Huawei Watch 3 review – Display of Potential

This year, Huawei began rolling out their Harmony OS 2.0 in the West. That first round of gadgets on their improved homegrown OS includes Huawei Watch 3. A smartwatch that the Chinese telecoms giant claims benefits from the new OS with huge steps forward in terms of usability and function over their previous Watch series entries. All that as well as adding eSIM functionality and a skin temperature monitor.

Huawei’s choice of a smartwatch to show off the power of Harmony OS 2.0 is an interesting one. It’s a familiar product line with an opportunity to demonstrate the OS to the curious without the commitment of buying a smartphone. Smartwatches are also an area where their hardware has excelled while some have found their software a little lacking.

Huawei Watch 3, therefore, comes as a chance to prove itself in this regard.

Classic Chronograph Couture

In keeping with Huawei’s ‘watch look’ goals, Watch 3 sports the classic round footprint. The face is 46.2mm in diameter – it’s a large piece. At 12.15mm deep it’s not thick but still a substantial wear.

Of course, that traditional shape allows for a larger watch without corners to dig into one’s wrist. The 2 o’clock placement of the mildly oversized crown shows they had wrist stabbing in mind. Details like this matter and Huawei’s hardware pedigree shows here.

The all-glass front rises from the stainless steel body with a gentle curve. Our ‘Active Edition’ black model avoids being plain with a bold yet minimalist design. The blackness almost makes it look at though it sits in permanent silhouette.

The build quality is, as expected from a watch this price, stellar. The watch itself, strap excluded, weighs 54 grams. Cramming 54 grams into the modest volume of the device gives it a pleasing density, lending it a rugged feel as well as highlighting the premium materials used.

If there was one complaint, it’s that the plain fluoroelastomer strap looks and feels out of place on a €369 smartwatch. Sure, it’s an ‘active edition’ but a secondary canvas or leather strap would have cemented the premium experience at that premium price.

Screen Soother

With the rounded form of Huawei Watch 3 comes a circular display. The AMOLED screen is gorgeous – bright and colourful with excellent contrast. The 466×466 (square) resolution tucked into a 1.43″ diameter makes it incredibly sharp, capable of showing a surprisingly large amount of legible text, buttons or icons at any time.

The generous array of built-in watch faces benefit hugely from the quality of the display. Whether it’s complex and info-rich skins or the more aesthetically congruent bold, simple ones – they look amazing. There also are hundreds, if not thousands, of user-designed faces available through the smartphone app.

After years of Huawei support for both paid and free facemakers, the selection has plenty of designs that match or exceed the quality of Huawei’s own. A user could spend hours selecting the one they like best – thankfully the watch can carry quite a few spare faces to let you swap on the fly.

The Always-On mode now sports a half-dozen faces. The original analogue designs are joined by some less elegant but well featured digital ones.

Sensor Sensibility

Watch 3’s has an impressive list of sensors and an even more impressive array of functions and features to exploit them. Acceleration, gyro and geomagnetic sensors as well as GPS for navigation and run/cycle tracking. Barometric sensor for altitude and to warn of sudden decreases in pressure that might suggest inclement weather. Optical heart rate and aforementioned skin temperature sensor for keeping an eye on your condition.

That GPS is spotty, though. It can decide to not work for a few minutes at a time or fail to update when you have moved location.

A Tactile Experience

The screen is surrounded by a black 2.5mm bezel that makes it easier to swipe from off-screen, something you will do quite often with the watch’s advanced gesture and swipe system. From top is the quick settings menu, from bottom is notifications. From left is to back/return and from right is forward

The crown is at the centre of off-screen navigation and is not just a juicy visual detail and tribute to the elder watch craft. A user can perform a lot of Huawei Watch 3’s functions by scrolling and clicking with the crown alone, especially if they choose the list menu option. Double-click and long-press show which apps you had open and power options respectively.

The crown features haptic feedback, something that Huawei were keen to point out. You can definitely feel the crown-specific buzz with each press or fraction of a turn but I was expecting something closer to a little ‘winding ratchet’ click when scrolling.

A second button, or ‘Down Button’ sits at 4’o clock almost flush to the side of the watch casing acts as a hot key. There are around two dozen options to choose from out of the box and all of our downloaded apps seem mappable to this Down Button also.

Software Potential Not Yet Fulfilled

As a show of a new ecosystem, Huawei Watch 3 succeeds. The swiftness of the device makes is satisfying to use. That array of sensors and doohickeys have plenty of fitness, health and navigation utility via Huawei’s own apps. After years of trying to marry the round form factor with a fully functional menu and interface system, Huawei has cracked it.

As promising as it is in that respect, the selection of third-party apps and the app store in its current state holds it back.

Huawei App Gallery for Harmony OS 2.0 has quite a few apps but few are standalone in nature. In addition, there are very few AAA app makers present on the store so you probably won’t find many companion versions of your favourite phone apps.

Users may not want to download an unfamiliar app to their phone just so they can avail of its watch functionality. Especially if they already use a more mainstream service.

App Gallery on Huawei Watch 3’s storefront offers only a search function and an expandable ‘featured’ list. There are no categories to help with browsing nor is there a predictive search. The featured list didn’t feature any big names nor did it seem in any way curated.

There are some gems – SofaScore is an excellent sport score app for mobile and smartwatch. It has meaningful standalone content with more available via the mobile app. A perfect sell, really.

Built to Last

A water resistance of 5ATM will see you hit depths of up to 50 metres. Or not. But it’s nice to know it will survive a swim. This water resisance combined with the stainless steel case and tough sapphire glass give a user great confidence in permanently attaching Huawei Watch 3 to one’s wrist.

The battery life is mostly impressive depending on what a user is doing with the device. Huawei’s skill for keeping devices awake long after their competitor’s bedtime means Watch 3 keeps the 14-day battery mode of its fitness ancestors. If anything, a potential 14-day battery life is even more impressive here considering the high pixel count of the AMOLED display.

At full tilt, though you will tire out Huawei Watch 3 in two to three days. An individual user, of course, will take a few battery cycles to find the right balance between the expanded features and function of Watch 3 and the sort of battery life that Huawei’s reputation promises.

Standing Alone

Perhaps the biggest upgrade is Watch 3‘s standalone utility. While their earlier devices stood alone mostly as fitness watches with a handy music app and generous on-board storage, the new generation comes with WLAN and eSIM functionality.

A built-in mic and speaker mean calls can be taken anywhere, unaccompanied by smart or ear phones. For rambling or running light, this is big step up. While standalone apps aren’t as numerous as we would like yet, the potential and promise of more is there. The music player and 16GB of ROM storage is still here.

Specifications:

Huawei Watch 3 wears a stylishly minimalist look with a striking attention to unified visual detail, all while respecting the traditions of a centuries-old craft. It adds a lot to the Huawei Watch experience and the swiftness and visual flourishes of Harmony 2.0 are there to see.

The app store needs to improve its front end and make it much easier to find apps. We also wish there was a bigger AAA presence on Watch 3’s App Gallery so companion apps didn’t require downloading another app on our smartphones.