Stepping out in style
The new exercise watch from Huawei not only records your movements but also helps you to do better
A SMARTWATCH for people who love to exercise while keeping a close watch on their health, the Huawei Watch GT is purpose-built to track your running, biking, walking and even swimming, linking all these features to its heart rate monitoring function to allow you to improve your sports performance.
Tough and sleek, it is resilient to accidents thanks to the ceramic bezel design, stainless steel and diamond-like carbon coating.
Skinny at 10.6mm thin, it features a double crown 1.39-inch vibrant Amoled screen with 454x454 pixels.
The watch also has good battery life. Huwei claims that the GT is the first smartwatch to use double chipset architecture and provides a two-week battery life with heart rate monitoring on and with exercise recording for 90 minutes per week.
It uses Huawei TruSeen 3.0 heart rate monitoring technology with the sensor built in to the back of the watch. To achieve the most accurate read-out of your heart rate, Huawei says the watch should be strapped about 2.5 centimetres from your wrist. Huawei says its technology is efficient and accurate in measuring heart rate as it uses a self-learning algorithm and advanced sensors.
The watch’s GPS chip supports three satellite positioning system (GPS, GLONASS and Galileo) worldwide to offer more accurate and faster and precise positioning.
The watch supports several workout types, including Running Courses, Outdoor Run, Indoor Run, Outdoor Walk, Trail Run, Outdoor Cycle, Indoor Cycle, Pool and Open Water Swimming.
Apart from tracking the exercises of your choice, Huawei Watch GT also provides coaching through introductory to advanced running courses to assist you in real-time. It also offers guidance training and gives time-movement effect feedback for you to try to improve your performance.
To function as fitness tracker, the GT uses its acceleration sensor and gyroscope sensor to detect and monitor your daily activities, including your step count, calories burned, activity intensity, and the amount of time you have been standing.
And the smartwatch can automatically identify your current activity, such as whether you are walking, running or stationary.
The GT can provide sleep statistics so that you can try to improve the quality and length of your sleep. Huawei says it conducted a joint study with Harvard Medical School CDB Centre to produce a sleep monitoring programme for every cycle of sleep. The TruSleep 2.0 identifies common sleep related issues and provides more than 200 potential suggestions to help you sleep better.
And when the Watch GT is connected to your smartphone, it can notify you of notifications of from your phone. It will notify you of SMS message, phone calls, and alarms and you can set reminders on the watch. You can use an app from Huawei, Huawei Health to customise which apps can send notifications to the watch. For example, the watch can alert you of Facebook Messenger alerts.
To start using the GT, you must first download and install Huawei Health and customise the app with your personal data, including your height, weight, sex and birthday.
You then use the app to add Huawei Watch GT to link to the app. The watch will alert you to allow the Bluetooth connection with the phone.
Then, the app will check for available update of firmware for the watch and download and install the firmware accordingly and the watch will be ready for tracking you activities.
The control and navigation for the watch is intuitive with touchscreen and two buttons. For example, you can press the up button to wake the watch screen when the screen is off, or access the app list screen from the home screen or return to the home screen, depending on the current situation. Or you can press and hold it to power it on or restart the watch or power it off.
You can press the down button to open the workout apps or press and hold it to lock or unlock the screen.
And during a workout, you can press the up button to pause or continue the workout or press the down button to switch the screen of the workout. You can press and hold the up button to end the current workout.
You touch and hold the home screen to change watch face. You can also swipe up the home screen to view notifications and swipe down on the home screen to view the shortcut menu and the battery status.
You swipe right or left to view your heart rate data, workout data, and weather information. When you swipe right, you will return to the previous screen.
If you want to improve your run, go to the Guided running feature in the Workout option select a running course. After the run, you can touch Exercise record on the watch screen to view detailed workout data, including training effects, general, speeds, steps, total height, heart rate, cadence and VO2max.
During the test, the watch worked fine in recording my steps and active time.
I also tried using it to record my ten-kilometre walk, using the Outdoor Walk feature. The GPS was fast in linking to a satellite and the watch provided an accurate map of my neighbourhood. During the walk, the watch showed my pace, distance I had walked and elapsed time. It alerted me for every one kilometre I completed with the average speed of that particular kilometre.
Huawei Watch GT has a suggested retail price of Bt5,990.
>> Display: 1.4-inch AMOLED Color Screen Display with |454 x 454 pixels, 397 PPI
>> Hardware function: Gravity Acceleration Sensor, Gyro Sensor, Compass Geomagnetic Sensor, Optical Heart Rate Sensor, Pressure Sensor, Ambient Light Sensor, 5 ATM Water Resistant
>> Memory: 16GB RAM + 128GB ROM
>> Connectivity: GPS + GLONASS + Galileo Support, 2.4 GHz BT4.2 Support BLE
>> Battery: 420mAh
>> Watch dimension: 46.5 x 46.5 x 10.6 mm (H x W x D)
>> Strap dimension: 22 x 140 x 210 mm (H x W x D)
>> Weight: Approx. 46g |(without the strap)
