Huawei Watch GT Complete Walkthrough: The Best Battery Life of a Smartwatch

Oh, the forgotten Hauwei Watch GT. When it came out back in Oct, all the major tech publications and tech YouTubers did a quick hands-on and then… never talked about it again. Well, I got my hands on one and figured I might as well do a complete walkthrough for anyone out there that is curious about it and don’t have anywhere to watch a thorough video on it. Also, the lack of coverage got me really curious about the watch. Was it forgotten? Is it that bad? Let’s find out.

If you aren’t familiar, a complete walkthrough on my channel is where I try and go through every feature I can on a new device so you guys are better prepared should you be in the market to go buy one.

Styling

With that said, there’s a lot to go through so let’s get started with the styling.

The watch only comes in one size unlike most other smartwatches out and I’d say it’s a tad smaller than the Samsung Galaxy Watch for anyone familiar with that.

The casing comes in either stainless steel or black stainless steel with a ceramic bezel which should resist scratches a bit more than normal.

The screen is a 1.39″ AMOLED touch screen with a 454×454 resolution, the case is 10.6mm thin and weighs about 46 grams which is nice, and there is no rotating anything: dial, crown, etc.

On the side we just have two hardware buttons, the bottom one opens up the workout menu and the top one opens the apps on the watch (which we’ll get into more in a sec).

The bands it comes with are either black, brown, grey, or green silicone. But they are quick release ones so you can easily find more online if you wanted.

As far as sensors, we have most of what you’d expect.

A continuous heart rate monitor, accelerometer, barometer, etc. and GPS.

Huawei claims the GPS is a lot more accurate than other models so I decided to test it by wearing it and Galaxy Watch and going for a ride (cause I hate running) and here are the routes they both tracked.

The two sensors missing on the Huawei Watch GT that most other smartwatches have are NFC, so there’s no using Google Pay, etc. and Wifi so you’ll need your phone nearby to use the watch at all.

The watch is being powered by an unspecific CPU along with 16 MBs of RAM. That’s not a typo, megabytes. And we have 128MB of internal storage, which is really for the ROM that is on the watch since there are no apps to download (which I’ll explain in a sec) and so there’s also no music storage on the device.

The battery size isn’t specified but Huawei claims the battery life will reach up to two weeks. Now normally, this is where I as a tech presenter would scoff and say, “I’ll believe it when I see it”. But, I think they might be right in this case. I’ve been using the watch for a little over a week, tracking my sleep with it and using it with all its functions on including continuous heart monitoring, GPS, and have only taken it off to shower and I’m at 50%. FIFTY. At this rate, two weeks is definitely doable. A company whose marketing claim might actually be right?! I don’t even know what’s real anymore.

Software

Now, there’s probably a big reason that battery is as good as it is and that’s the next thing we need to talk about. And that’s the software.

The watch is running an entirely new OS made by Huawei called LightOS. And well, it’s pretty light.

You have the watch face, which is your home screen and you can tap and hold on it to choose from some others, but what you see here is what you get–since it’s Huawei’s own OS there is no app store and so apps or watch faces.

Swiping to the left on the face gives you your activity rings for standing, steps and exercise minutes.

Swiping to the right on the watch face gives you your constant heartrate, and trust me, it is constant.

Swiping again to the right gives you the current weather in your location in Celsius (I couldn’t find a way to change it to Fahrenheit, just FYI). Swiping again brings you around to the activity rings and then the watch face again since it’s a carousel.

Swiping down gives you your quick actions which include “No Disturb” which is a do not disturb function; show time, which leaves the screen on for 5 mins so you can see the watch face without it going to sleep; find phone, which causes the phone to make a noise to help you find it; Lock, which locks the screen until you press and hold on the bottom hardware button, and a shortcut for Settings.

You also can see if it’s connected via Bluetooth, the remaining battery life, and the date.

Swiping up from the bottom will give you your notifications. You can see various notifications here, tap them to see more details, and swipe them away to dismiss them. You cannot, however, reply or interact with them beyond this.

Really quick, let’s go through the settings–there aren’t many.

Under Display, we have a shortcut to our different watch faces and a brightness control.

Under Do Not Disturb, we have options to turn on Do No Disturb as well as set it to turn on and off automatically at a certain time.

Under System, we have restart, power off, and reset.

And finally, under About, we have our device name and other regulatory info.

And that’s it.

Now, I’m two minds about this watch. On the one hand, it is actually a great fitness tracker as it has a ton of different options and syncs them with all the normal services like Google Fit, etc. it has probably the best sleep tracking I’ve ever used, it looks relatively like a normal watch, and the battery life is properly nuts.

(Speaking of battery life, if you want to see how Huawei’s Mate 20 Pro did in a real-world battery test, check out this video).

On the other, it’s OS is very limited, a little janky and slow sometimes, and has a lack of interacting with your notifications in any way.

For me, I think this smartwatch is actually something else. It’s a fitness band, with a watch-like screen. If you think of it that way, then it’s an upgraded fitness band, versus a hindered smartwatch. the thing is it’s about $200, which is less than a Galaxy Watch, for example, but a lot more than the Band 2 Pro from Huawei. So you’ll need to really decide which of those two categories it falls under at that price.

Check it out here for more info and let me know in the comments what you think of it, love to hear your thoughts, as always.

Thanks for watching!