Huawei Watch 3

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2 years ago

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amazon Huawei Watch 3 reviews

The product marks a return to Huawei’s flagship smartwatch line, the Watch 2 generation launched in 2016. Along with that was the launch of the company’s proprietary new operating system: Harmony OS.

This is a more advanced device than the Huawei Watch GT2 (and GT2e), although they both share many of the same best features.

Price and competition

At launch, the Huawei Watch 3 was priced at £349. There is no US price due to not being officially launched here, but on Amazon US it costs $432. We expect the product to drop in price over the next few months.

This is quite a high price for a brand that often offers cheap smartwatches. But true to the value brought: good materials, great display.

The Apple Watch Series 6 starts at $399, so if you’re an iOS user, it’s easy to pick. Much of what the Huawei Watch 3 offers is the same as on the Huawei Watch GT 2 and GT 2e, which cost a lot less.

And you can also consider the Amazfit GTR2e, which also offers similar fitness features, stress levels, temperature monitoring, and Alexa for half the price.

Design

When we unboxed the Huawei Watch 3, we were extremely impressed. The Huawei Watch 3 is an elegantly designed smartwatch that uses premium materials to complete the case.

The 46mm size will be quite large for those with small wrists, and there is only one size of this, so it will be more suitable for men.

Stainless steel case, ceramic back, and sapphire 3D glass. Great combination of materials in this price range.

There are three versions of the standard Watch 3, mostly with varying strap materials. We have here the Elegant version with a carefully stitched leather strap. In addition, you will have the Classic version with a silicone strap for sports use, and the Elite version with a metal bracelet. If you choose the Watch 3 Pro, the outer shell you get will be titanium.

Each strap is interchangeable with a quick-release pin so you can change it up to your liking.

The dial lets you access the main menu, return to the main watch face (just like the Apple Watch), and scroll through menus. It works well, and it’s nice to have tactile controls from the touchscreen.

This is a smartwatch with the brightest display we have ever seen, the display is beautiful. The screen isn’t quite as edge-to-edge as in many press ads, and there’s a rather large black border around it.

However, 1.43 inches is wide enough to display the Harmony operating system and makes navigation seamless. There is a wide selection of watch faces and the designs also stand out from the competition.

It has options to always be on or raise your wrist to light up the screen.

You need to download Huawei App Gallery from the Google Play store, and then install the Health app from there. iOS users can use the Huawei Health App Store app – and be sure to use the latest version.

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Fitness and health tracking features

The fitness tracking experience is similar to what you get on the Huawei Watch GT2.

Most of the best health features are disabled by default, so you’ll need to go into your settings to turn them on. These include continuous stress monitoring, continuous SpO2 monitoring, and temperature monitoring – but these will have a big impact on battery life, so you should consider them before using them.

Activity tracking and step counting

Pedometer provides approximate data to other devices (Fitbit and Apple Watch), with almost no deviation to be concerned with.

The familiar display circle system also tracks active minutes. You’ll also get a daily goal and complete activity watch list that closely resembles the Apple Watch.

The Huawei Watch 3 will give you a sporadic move reminder if you don’t get up and don’t move for more than an hour.

There are watch faces that will show your goals if you want, or you can swipe right from the main watch face to see an overview.

Sleep tracking

On the Huawei Watch 3, you get a wealth of data and sleep-tracking insights, and your nightly sleep score and sleep duration are available on the watch.

We found the sleep duration to be a bit overestimated, and it wasn’t as sensitive to wake as the Fitbit Sense or Apple Watch.

But overall, the data is pretty granular, and the sleep stages (light, REM, and deep) are on par with the competition. It builds on our tendency to not sleep deeply enough, stores just the necessary details, and can be a useful tool.

Temperature

A completely new feature for the Huawei Watch 3 is the skin surface temperature index – which has already appeared on Fitbit Sense. It’s not a very exciting feature – but it can provide an interesting data point about your overall health.

Changes in skin surface temperature can be a sign of illness, so it’s important to watch for large index fluctuations. The Huawei Watch 3 doesn’t warn you about major changes, and it doesn’t appear in Huawei Health either.

Furthermore, the app on the watch monitors the temperature throughout the day, and we feel that after a week there will be more insights. We’re not sure what a 24-hour summary of skin surface temperature can tell us. Furthermore, Huawei doesn’t add ambient context on what might be normal for you from your facility, as everyone can be at different temperatures.

As a result, we doubt the usefulness of this feature, other than the extra box on the spec sheet.

Heart rate monitor

The Huawei Watch 3 has a brand new TruSeen 4.5 optical heart rate sensor, so we expect things to become even more accurate.

Got off to a good start with a resting heart rate. During a routine blood donation, we had a nurse check our pulse manually on the Huawei Watch 3, and were pleased that the two results matched perfectly.

Resting heart rate is tracked in the Huawei Health app, and is comparable to rival devices we trust. We had an RHR (resting heart rate) of 51 in Apple Health and 52 in Huawei Health.

We won’t be able to track heart rate variability (HRV) like on the Apple Watch or Fitbit, an indicator that supports stress-monitoring features.

In terms of training heart rate, we tested the Huawei Watch 3 in the 10 km race.

The Huawei Watch 3 tends to report a bit low on the chest strap (albeit with more stability during the early part of the race) – and this results in a lower average HR overall. It managed to report the same maximum HR for the run, right at 191 bpm.

Thus, it is a sensor capable of providing a consistent guide to exertion during intense exercise.

Like all optical sensors, operating during intense periods of rapid rise and fall has misaligned the sensor – so if you want to keep an eye on your heart rate while jumping around in HIIT class, you should wear a chest strap. Huawei Watch 3 does not support Bluetooth HRM.

Stress tracking

You can choose to monitor your stress 24/7, which you can see in the Huawei Health app. It will show the stress score in this.

You can check this score to see when to try guided breathing (there’s an app on the Huawei Watch 3) or other stress-reducing meditation methods if you like.

Is it accurate? If stress is an issue for you, it can certainly highlight when something needs to be done to lighten the load. However, there are quite a few holes in the daily chart, and we feel its implementation needs some work to turn it into a proactive, stress management tool.

SpO2 Monitoring

The Huawei Watch 3 has a built-in SpO2 display, which is used in many ways.

First, you can check your blood oxygen on the spot at any time – if you’re at a high altitude or simply interested in testing. We always recommend using a medical-grade sensor if you feel sick.

You can also choose to monitor SpO2 continuously. Low nighttime SpO2 can be a sign of a sleep disorder and is the most useful application for this technology.

SpO2 readings are pretty accurate when compared with other monitors and with medical grade sensors – so no complaints there.

Sports workout tracking

Sports tracking features have largely been carried over from the Huawei Watch GT2, for an identical experience when you access the Workouts app.

Runners are served with a pre-programmed running training regimen that guides things like distance and pace goals if you’re looking to improve your fitness. It doesn’t make for an overwhelming experience, and we prefer something like the Nike Run Club.

There are also plenty of modes, such as providing stats-based guidance about your workouts and having alerts for pretty much anything like speed, distance, and heart rate.

By default, you will hear a lot of data per kilometer read by the built-in speaker of the Huawei Watch 3. We found it annoying and a bit embarrassing when running in a park with lots of people around because we rarely connect headphones to the watch since it doesn’t support streaming music.

Otherwise, the running experience will be great. We had no problems with distance data or accuracy, everything worked smoothly.

GPS tracking was also appreciated by us – although the 10K race was only tracked at 9.79 km. However, every kilometer was perfectly tracked right up to the last minute, so we don’t have much to complain about. Every other run is noted for accuracy.

Unfortunately, switching to Harmony OS did not provide the ability to export data to Strava, we hope Strava can create its own Harmony OS application.

Exercise and fatigue mode

Due to not being familiar with Huawei’s design language, the App Launcher is a bit confusing. So it took us a while to find the workout stats menu great.

You get three screens: fatigue percentage, which will measure recovery time until your next workout.

You also get a Training Load, which measures how much training you’ve done based on intensity and VO2 max.

Our VO2 Max score has been bumped up slightly from Garmin’s, which we’ve previously identified as one of the best estimators compared to a lab test. Both the Garmin (based on runs with the HRM-Pro) and the Apple Watch gave us a rating of 49 m/g/l, while the Huawei Watch 3 rated us at 53, which is a bit too high.

Harmony OS and smart features

Much of the smartwatch features can also be found on older and cheaper Huawei Watch models. So why spend more money on this product?

The ability for third parties to make apps available on Harmony OS is a big part of its future development – but there aren’t many good options right now. No major giants (such as Strava, Map My Run), and even the basic app Uber are involved yet. Huawei needs to make efforts to entice developers. We’re sure it will be easy to do this in China where it has a large user base, but other markets like Europe also have a lot of growth potential.

There will be a voice assistant equipped – Huawei’s exclusive Celia. It works well for things like timers and alarms. But is it worth spending the extra $100 over competitors? Not with us, but perhaps those who are interested in and use products of Huawei’s ecosystem (watches, phones, …) will find more value.

Notifications work well, however, the ability to interact with and respond to notifications is lacking – which puts Wear and Apple Watch devices at a disadvantage when running on their native platforms.

Harmony is an operating system that is still under development and needs constant updates shortly.

It also needs to be connected to Wi-Fi manually to run the update, doesn’t pull that information from your smartphone, instead requires input using the virtual keyboard, which is pretty annoying.

The Huawei Watch 3 doesn’t support LTE over eSIM, but we didn’t test that.

The Huawei Health app also looks like it needs some tweaking. It’s intuitive and easy to navigate, but the Health home screen is a bit blank, we’d love to see daily data easier to view and more informative.

Battery life

In normal mode, you’ll get 2 to 4 days of battery life – depending on how you use it.

The always-on display will reduce the battery to about 2 days. If not then you can enjoy about 4 days – but please note that we do not use an LTE connection.

Turning everything on, including continuous SpO2, stress, and temperature monitoring, and an always-on display can reduce battery life to 1 day. A bit disappointing!

However, there is an option for extra-long battery life located in the Settings menu. If you enable this feature, it will put the Huawei Watch 3 into a different mode, much more like the Huawei Watch GT2. Here you get only 1 basic watch face and the number of workout modes is reduced to just 14.

That means it can last about 10 days, and still offer activity tracking, heart rate, and sleep tracking.

However, the overall performance of the smartwatch is also reduced: menu operations are slow, navigation is a bit laggy, etc., so you can mainly use it at times when you don’t want to carry a charger, and still have just enough experience. This mode will also disable LTE and Wi-Fi will also be disconnected.