Hands-on review: The Huawei Watch Fit needs a better workout

In 2020, almost every phone company wants to get in on the smart watch and fitness tracking market. Huawei just released their take on a fitness tracker/smart watch hybrid with Huawei Watch Fit.

The market is saturated with different Wear options. Fitbit's and Garmin's different offerings have dominated the fitness side, while the Apple watch and the OPPO watch cover the smart watch side. Any newcomer needs to be impressive to be able to compete.

From a distance, the Huawei Watch Fit looks great. It has a nice design and small formfactor that is small enough to be small, but also big enough to have a decent screen. Unfortunately, "from a distance" is the key phrase here.

On closer inspection, the Huawei Watch Fit feels a little like a toy you would give your child. Even though it comes in nice and inviting colours, they do not help when you hold it in your hand - they only make it feel cheap. Huawei could greatly improve this watch simply by using better quality materials.

The display looks okay, but the controls are a little weird at times. It is not always very responsive, especially if you are exercising and your hands are a little sweaty. I like the fact that the colours are really crisp because it makes all the stats pop.

The Huawei Watch Fit has all the basic trackers. It tracks steps, heart rate and calories, distance and sleep. This basically covers all the necessities. The watch itself does a good job at the tracking, but you can't really do anything with that data.

With any wearable, you want to be able to access all your data through a phone app. The Huawei app that accompanies the watch is not the greatest. It took me hours to convince it to properly sync with the watch; it's also laggy and doesn't have any social features yet. Huawei could do a much better job of improving its app - perhaps it could use inspiration from the likes of Fitbit or Apple Health.

One of the other unfortunate features is that the watch doesn't automatically recognise exercise. This means that you have to manually log in exercise sessions. To make up for this, the watch does have 85 workout modes and it has a few cute workout examples where a small animated man shows you how to do the move. It's cute, but not necessary.

A great thing about the Huawei watch is battery life, which lasts a whopping 10 days. This is amazing for a budget watch. The Watch Fit can support you a full day after plugging it in for just five to 10 minutes!

While the Watch Fit sounds great at first glance, there is plenty of room for improvement and Huawei needs to do much more if it wants to compete against the likes of Fitbit and Apple. You could say the Watch Fit needs a few more hours in the gym and a better workout.

I would recommend this for anyone on a very tight budget who has never had a fitness watch before, but there are better options out there.