Huawei Watch Fit 4 review

Introduction

Outside of my ageing Apple Watch SE, the Huawei Watch Fit 4 is the first smartwatch I’ve put through its paces.

As a late adopter of wrist-bound wearable tech who has recently incorporated a gym routine to offset the largely sedentary lifestyle of talking about this stuff for a living, I’m starting to appreciate the gamification of everyday activities these devices can offer. And at £100, the Huawei Watch Fit 4 is a bit of a wakeup call for me.

Design and Screen

• Bright 1.82-inch AMOLED display
• Rounded design
• Always On support

Most days, I genuinely forget that the Huawei Watch Fit 4 strapped around my wrist isn’t my Apple Watch SE.

It’s a little less bubble-like along the edges, but the rounded screen – you know, the part the wearer really sees – tricks me into thinking I’ve brought the wrong device. Every. Single. Time. The crown on one side basically seals the deal, with only a glimpse of the outer shell or the notch that hides the single side button jogging my memory.

What Huawei sent my way was the two-tone grey nylon strap model, but the Huawei Watch Fit 4 is available with purple, white, and black silicone straps, too, with the Purple option being an option for smaller wrists.

Ignoring the bottom-mounted sensors that sink into your skin, the Huawei Watch Fit 4 measures around 43 x 38 x 9.5mm, giving it a generous 1.82-inch screen. This is a crystal-clear AMOLED panel at 480×408 pixels that can hit a reported 2000-nit peak brightness, which is more than enough to stay visible in harsh outdoor sunlight, and makes it a teeny-tiny torch in fringe situations.

There’s also a thin protective skin pre-applied that gives it a grippy, rubber-like texture, and a speaker that gets so loud that I had to stop my sprint in the gym to turn it down in a panic. If you’re looking for something with more rugged appeal, the Huawei Watch 5 is an option, but it’s 3x the price.

Features and Software

• NFC for payments (grey model only)
• Six different lifestyle and health sensors
• Bubble or list view for apps

Packing essentials like a gyroscope, ambient light sensor, and accelerometer is par for the course with a smartwatch, with the optical heart rate sensor being an obvious must-have for one designed with fitness in mind. So that’s what you’re getting.

A barometer and magnetometer are also stuffed in there to help with things like air pressure measurements and orienteering if your preferred way to get your steps in is a walk through the woods or a hike up a mountain.

It’s rated for 5ATM water-resistance, which means that while a swim in a pool is fine, it’s not designed for hot water, making even showers apparently a bit much for the watch and its nylon strap.

For science, I subjected it to ten minutes in a bubbling hot tub and another five in the steam room – my typically twice-weekly gym wind-down routine – which caused it no visible issue. A shower (with plenty of soap) wasn’t a problem either.

A 20-minute swim at the gym was fine, with good visibility under the water, but the water ejecting feature did ask that I let it dry out manually, suggesting it wasn’t happy with its own performance. Manipulating the touchscreen was out of the question, too, but that’s hardly unexpected.

Setup was simpler than I expected on an iPhone. You do need to download the Huawei Health app, but everything else syncs just fine to whichever fitness app you prefer to use. Once it’s ready to go, you’re presented with a UI that closely resembles Apple’s watchOS – an assortment of app icons floating in space that can be swapped to a named list view by scrolling to the bottom.

I was happy to use the default bold and colourful watch face for the longest time, but a quick browse around the dedicated app soon revealed plenty of finer options – including a traditional clock flanked by key daily fitness metrics like steps, calories burned, and my current heart rate for easy viewing at the flick of my wrist.

One major annoyance is needing to give the watch permission to do just about anything. With probably two dozen micro-apps pre-installed, you don’t know which you need until you need it, at which point you have to scroll down to accept its hyper-specific EULA, warning, or advice screen before it’ll do anything.

I’m not going to blame Huawei specifically, but heed my warning: give every app you’re happy to see its relevant permissions the first time you wrap this around your wrist. Delay, and there’s a good chance you’ll regret not having it track something until two weeks down the line.

Health and fitness tracking

• Largely reliable automatic workout tracking
• Easy setup of lifestyle reminders
• Loud speaker for on-the-go exercise

Though I’m far from the most health-fixated person on the planet, I do appreciate any smartwatch’s ability to gamify getting up off the couch.

To that end, the Huawei Watch Fit 4 does more or less everything my Apple Watch SE has been doing for the past couple of years, like encouraging me to break away from my desk, convincing me to get some steps in, and showing off some flashy, brain-pleasing graphics when I give in to its demands.

It may sound silly to some, but as someone who likely has some undiagnosed “lazybones syndrome” type affliction, those little quirks not only help me stretch my body, but give me a good reason to grab a glass of water, walk my dog, and tidy up after myself.

Does it stop me from tabbing back to Twitter every five minutes? No. Maybe there’s an app for that, but at least I don’t have to whip my phone out to check the time. Because we all know where that leads. It’s the little wins, and a £100 device literally keeping me on my toes and better fixated on the world around me is worth it.

Down at the gym, I wore both the Huawei Watch Fit 4 and my blindly-trusted Apple Watch SE during a 20-minute sprint on the treadmill. It’s not massively indicative of my usual routine, given I injured my left leg twice before the Huawei landed at my door, but the results were clear enough to see.

Though the Huawei Watch Fit 4 seemed a little slower to report my heart rate mid-exercise, the result of said 20-minute indoor journey closely matched my Apple Watch and the readout of the treadmill.

In the pool, however, it did seem to miss a length or two. This could have been caused by my need to switch my stroke halfway, but since I haven’t noticed this issue with the Apple Watch SE, it suggests there’s room for improvement.

Knowing it won’t kick the bucket mid-snooze has helped me hone in on my own sleeping habits, too. Where my Apple Watch would miss nights at a time due to a poorly-timed charge, the Huawei Watch Fit 4 survived enough consecutive nights to give a good idea of how to avoid those mid-afternoon lulls.

With more data available on-device to scroll through in the morning, I have a better understanding of how a consistent bedtime (and a camomile tea) affects my day. My breathing seems absolutely fine, too, with the stellar battery life giving it enough time to work out a weekly average I can track well into the future. More on that shortly.

In terms of stability, the very occasional disconnect was easily solved by opening up the Huawei app. This happened maybe twice in three weeks, and only really means missing notifications that can’t be replied to on iOS anyway, but it’s worth mentioning.

Battery life

• Stellar 10-day battery in default conditions
• Four days of battery with always-on display and moderate use
• Fast wireless charging

Battery life is where the Huawei Watch Fit 4 truly stands out. With the Apple Watch SE needing a tight daily charging ritual to avoid shedding the ‘smart’ part of its name on route to the gym, the Huawei Watch Fit 4 lasting for well over a week on a short charge is genuinely life-changing.

Out of the box, the pre-charged battery lasted so long that I eventually lost count of the days. Once it was time to put the tiny battery to the test, it charged on its included puck to 48% after just 30 minutes. As advertised, a full 75-minute charge is all it needed to last around 10 days.

Get into the habit of giving it a 15-minute break on the puck while you take a shower, and you’ll likely never need to go without it.

What is worth noting is that the Huawei Watch Fit 4 uses a different charging protocol than the Apple Watch SE. It’s not a problem if this is your first smartwatch, but if, like me, you’re switching from an Apple Watch for whatever reason, your current all-in-one charging solution might not work.

For example, the pull-out watch puck on my Anker Cube 3-in-1 won’t juice up the Huawei Watch Fit 4, but it’s quite happy to charge via the MagSafe main component made for my iPhone, upsetting any plan for the Huawei to annex the bed of my outgoing Apple Watch for what I hoped would remain a single-cable solution for my phone, watch, and earbuds. Bummer.

Should you buy it?

FAQs