The Huawei Watch Fit (2021 version) is the latest in Huawei’s lineup of budget wearables. While the brand has been launching these devices on a regular basis, the Watch Fit is probably the most ideal device for moderate exercise enthusiasts. Since we’ve already had experience using their other wearables, particularly the Watch GT 2e and the Band 6, we’ll explain more about where the Watch Fit actually fits in the lineup.
The Watch Fit is probably the middle ground between the Watch GT series and the Band series – not too big, not too small, and caters to both men and women alike. Huawei also put in just the right amount of specifications in this device that just makes it so much more of a better value compared to the Band series. Of course, with the GT series costing up to 3x more than the Fit series, it’s easy to see why Huawei has this lineup available.
Unboxing
Tiny but with a great display and interface
Our demo unit came in it’s nice matte “Isle Blue” color, but there’s also other colors such as Pomelo Red, Sakura Pink, and Graphite Black.
Length of the watch is 46mm with a width of 30mm. The strap has a length of 130mm-210mm, while the Sakura Pink version is made for those with much smaller wrists, at 110mm – 190mm, which is a fantastic consideration for those who have problems with wearables being too big. The watch itself is extremely light at 21g, and I sometimes forgot that I was even wearing it.
The watch display is at 1.64inches with an AMOLED color screen (456x280pixels, 326PPI) Colors are definitely much brighter and even comparable to the much more expensive Apple watch. It’s 5 ATM water-resistant, meaning it can work with casual activities such as swimming, but it’s not meant for scuba diving or waterskiing. However, the touchscreen does not work when underwater. There’s only a single side button to the right side of the device, and the charging port is located at the back of the watch beside the heart rate sensor. There’s no NFC or GPS, and no other apps can be run natively on the watch alone. There’s also no SIM card tray, but it does support Bluetooth 5.0 and BLE. However, it’s compatible with both Android and iOS devices. Android devices dont’ necessarily need to be Huawei devices, since the Huawei Health app works with all devices. One thing to note is that the music player (either youtube, apple music, or spotify) control won’t work with iOS devices, which is probably the biggest downside for this watch for Apple users. If you’re going to use the Watch Fit with an Android device that isn’t a Huawei, then it will still work fine.
Fantastic Battery Life
Probably one of the most important features of a wearable is battery life. For a device that’s assumed to be always on and always on the wrist, wearables are just not supposed to be charged the same way as laptops or mobile phones. In addition, since they normally have their own unique charging cables, it’s also such a hassle to add to your normal portfolio of cable.
Luckily, after testing for a few months as my new daily driver, the Huawei Watch Fit battery life lasts more than a week. On the average, it would take around 7-8 days on active monitoring mode with heart rate, O2, sleep sensors, only occassionally taking it off my wrist. I was genuinely surprised by this, considering that my 2-year old GT2e lasted only around 4-5 days if this setting was turned on. When all the sensors are off, it lasted even more – around 9-10 days. With absolutely the lowest level of power available on standby mode, it really is able to maximize battery life over anything else.
Charging time is barely noticeable, with the Huawei Watch Fit capable of being fully charged in less than an hour. Its magnetic charging cable is also incredibly strong, unlike other wearable chargers I’ve used before. It also alerts you to make sure that the charging surface is clean.
In addition to this, Huawei has been making its charging cables more compatible with each other – thus my Huawei Watch Fit cable is also compatible with my Huawei Band 6. Hopefully they maintain this trend with all other wearables.
Exercises within the Device
One of the key differences between the Huawei Watch Fit and my other entry level wearables is the availability of basic to advanced exercises within the device, called “Quick-Workout Animations”. Even as a moderate fitness enthusiast, I found that this feature to be extremely helpful – especially since I wanted to change up my exercises a little bit. Of course, a lot of these are just bodyweight exercises, but when you’re outside of the gym and don’t really have a lot of time to think about what you’re going to do, then you’d find that these are really useful. In addition, it also provides vibration queues so that you’re in track of when to start or stop certain exercises.
Currently, there’s 12 kinds of animated quick workouts, such as “Exercise at Work”, “Full body stretch”, “Ab ripper”, with 44 movement demonstrations. It’s quite limited, but a great feature especially if you’re just starting with your fitness journey, or just want to change up your usual routine. It’s really like having a private trainer on your wrist. And judging from the animation guy’s clothes, it’s really more for casual exercises during breaktimes, not for serious workout sessions.
One of the key things I really wanted to build up on this was the availability of a store that could help to upload more exercises on the watch. Currently, there is only a limited number of exercises available, and unfortunately it’s not upgradeable. Even if there was a paid way to do this or an available library of exercises that can be uploaded to the device, I would have gladly paid for it. C’mon, Huawei.
Tracks a ton of vital health signs
At this point, there’s not really a lot more sensors to add to these wearables. Everyone is just waiting for a consumer-friendly sensor that can track blood pressure (which sadly still isn’t available yet anywhere), but aside from that it’s really mostly the same. For the Huawei Watch Fit, there’s an optical heart rate sensor and a 6-axis IMU sensor (accelerometer, gyroscope), both of which work together to do all of the measurements.
In addition, if you really need to be constantly conscious about your heart rate, there’s an option to turn on 24/7 Heart Rate monitoring, which will also alert you if your heart rate spikes. There’s also All-Day Sp02 (blood oxygen) monitoring which will also alert you when O2 levels are low. All of the records can be viewed either on the watch itself or on the Huawei Health app. These are especially helpful during the pandemic, in which both heart rate and O2 level monitoring is extremely important when sick with COVID. Compared to my previous devices, these measurements were extremely accurate, and comparable to the results from other separate medical devices that also measure the same figures.
Easy to use for exercises
There’s a whopping 97 workout modes on the Huawei Watch Fit, including 12 professional sport modes for running, swimming, cycling, and rope jumping. Others casual workouts include weight training, HIIT, and many more. The watch will also sense if you’re currently vigorously running, and will ask if you’re running so that it can turn on its sport mode for running.
While these modes are primarily for tracking purposes on the app, it also give users the chance to track vital performance indicators. However, this is mostly applicable for the running, cycling mode and other sport modes, in which the app will give out a ton of statistics for improvement including your speed, pace, cadence, stride, and a lot more. For most other workouts, such as strength training, it will only really track duration, kind of exercise (anaerobic or aerobic), calories burned. It won’t track how many reps or sets you’ve made, although in all honesty I’m not sure if a device can actually do that.
Unfortunately, I’m not much of a runner, so I wasn’t able to monitor the results for running, but there’s a whole host of result examples on the Huawei website for that. There’s also a whole separate tab on the Huawei Health app that specifically monitors running activities, so it would definitely be much more helpful for fitness enthusiasts who are into running.
Conclusion: Cheap, Simple device for moderate fitness activities
While it neither shares the complicated features nor the high price of the flagship Watch GT 3, the Huawei Fit 2021 is perfect for beginner to moderate fitness enthusiasts who don’t really want to spend much for expensive devices. Boasting a fantastic battery life, a great display, and basic functions necessary for a fitness watch, there really isn’t anything else to ask from a device at this price.