HUAWEI’s recent release in their wearables department, the HUAWEI Watch Fit 2 is a great example of the work they have done with smartwatches. It sports a thinner profile not dissimilar to some Fitbits, yet with a large display to give you full access to everything the watch has to offer.
The HUAWEI Watch Fit 2 has a 1.74-inch FullView AMOLED colour display with touch screen capabilities. The watch is full of applications surrounding tracking your activity, from a heart rate monitor to tracking your steps and running and even your sleep. You can take calls, read your texts and play music all from your wrist. Add to that, applications to check the weather, use a compass, a stopwatch and even a flashlight. It also tells the time for those of you who are into such a thing.
The watch face is customizable, allowing you to select from a large catalogue of free and paid watch faces that vary from fancy to fantasy and display a varying number of the stats that they record, depending on the watch face that you choose. You can even copy a photo from your phone to take on the role of becoming your new watch face, all by tapping the watch to your phone.
Watch straps are also customizable with bands for sale ranging from the sporty to the dressy, depending on how you use the HUAWEI Watch Fit 2. You could even switch back and forth so that the watch fits your style all day long. Swapping watch straps is incredibly easy with just a press of the button on the watch to remove the straps and snap new ones in place.
“The HUAWEI Watch Fit 2 has a 1.74 inch FullView AMOLED colour display with touch screen capabilities.”
The HUAWEI Health App is how you connect the HUAWEI Watch Fit 2 to your smartphone. The app is a great overview of all the stats that you can track via your watch, including stress levels, oxygen saturation, distance travelled and everything else that I listed above. You can also add your weight for tracking, or connect a HUAWEI scale to the app, which will automatically add your weight and a number of other stats. The app is easy to navigate and simple to get the information you want from it.
One of the things you can do from the app is select a new watch face. Watch faces for the HUAWEI Watch Fit 2 come in a number of options, both free and paid, that can make it look like you are wearing something fancy or be a complete utility, giving you all of your stats at a quick glance.
I tend to look for something in between, where you select a watch face that looks like a real, analog watch, only with discreetly placed stats like your step count and a couple of others. You’ll be able to find your perfect balance between the two, though. because some can just tell the time and some barely show the time at all.
For exercise, the watch has a number of available workouts where it can recognize your movement, like running or swimming, to provide accurate feedback in your fitness tracking app. But more than this, it has animated and voice-guided warm-ups for seven common workouts. You can watch the animation as an example and the voice commands will keep you on time, like a tiny robo-personal trainer.
It also gives you real-time running stats, including your heart rate and what exercise “zone” you are in, and a series of cool-down stretches for after the workout. And if you aren’t working out, it’ll give you a reminder to get up and move.
“At $158.99 CAD, the HUAWEI Watch Fit 2 is a cheaper option than the flagship watches of other available brands…”
The HUAWEI Watch Fit 2 also has HUAWEI’s Health Clovers and activity rings, which are all of your stats collected as a graphic, so you can see at the quickest glance, what your daily output is. Having a visual representation of all the things that make up what HUAWEI has considered an important part of an overall healthy day can be very motivating, because instead of seeing numbers, you see progress.
HUAWEI’s claim is that the battery life is up to ten days for normal use and up to seven days for heavy use, and I am happy to say that the claims are accurate. In all of my time using the watch, I never needed to charge it before I hit the 8-day point, and even then, I probably could have gotten another half day or even a day out of it, but charged it because it was a convenient time to do so. I’ve been very impressed with HUAWEI’s battery life compared to some of the mainstays, like Garmin or Fitbit, whose batteries don’t last nearly as long by comparison.
The biggest drawback, as is the same with all HUAWEI devices, is the company’s issues in the US, stopping them from integrating with the bulk of the most popular applications, like myfitnesspal, Google Pay and so on. Those integrations are huge selling points for most of the biggest smartwatches on the market, so the HUAWEI Watch Fit 2 is for people who want all the functionality that the watch offers, but doesn’t care about those integrations.
At $158.99 CAD, the HUAWEI Watch Fit 2 is a cheaper option than the flagship watches of other available brands, but sits just above similar shaped watches, like the Fitbit Luxe or Inspire 3. While the price is right, you need to decide what kind of watch you are looking for. The screen is wider than those other narrow watches, but is still distinctly that classic activity tracker shape. If you are in search of a smartwatch that looks more like a watch than anything else, then you may consider looking elsewhere.
