A Watch Review: Huawei Watch GT 3
So, its been a lil while, but this is a follow on from a post I made back in May reviewing my last watch, a Fitbit Versa 2. I want to contrast that experience with that of my current watch, the GT 3.
I’ve been using this watch daily since December 2022, and I guess the best way to sum it up in one sentence is that, two and a half years on, I don’t really want to change watches. Sure, I have a Core Time 2 Pebble Time 2 on preorder, but I kind of know that as cool as that is, it will probably be a downgrade.
Aesthetics
Starting with the biggest part of how I feel about this watch - aesthetics. One of two reasons I got this watch is still the biggest reason I love it to this day. It looks good. Most smartwatches fall into a few camps. First is the “Apple Watch alike”, as is the case for the Apple Watch, Fitbit Versa, Galaxy Fit, Huawei Watch FIT / D, and more. Some people I know have pushed back on my opinion here and think these watches genuinely look nice, and I suppose power to them, but in my opinion it looks like someone has taped a phone to your wrist, and its using the same trick as AirPods to become “fashionable” - being Apple and having status. Also I’m putting the Pixel Watch here even though that watch is circular, because it looks like a techy artefact and not a watch, which is what I’m really getting at here.
Then there are watches that look more like they want to be inline like a classic Fitbit, such as a Fitbit Charge and Huawei Band. I don’t really have much to say about these but I don’t really care for them for myself.
Most interesting to me are the watches that actually try to look like a traditional watch. Examples here include the Galaxy Watches, Garmin’s offerings, the Huawei Watch, GT, and Ultimate lines. I am particularly interested here because I love the functionality of a smart watch, but much prefer a traditional watch fashion-wise. I think a tasteful watch on your wrist can look great.
This last category then further splits pretty much just like the world of men’s watches does anyway - into ugly and tasteful. Galaxy Watch? Tasteful. Huawei Watch (GT) 2 and 3? Tasteful. Huawei Watch (GT) 4+, Watch Ultimate, Galaxy Watch Ultra? Ugly. Designed to look either aggressively masculine, or aggressively expensive. I’d expect to see them on Alex Jones’ wrist or on teleshopping.
I’m rambling here but the TL;DR is that I personally believe the GT 3 to be one of the most fashionable smartwatches ever made, and that makes me feel good about wearing it. I do wish now that I have transitioned that I had the more fem styled variant instead of the larger and more masculine styled variant, but hey it has a larger battery, a cool dial around the outside, and it works aesthetically with leather bands, which are my fave :>
Including this one with the moon phases feels like cheating since literally nobody ever would need this on their home cards unless they were like really into astrology or some shit, but it looks fucking fantastic on this display. It’s stunning in person, especially when at the time my phone had an LCD display.
Materials, Build, and Comfort
This watch feels as you would expect from any major tech company - it’s built excellently. Of the many colour choices (metal + leather, black body + silicone band, metal + band band), I went for the silver body with the leather band.
I am pretty sure the body is aluminium, its shiny aluminium on the top and between where the bands connect, but the outside edges are brushed, which helps them not pick up fingerprints so much. The bottom button clicks decisively and doesnt wobble particularly, and is brushed to match. The crown is shiny around the edge, radially brushed, rotates smoothly, and clicks satisfyingly.
The glass of the screen is durable enough, mine has scratches but you really struggle to see them, somehow. The glass bevels down to meet the body and this particular colourway comes with clock numbers printed under the glass around the outside which I think looks fantastic in their execution.
I highly appreciate that this watch can take regular watch bands, not just proprietary ones, so after their official leather band, which was of high quality and attractive, worn down over a couple years, I was able to replace it with my favourite watch band, a Barton Quick release. I am still using that band now as I type this.
As for comfort, this thing is excellent. I’m sure more comfortable watches exist, and I can often feel that I’m wearing it and want to take it off, especially when I’ve just woken up (I sleep with this on), but its far and away the most comfortable out of the smartwatches I’ve had - it doesn’t dig into my wrist as my Fitbits did. The back glass is easy to keep clean, too.
I happily believe the waterproofing rating, at least I did up until the screen started to pop off just as my Versa 2 did to me. This is because the seals in the screens of these can start to go after a few years. Luckily, I found this watch to be not too hard to disassemble, so I was able to take the screen out, then superglue it back in nice and tight, and reassemble it. I expect it probably is now waterproof again now, but I don’t trust it to be anything more than splash resistant because, frankly, my track record isn’t great :p
Hardware
The sensors / hardware crammed into this little thing impress me. It can read my heart rate, my blood oxygen, figure out if im sleeping or not and whether im in light/REM/deep sleep, has accelerometers etc for step and activity tracking, has a skin temperature sensor, a barometer, bluetooth for connecting to your phone or to bluetooth speakers (!), GPS for outdoor exercise, a compass, NFC for payments, and a microphone and speaker for taking calls and using a voice assistant.
Regrettably the NFC is useless to me as my region (the UK) is not one where Huawei Wallet is available, and same for the mic and speaker as I don’t take calls on this, nor play music from it, and you need a phone running Huawei EMUI to make use of the voice assistant. Still, neat to say that they completed the pairing unlike the Fitbit Versa 2, where Alexa could hear you, but only reply to you on the screen.
The watch has a round screen, which may be a downside to some, but as an analog clock face person, this is a HUGE plus. Analog-style watch faces just look at home on this. Personally I use a watch face called “FYaHeiEN”, and I wouldn’t want to try anything different.
The display is bright, clear, and automatically adjusts brightness such that it will not at all bother me or dazzle me if I check my watch groggily after waking up in the middle of the night. The heart rate sensor does not fill my room with green in the dark nearly as much as my Fitbits did.
The vibration motors in this are perfectly sufficient to tell me when I have a notification, buzz me when I need to get up and move this hour, or wake me up silently in the morning. I will note that I actually do sometimes sleep through the alarms on this - they might technically wake me up, but then I drift off half an hour later and don’t even recall being awake. I am unsure if this is an issue with the vibration strength, just inherent to the lack of noise, or if I simply need a more healthy sleep cycle, but it’s worth noting.
Unlike the Fitbits I’ve had which used either a plug or metal contacts and pogo pins, this watch charges wirelessly. Annoyingly it follows the smartwatch trend of using nonstandard charging. This won’t work on a Qi pad.
The battery in this thing is insane. A large part of this is down to the software, but this thing was marketed to last 2 weeks new, which I think was just about possible, and it routinely lasts me a week to a week and a half now, with its three year old battery.
There’s no WiFi, and while this does make the initial software update when you unbox it kinda suck, its fine in practice as your phone will quietly send software updates to the watch in the background, then the watch will simply prompt you with an “update available click here to do it now” button once its finished sending the entire firmware over bluetooth, and it installs quickly.
Software
I don’t really follow what Huawei have done with their product lines since (I think now the GT distinction is a fashion thing), but at the time, the GT line was distinct from the flagship Huawei Watches by the software. At the time (pre sanctions I guess!) the Huawei Watch line ran a version of HarmonyOS based on Wear OS, which meant you had access to the whole library of android apps, whereas the Watch GT line run a version of HarmonyOS based on a custom LiteOS kernel. God knows what the current watches run, probably something similar to HarmonyOS NEXT, but what I DO know is that the LiteOS based HarmonyOS is incredibly frugal with power draw.
The OS is the trick to these watches lasting two weeks when new. Both WatchOS and Wear OS draw power like a bitch because they’re phone OSes shoved onto a watch, but this just lasts.
I don’t really like the lack of an ecosystem, its very small, but the software in general aside from that is fantastic. The Huawei Health iOS app kinda sucks but the Android one is great, and the watch itself is too. Your metrics are continuously monitored throughout the day, you can rearrange your app menu and choose your home pages that you can swipe between. Notification management is good, though I wish it would send app icons to the watch for unknown apps - there’s essentially a whilelist of apps that will have their icon shown on-watch. My one gripe with notifications is that its not really possible to open the notification centre unless you’re on the watch face. They’ll pop over other apps, and you can open the notification full screen, but if you miss it its gone.
This is especially infuriating if you’re in an exercise, as while the exercise UI is generally good, you can’t go into another app nor open notifications nor settings while you are exercising, or well, not without ending your exercise session.
The watch syncs data via your phone pretty seamlessly. I wake up every morning to accurate and up to date weather information on my wrist, and if I tap into the weather app, it’ll immediately grab up to date information from my phone including adjusting my location, which takes only 5 or so seconds. I can also trigger a sync from the watch side by pulling down in the status pane (to the left of the watch face), which contains weather and now-playing info. Notifications show up and disappear instantly, now playing data does too, and when you finish an exercise session, you can look at the summary on your watch and maybe just a second or two later it’s synced to your phone (and presumably the cloud) and you get a push notification back notifying you that that is done.
When I raise my wrist the watch tends to pick up my intention pretty accurately every time, and I appreciate that watch faces are allowed to be interactive - I can tap the weather on my face to open the weather app, the “unread notifications” indicator to open the notification centre, the sleep time indicator to open the sleep data app, and steps or distance moved to open activity tracking.
The OS has a pleasing and consistent design language.
The sleep tracking works very well and I appreciate having it there when I want it.
Battery Life
Because I am very obviously a normal and neurotypical individual /s, I decided to actually measure the battery life of this watch, using it as I usually would.
Now it turns out that this kind of backfired because the day I started this experiment, I then walked a way to meet up with some friends, and chose to record this with the GPS on the watch, and if I was trying to get a more representative sample of how the battery lasts I probably would have chosen to avoid that. Hey, it’s probably representative for how many people do use their watch though, so why not!
I don’t really know how to interpret this data, but it lasted for 75 hours, which is 3 days and 3 hours. Not as good as I remember, actually. I’m not sure how much I trust past me’s data gathering though.
The battery life of this thing never bothers me day to day though.
Openness
I can’t really develop software or watch faces for this. I signed up for the developer program (I had to send this chinese tech giant a picture of my debit card for this, as I remember, neat! /s), and installed their crappy watch face studio, and pretty much gave up. Clearly its doable but even if I got past the tools sucking, I could not find how the hell to actually install the face to my watch from the phone app, which is supposed to be just there. Whatever, I wanted to add timezones to my watch face but I can live without. I’ll probably do it for realsies when I get my core time!
uhhhhh wait i need a conclusion
I feel like this review has been incredibly unstructured but essentially, I like the watch. It looks attractive enough, its comfy, and it does everything I want out of a watch: show me the time, my notifications, the date and weather, how well I slept, wake me up in the morning, and perhaps every so often recording my walking route and metrics is a nice bonus.
The app is good and I like the stats / “insights” they show me using my data. I don’t see any reason to upgrade from this now “outdated” watch. I was getting software updates up through a year or so back, and while I havent had an update in a while, its pretty stable.
Literally the only reason I’m even getting a new watch is because its a cool thing that I might never get the chance to grab any time other than now - I suspect I’ll prefer to keep wearing the GT 3 day to day.
I’m happy :)
oh god never mind
Okay so when I drafted this review, 6 days ago, the watch was working wonderfully, but I have done something a lil stupid. I wore this watch while swimming! Now initially I thought “I do not trust the water resistance on this” as it’s 2.5yr old, the screen literally fell off and I glued it back in, and I’m pretty sure opening the watch reduced the effectiveness of the back / body seal.
I did not realise I was wearing it until after I was in the water, and actually, it worked flawlessly for 10 minutes! It would respond if I lifted my wrist underwater, etc. Being the idiot I am, I got a false sense of security and just left it on. I checked back another 5 minutes later and it was gone. Off and completely unresponsive.
I uh… hopefully I can revive it but if not then oopsies! In fairness, despite the advertised 50m water resistance, Huawei did not have any format IP ratings for their GT series watches until the GT 5, and its an old watch now, but, damn.
Anyway! Thanks, and hopefully this is in some way engaging or helpful at all, or interesting, I don’t know :p
Hope to see you around here some time again.
— Hazel