited, e.g. you can’t respond to a message from your watch from what I hear. I use a lot of Google platform apps that Wear provides far better integration with – Play Music, Authenticator, Keep, Maps, Messages, etc. Believe me, I’d love hardware as good as the Galaxy watch, but I know the software limitations would kill it for me.
I wonder what OS this device is using. It could be an Android derivative. Or it could even use Tizen as a base, as that’s open source too.
Tizen or something proprietary Huawei is by bet.
@Björn, https://www.gsmarena.com/huawei_watch_2_pro-8910.php
Was tempted myself as it had the classic look but want enough info at the time re comparability.
Google definitely need to improve their wearable ecosystem otherwise they will be left behind. The fact that I still can’t get an esim version of a Wear OS device is frustrating.