Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro review: A slim, powerful Apple Watch alternative | Tech Radar

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Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro review: A slim, powerful Apple Watch alternative

It’s just an all-around nicely designed smartwatch

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The Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro succeeds, from a hardware perspective, in every way that matters. It’s powerful, with plenty of fitness-tracking smarts. It’s light and comfortable to wear, even while sleeping or on a long run. It’s attractive, with a bright screen and plenty of eye-catching apps, including a panda that takes you through stretching exercises. However, Huawei’s usual stumbling blocks — its non-availability in the US and its incompatibility with most commonly-used apps — persist here, preventing it from getting full marks.

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The Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro looks quite similar to an Apple Watch Ultra 3, only slimmer, and I get the feeling that’s very much the idea. The same raised bump on the titanium shell protects the digital crown, and houses an additional side button. It’s the same shape as the Ultra 3, the screen is bright and colorful, and as you can see from the Tik Tok video embedded below in which I compare the two, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s an Apple Watch at first glance.

However, just because Huawei’s stealing Apple’s lunch a little in the design stakes, that doesn’t mean this just a cheaper knockoff. Huawei has been making quality wearables with accurate metrics for ages now, and the Fit 5 Pro is another absolute win in my book.

It’s light and comfortable to wear, with the wide screen and slim design ensuring it sits flush and close to the wrist, like the Garmin Venu X1, making it perfect for more comfortable exercise, and not weighty or cumbersome to wear during sleep tracking. The tough ‘aerospace-grade’ titanium-alloy shell is a great get at this price, with the closest-priced Apple product, the Apple Watch SE 3, using aluminum, plastic and nylon. The whole aerospace thing is a bit of a gimmick, but titanium makes the whole package feel much more premium and stylish, and it looks as good as it feels.

The Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro battery is claimed to last up to 10 days in smartwatch mode, but with near-constant wear, multiple GPS workouts, and with the always-on display turned off, I got around six days during my testing. The LTPO AMOLED display is powerful, and nearly two inches wide with an adaptive 1-60hz refresh rate. In layman’s terms, it’s bright, smooth and powerful, and in such a thin smartwatch it’s a real battery sucker. Nevertheless, six days is still triple the usage I get from the Apple Watch Ultra 3 on a single charge, even though the latter is triple the price.

Like Apple, Huawei relies on its own walled-garden ecosystem, as a result of being a Chinese company and operating behind the ‘great firewall of China’, preventing its integration with apps like Google Maps, Spotify and others from major US tech companies, although it supports some select integrations like Strava and Komoot via the Huawei Health app. The App Gallery must be accessed from your phone’s internet browser and the apps downloaded from there, with no Play Store or App Store integration.

The Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro uses Chinese apps for its core functions, like Petal Maps for navigation instead of Google or Apple Maps, so to sync with your phone you’ll also start needing to use Petal as your primary map app. Lately, Huawei has been using the UK-based Curve digital wallet — this is good news, as it’s a feature that’s long eluded Huawei watches outside of China.

However, if you’re an Android or Apple user, your Google and Apple wallets don’t automatically work with your watch, although this is slightly less of a dealbreaker, as Garmin also uses a proprietary wallet system. Whats App can only be interacted with via notifications, not a dedicated Whats App interface. These pain points are not necessarily a dealbreaker for everyone, but it does make shelling out for the Fit 5 Pro in favour of the best Apple Watches or best Android watches that bit harder to swallow.

There are a bunch of interesting wellness features on the watch. Much was made at launch of the ‘mini-workouts’ feature, and there are 30 in total, for which you follow a cute panda avatar in stretching or light aerobic exercises lasting up to a couple of minutes, many of which you can do at your desk. These are targeted at specific body parts, used to correct posture or stretch your neck, spine, legs, or even face.

The Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro is built for fitness tracking, and it’s strong in this field. On a 5K test route around Paris, the Fit 5 Pro cleaved closely to the top-tier Garmin Fenix 8 Pro in terms of distance, pace and heart rate measurements, with just 1bpm between the different ‘average heart rate’ measurements. Having tested the Fenix 8 Pro against a Polar H10 heart rate monitor and being satisfied with its accuracy, I feel good about Huawei’s metrics here when compared to the Fenix 8 Pro, especially for its low price. I also tested it against the new Google Fitbit Air fitness tracker, which again recorded just a 1bpm difference in my average heart rate. Unfortunately, my Polar H10 heart rate monitor malfunctioned during testing, but I’ll update this review if any scores differentiate from a new device.

The Fit 5 Pro packs dual-band L1+L5 GPS, which supposedly means it’s more accurate when you’re among tall buildings. When I tested its GPS credentials against the Garmin, there was 30 meters between the estimations of the Garmin Fenix 8 Pro and Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro; the Fenix 8 Pro thought I’d run 5.04km, while Huawei calculated 5.01km. A total of 30/5000+ meters is to me a reasonable statistical difference, as it’s a less than a 1% margin of error, and perfectly fine for most amateur athletes. Huawei’s Tru Sleep sleep-tracking and Tru Sense heart rate algorithms are industry standard, and there are more sports modes to choose from than you could ever need. It’s a strong fitness tracking choice.

The Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro offers good battery life, accurate tracking, and lots of nifty features — and those who want Apple Watch Ultra aesthetics and performance at a budget price are going to love it. But if you want a smartwatch that can handle apps, calls, notifications, directions and other convenience features, be prepared to jump through a few extra hoops thanks to Huawei’s walled garden.

Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro review: Price and availability

The Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro costs £249.99 in the UK and AU$299 in Australia. It’s unavailable in the US due to the ongoing ban on Huawei consumer electronics.

It’s very well- priced considering it’s packed with features and packs a durable, premium build, as watches with titanium bezels and sapphire glass usually tend to retail for a lot more.

If that’s still too dear for you, the Huawei Watch Fit 5 (aka the non-Pro version) starts at £159.99 in the UK from Huawei’s website, and around AU$225 in Australia at third-party outlets. Rather than titanium alloy, its case is made of softer recycled aluminum, and its design is more akin to an Apple Watch SE rather than the Ultra series.

It’s a great-looking and feeling watch, and the Huawei Harmony OS software is intuitive.

The lack of third-party app support is always a blow, but lots of sport stuff and (finally!) a digital wallet.

Fast, accurate tracking compared to the top-flight Fenix 8 Pro. Good battery life and an easy all-day wear.

For the price of an Apple Watch SE 3, you get a far more hard-wearing and powerful fitness tool.

Love multi-discipline sports? Bounce between the gym and the pavement? You’ll love this watch.

Huawei’s Curve Pay integration means you can stop for coffee after your run, even without a phone to hand.

Want Spotify, Whats App, Training Peaks and other such integrations on-watch? Huawei’s limited App Gallery will make life more difficult for you.

Even though the Fit 5 Pro has a ton of great features, it’s hard to recommend for i Phone users — Apple makes setting up and using its watches absolutely seamless, and Huawei makes life harder by operating on a separate ecosystem.

If you're on Apple, any of the Apple Watches should be a serious wearable consideration, but the middle-of-the-road Series 11 strikes a balance between premium and affordable.

A powerful, affordable Garmin watch with serious staying power and loads of training credentials. If you don't mind the plastic body, this is a winner.

I wore the Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro for around a week, draining the battery, sleeping with it on, and using it for exercise. I tested the micro-workouts feature, used the Emotional Wellbeing tools, and took the watch swimming, walking and running. To test its running metrics I compared it against the Garmin Fenix 8 Pro smartwatch, Google Fitbit Air fitness tracker and Polar H10 heart rate monitor, wearing multiple devices on runs.

Matt is Tech Radar's expert on all things fitness, wellness and wearable tech.

A former staffer at Men's Health, he holds a Master's Degree in journalism from Cardiff and has written for brands like Runner's World, Women's Health, Men's Fitness, Live Science and Fit&Well on everything fitness tech, exercise, nutrition and mental wellbeing.

Matt's a keen runner, ex-kickboxer, not averse to the odd yoga flow, and insists everyone should stretch every morning. When he’s not training or writing about health and fitness, he can be found reading doorstop-thick fantasy books with lots of fictional maps in them.

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