We’ve seen a steady rollout of wearables through the last quarter of this year. From the new Apple Watch with its always-on display, to Fitbit’s much improved Versa 2 to Samsung’s Watch Active 2 with its striking circular display, its tough to take sides if you’re in the market for a smartwatch. Huawei’s all-new Watch GT-2 is the newest entrant to this slugfest and is powered by an all-new Kirin A1 chip that has been created specifically for wearables.
Style is probably the overriding consideration for many smartwatch buyers. This is an area the GT-2 scores. We checked out the larger, 46mm variant; the 3D curved bezel-less watch face stands out. The 1.39-inch (454 x 454 pixels) circular display is quite vibrant and packs 326 pixels per inch. Our review unit was kitted with a silicon strap that certainly looked and felt premium. That’s one of the highlights of this watch – it’s quite light on the wrist despite its large display. Huawei packs over 20 watch faces, while some of them truly embellish the display, there’s no option to add third-party watch faces. This is an area where the Versa 2 and Samsung’s wearables have an edge.
It’s not just design, the GT-2 also scores on its wide array of fitness features. It’s 5ATM water-resistant allowing you to plunge into the pool and track your swim. There are other useful touches like VO2max consumption monitoring that reflects cardiorespiratory fitness and endurance capacity in exercise performance. And then there’s a handy alert if your heart rate stays above 100bpm or below 50bpm for longer than 10 minutes. Just like most of its rivals, you can track multiple types of workouts from indoor rowing to outdoor runs. But I found the Voice Assistant that alerts you on the status of your workouts slightly annoying. There were at least a couple of instances when I hit the wrong buttons in crowded spaces and activated this very loud voice.
The good thing about the speaker is that you can pull off voice calls. I could hear callers and so could they when I used the watch (hooked up via Bluetooth, feature that’s only available on the 46mm version). Pairing the watch through the set up was quite hassle-free (I synced it with an iPhone 11 Pro; the device also works seamlessly with Android devices). Our most favourite feature of the GT-2 is the stellar battery life. Huawei pegs it at two weeks, it seems like an accurate estimation given our test results – the device hit 65% after about 5 days of usage.
The GT-2 scores on battery life, design and its suite of fitness features but there’s not a lot of smartwatch features it boasts of except music storage (you can store close to 2GB of music via USB transfer – we didn’t try this, except for the pre-loaded music on the watch) and weather updates. There are not too many Apps that let you go beyond these features. If that’s not a deal breaker for you, then the Huawei Watch GT-2 might be all you need at a sticker price that offers a significant saving over its rivals.
The Huawei Watch GT-2 comes in three options – a leather sport variant at Rs 17,990, a Titanium Grey variant at INR 21,990 and the Black Sport variant at INR 15,990. Customers will also get a Huawei Mini-speaker priced at MRP 2999, for free (until December 31, 2019)
