So this is the huawei watch. Three and i’ve been wearing the smartwatch for just over a week and today, i’m, going to tell you everything you need to know about this smartwatch and whether it’s worth the 349 pound selling price. So the first thing is build quality. The watch case is made from stainless steel finished in black with very nice. Smooth ceramic bezels so definitely feels and looks quite premium and very comfortable on the wrist, and the design is quite reminiscent to the samsung galaxy watch active 2 but of course much bigger in size. So, on the front, you are looking at a 1.43 inch, amoled display with a screen res of 466 by 466 and 326 pixels per inch, and you have a scratch resistant ultra 3d curved glass. On top now, this smartwatch is powered by a brand new chipset called the high silicon 6262, but there is no info or mention of it on the official site, which seems kind of strange. You also get two gigs of ram and 16 gigs of internal storage. There is only single band: wi fi, with bluetooth, 5.2 you’ve got built in nfc. This supports e sim and you have a 5 satellite gps built in now. This smart watch is, of course running the harmony os with celia voice assistant, and you do get bluetooth phone calls, so you can make and receive phone calls directly from the watch with all day heart rate monitoring all day, blood, oxygen monitoring, and you also have all Day, skin temperature monitoring, other included health features are automatic sleep tracking, including daytime naps, automatic workout detection, and you do have a lot of built in workouts to choose from now on the side.
You do have two buttons and you can see your loudspeaker just underneath. The top button is actually a scrollable button and you can use that for navigating up and down on the other side. You have nothing and at the bottom of the watch, you’ve got all your health sensors. These straps are made from silicon and they are removable and replaceable with your own 22 millimeter band, and this watch is 5 atm water resistant. So how did i get on with this watch? Well, i really do like the 24 7 monitoring of the various health sensors, but if you switch on all of the health sensors that’s every single one, then i found that the battery will not last longer than 12 hours. If you switch off the auto blood oxygen and skin temperature monitoring to manual and leave on just the all day, heart rate monitoring, then you can achieve around 1.5 days of battery life that’s, taking into consideration that i’m not doing much on the watch so medium to Light usage, i also tested another scenario with everything off, except the all day, heart rate, and this time i switched on the always on display, which i really like, and the battery did last me all day. So that means the battery life for the huawei watch. Active 3 is quite bad and it’s, certainly not three days that they quote. It means if you do anything more on the watch. For example, taking phone calls using an e sim or even downloading watch faces, the battery will rinse pretty fast.
The hardware is good, but i think the software harmony os is not quite energy efficient yet, and this active model appears to have a lower battery capacity than the pro elite titanium version, which i recently reviewed. Now there are a few other drawbacks. You cannot respond to notifications. You can only read the first line of the subject, so all messages and notifications are read only, but at this price point the samsung galaxy watches and even the apple watches allow you to respond and reply to notifications and much much more. So not sure why huawei would leave out such an important feature. Another thumbs down from me is the fact that you cannot copy over your mp3s. Yet so maybe you can in the future, but as it stands, you cannot copy your own mp3s to that 16. Gig internal storage, but you can in the previous gen huawei gt2 watches, so why would they remove that feature now talking about os compatibility? I tested this smartwatch throughout on both android and ios. Now let’s talk about software compatibility. I tested this smartwatch thoroughly, both android and ios, so on android everything works as it should on ios. It will give you complete compatibility, including bluetooth, calls read. Only notifications, you still get the always on display. Complete health tracking is available. Everything works very well on iphone. Minus huawei music. So if you try and open huawei music, you will get a message saying: ios is not compatible.
Also, some of the apps you download from the app gallery are not compatible with ios, as some of these apps actually need their android counterpart downloaded on the phone in order to work. So, yes, you can expect app compatibility issues when using iphone. Now on to some positives. We have plenty of watch faces to download and to change. Your watch face just keep the center press for a second or two. You will feel some haptic feedback and then you’ll be presented with a whole bunch of watch faces that you can immediately change to and i’ll give you a few examples on screen of some of my favorite watch faces Music, so you can change your watch faces from The watch, but you can also do it from the smartphone app and, as you can see, there are lots of pre installed watch faces and there are so many that you can download as well and just to show you the power and performance of this watch. I am going to download a watch face right now and show you how long it takes to transfer so just going to choose a watch face that i don’t already have. So it looks like this one 374 kb it’s already downloaded, and it is now installing and we’re going to see how long it takes to transfer to the watch done and so it’s downloaded and installed. I think within 30 seconds to download and install this watch face.
So a pretty good all around performance from this watch now i’ll give you a quick walkthrough of the software, but before i do that, i just want to quickly show you what you get in the box standard, huawei wireless charger simply hook on top and it’s a Magnetic charger and that watch takes around 90 minutes to fully charge, and you get some paperwork to go with it, so that is pretty much it watch software so swipe down for your quick toggles for aeroplane mode screen on vibration, do not disturb alarms, etc. If you swipe to the right, you’ve got your celia voice, assistant and you’ve got your local weather. Now you can activate celia with your voice. What is the weather like today in london, the forecast was mostly cloudy with showers in london today with a high of 20 degrees celsius and a low of 14 degrees celsius. It actually is cloudy and you can swipe up for some detailed information. So celia is quite a new fresh voice assistant, but it does do the job for basic tasks like setting, alarms, setting reminders and checking your local weather, etc. If you swipe up towards the top you’ve got your notifications, if you swipe left you’ve got your health tiles. So here are your health rings: you’ve got your heart rate, tracking your blood, oxygen tracking and your skin temperature. You can also customize all of these by hitting the edit sign and then you’ll be able to move things around now.
If you press this button over here, it will bring up all your apps and you can see how neatly it’s laid out, giving you kind of like an ios style, and you can zoom in and out as well. If that makes things a little bit easier for you and you can see, we have quite an extensive app list. There you’ve got everything from sleep tracking, your music heart rate, skin temperatures, sleep, monitoring, you’ve got your weather, workouts you’ve got phone. So if you tap on phone you’ll be able to initiate phone calls check out, your missed calls and you’ve even got a keypad, so you can dial a phone number out, so harmony os does look and feel pretty good, smooth in operation definitely going in the right Direction all right so time to test out the accuracy of the health sensors. So here is the o2 ring it’s a medical grade sensor, and it will give you in real time your heart rate and blood oxygen reading. At the same time and it’s super accurate medical grade now there is no smart watch out there that claims to be medical grade. But what we’re trying to do in this experiment is to show you how close to medical grade this watch is so let’s go straight to the heart rate test, so it’s showing me a hundred beats per minute and on the o2 it’s showing me 75 beats per Minute, if we just give the watch 3 a minute to collaborate itself, because i’ve just put it on again so we’ve got 92 beats per minute.
On the watch three i’m going to bring in the o2 ring, you can see. The heart rate is 92 as well. 82, 81. 80 and you can see it’s gone to 89., so you can see 94 now and the watch 3 is still on 89, but it’s going to come up to 91 and that comes up to 96.. So, in terms of accuracy of that heart rate sensor, this is what you guys can expect. Definitely not a super accurate heart rate sensor in the active model, i’m going to swipe again and we’re going to now test out the spo2. The watch is definitely on very tight and i’m going to keep still now and we’re going to get a reading. The o2 ring the o2 ring is giving us a 96 blood oxygen rating let’s see what result we get on the watch three so 95 on the medical grade and the watch three says a hundred percent. As you can see, that is such a big difference in the reading 96 on medical grade and a hundred percent on the watch. We’Re gon na have to press measure again just to see what happens. This is exactly what happened to me during the whole week of testing this watch. My blood oxygen would not move from 100 and it looks like this watch needs a firmware update to improve things, but as it stands, i cannot say that the health sensors are accurate. Okay, finally, we’ve got skin temperature monitoring again it’s, not on 24 7, because that just kills the battery so measure when i need it 35.
1. I don’t have a temperature sensor handy on this desk right now to compare, but that does look about right. So that was all your health tracking, so there you have it guys. My few weeks with the huawei watch 3 active model, i think huawei have nailed the design and build quality of this watch. Stainless steel finish with amoled display 580 and water resistance, and it feels on par and as premium as the galaxy watch series, smart watches and to me this really does look and feel like a bigger version of the active two. If i turn off both displays, you can see how similar they look i’m, not comparing the crown on the side, and this is how they look underneath it’s. A very similar feel very similar. Build quality. You’Ve got a lot of health features here, um, but unfortunately the sensors were not as accurate as i would have liked them to be. I do like the always on feature. You’Ve got a great looking screen and lots of built in apps to play around with you. Also have the app gallery so downloadable apps are here, but we have to wait for that library to give us better choices as right now. The downloadable apps are not very useful. Another major letdown which stops me from wearing this watch as my daily driver, is the battery life huawei promises three days, and i really wish that was true, but i can only see that happening if you turn off all the health sensors turn off wi fi turn Off nfc, maybe even turn off bluetooth, and then you might achieve three days, but then it becomes a pointless non.
Smart fitness watch with no fitness tracking active for 350 pounds. The previous gt2 version of the huawei watch was actually able to give you something. Like 15 days battery life and still be able to change your watch faces, whereas in this active watch 3 you can go into power, save mode which will give you a good 14 days battery life, and it will give you also all the health sensors active. So heart rate blood oxygen and skin temperature monitoring and sleep monitoring, but you are somewhat limited in features, so you cannot change the watch face in this mode and when you hit the app drawer, you are limited in what apps you can see. So technically, when you go in power saving mode, it turns into a huawei gt2, but with some features taken out. So no copying over music and no changing watch faces now just to compare the samsung galaxy watch 3, for example, will give you 2.5 days to 3 days battery life with every fitness feature switched on. So definitely a mistake to put a smaller battery in the active model. The pro version of the watch 3 has a much better battery life. You also cannot use the built in nfc at the moment there is no app for it. So no nfc payment supported with this watch and i’ve not been able to test the e sim, but i’ve actually read somewhere that the e sim does not work outside of china.
So i’m gon na have to test out the esim feature for myself. So do bear with me on that, so the takeaway here is this watch is currently overpriced. It has all the ingredients to make quite possibly the best smart watch in the world, but the ingredients have not been cooked properly, leaving a raw taste in your mouth now i’m feeling like this could have been so much better. Maybe they released it too quickly and they should have waited for better app compatibility and downloads, better system and battery efficiency and maybe more lab testing. If huawei were to send me the watch much earlier than release, i would certainly lab test it for them. So there is lots to do, will they do it? That is the question, and if they do, i will certainly drop another video now. That being said, i am at the same time happy that huawei has tried to push forward in their wearables by introducing the app gallery and introducing some of these extra features that you get with harmony os. But again we do have to wait to see if things improve and especially the actual health tracking in the active model. Now the pro version of this watch definitely has better and more accurate health tracking. So the question is: should you buy this smart watch so based on everything that i have shared? If you still want a watch 3 series watch, i would definitely recommend the pro version.
That is, if you can afford the high price tag. The pro version will definitely give you more accurate health tracking, but also solves the problem of the battery life. I hope you found this video useful. Any questions do fire them at me in the comments.oEt0gRCdS8Q
