The Huawei Watch Fit 3 has been my daily wearable for quite a while now. When my Garmin’s battery started giving me the ghost, I thought I’d give it a try, and I actually really enjoy it. It’s a great piece of tech that does everything my old watch did and more.
Then the opportunity arose to test out the new Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro, and I leapt at it. Why wouldn’t I want to test out the newer, pro-ier version of the watch I wear every day?
We got the green version of the watch for review, which comes with Huawei’s new lime green nylon strap. I was pretty pleased we got this version for review because I love green things. Don’t judge me. This also means I get to give you a mini review on the strap compared to the fluoroelastomer, silicone style straps we’re used to.
But let’s start from the beginning: what’s new in the Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro?
Well, for one, the Watch Fit 4 Pro features a much more robust titanium alloy bezel, a sapphire OLED screen with amazing colour, new golf features, diving capabilities up to 40m, and a host of new sensors built in, including a barometer, temperature sensor and ECG sensor.
Essentially, it’s a straight-up upgrade on the Watch Fit 3: more sensors, a better battery, and Pro-level features.
Eager to see if it would impress me more than the Watch Fit 3 did, I connected it up to my iPhone, slapped it on my wrist, and went straight to bed. Because sleep monitoring, duh. Oh, and I had a weekend away planned with some exciting outdoor hiking, just perfect to see how the Fit 4 Pro would perform.
To touch on sleep tracking quickly, though, the Fit 4 Pro is more than comfortable enough, even with its bulkier design, to wear all night long for decent sleep tracking. It’s a great nighttime gadget, paired with the incredible battery life you get out of the watch. It tracks your sleep duration and quality and offers insights as to why you may have overslept one morning or why you feel great as you wake up.
Ok, back to the hiking. Out in the Magoebaskloof mountains, the green of the Fit 4 Pro suited the wilderness perfectly, sort of. It was burning season in the veld. But what the watch did suit perfectly was tracking everything we did up on the trail: elevation gain and descent, direction, with a built-in compass, heart rate, and all the rest you’d expect from any other smart watch. All of it neatly displayed on my wrist. I even used the route tracking to take us back to our start location after the route got a little hard to find in the end.
While it may not have offered anything I’d never seen before, it was just great to have all that data on my wrist. Plus, I was confident enough that the battery would get me through it without a hitch. On the almost three-hour hike, the battery drained around 25%. This means that you could roughly estimate a 10% drain per hour while using all the sensors on the watch.
After the hike, a quick dip in the hot tub proved that the watch could go underwater just fine, and we were able to utilise the built-in temperature sensor to tell us just how hot this wood-fired water tub was getting.
While I could easily see the watch being a great outdoor sports assistant, my reality is slightly different. I train in an indoor gym doing CrossFit things most days of the week, with a leisurely walk in the park with my dogs when I can on the weekend. I sit behind a computer desk most of the day during working hours, and again, playing games outside of working hours. I’m 3D printing things, and I’m helping Len build the podcast studio for the 13th time. I’m doing a lot.
This daily lifetime kind of stuff is where the Watch Fit 4 Pro started to lack in its lustre compared to the Watch Fit 3.
The bulkier design in my workouts meant I was always pressing down on the crown, even with the enabled crown and screen lock. This would either pause my workout, stop it entirely, or, in one case, reset the whole watch. The crown is also very sensitive, almost as if it’s free wheeling it’s way down a hill until you get to the bottom of the app screen.
The Nylon strap, while completely interchangeable, gets dirty quite a lot quicker than the fluoroelastomer strap I’m used to. I’m also not 100% confident that the Velcro pieces will stay on the strap for very long with the amount of taking the watch off and putting it back on that I do.
It’s also worth noting, not that it’s bothered me in the past, that as an iPhone user, you have no access to the Huawei App Gallery to install third-party apps on the watch. The main Huawei Health App works perfectly well for tracking all your data and installing new watch faces, but what you get is what you’re stuck with if you’re on an iPhone. That being said, even Android users only have around 15 third-party apps to play with, so it’s not like there’s much to miss out on. If you’re a tap-and-pay with your watch kind of person, you’ll also be out of luck here, as it just doesn’t yet work in South Africa.
So, even though the Watch Fit 4 Pro looked cooler in its suave green strap, had a better speaker for taking calls and making memos on, packed more sensors and had the data-hungry nerd inside of me jumping for joy, lasted eight days on a single charge, and now charges via a wireless charger. I was still happy to go back to my Watch Fit 3.
If you are already on a Huawei Watch Fit 3, I wouldn’t say the upgrade is necessary unless you specifically want it for diving or the added golf maps. But if you’re looking for a new smart watch in general, you should definitely give the Huawei range a peek. They perform well, have great battery life, and come in at a fraction of the cost of most other brands.
