Huawei launches a series of new smartwatches to challenge the competition, Apple and Samsung first and foremost. With Huawei Watch Ultimate aims at the “smart” luxury sector, focusing on three main elements: quality of materials, sports and health tracking and battery life.
How it’s done
Huawei Watch Ultimate tries to convince those who don’t want to give up design while maintaining smart features. The objective, here, is to propose something that can be worn on any occasion, without that “cheap” effect that even products like Apple’s Ultra convey while losing elegance.
Its advantage is that it does not look like a display attached to a strap, but a real one clock able to capture attention starting from materials: the bezel, in two colours, is made of ceramic with nanotechnological treatment to make it resistant to impacts, the case is in zirconium-based liquid metal with titanium alloy buttons. The same choice of the two-tone bezel recalls the world of the most classic and prestigious watches, as does the titanium strap available in the more expensive versions.
The 48mm case integrates one AMOLED screen generously sized (1.5 inches) with a truly responsive touchscreen and an interface that never showed slowdowns during the test of more than two weeks. Tested in all light conditions, the screen returned excellent brightness even under direct sunlight, always guaranteeing readability.
Technology: sport and health
At the center of the technological part of Huawei Watch Ultimate there is the TruSense systema technology that combines the latest generation sensors with the most advanced software algorithms to track activity and health:
- accelerometer
- gyroscope
- magnetometer
- optical heart rate sensor
- barometer
- skin temperature sensor
- depth sensor
- ECG sensor
- ambient light sensor
The catalog of sporting activities available is enormous and uses new sensors to precisely track position and movements. Navigation during excursions, for example, is very precise and even works with offline maps. During the race, the precision detected compared to other smartwatches is really high, giving us tracking that is more in line with the road actually travelled, therefore more precise both in terms of kilometers and in terms of pace.
With its 100 meters of resistance under water (10 ATM), Huawei Watch Ultimate also becomes a companion for those who practice diving, returning data such as dive time, depth, descent rate (measured in meters per minute) and so on.
Even i golfers they will have complete software at their disposal, so much so that Huawei provides maps of golf courses (there are more than 15,000) which can be viewed to have a preview of the holes to be tackled, as well as tracking our swing and backswing thanks to a algorithm trained in the laboratory with repeated tests that compare the data from the watch sensor with that of external equipment and cameras that analyze the player.
And for tracking the Health? Huawei has a new series of sensors which are now very close to professional medical devices. Compared with medical equipment, in fact, the data from Huawei’s sensors are truly precise in detecting the level of oxygen in the blood and heartbeats. However, by combining all the readings, Huawei has created a system that offers other features, starting from the stiffness of the arteries and ending with the ECG which can then be sent by creating a PDF on the app (app for iOS and Android) so that it can be consulted to your doctor.
The advantage is that by tracking all this data over time, Huawei’s smartwatch (with theHuawei Health app) can better understand when our health parameters deviate from the norm. In China, for some time now, the precision of these devices has been certified as usable for medical measurements and the manufacturer is working to obtain this recognition in other countries (especially with the Watch D2 which also measures blood pressure).
Who it is meant for
An important thing needs to be said about this smartwatchesit is not one of those designed to use applications such as those that manage, for example, the connected home or the digital key for some cars: Huawei cannot access the Google Play Store like the Android smartwatches we are used to, and this places it in a very specific segment of the market.
Huawei Watch Ultimate should therefore be chosen by those looking for excellent tracking of health and sports activities, with the addition of a monitoring system. notifications improved which now allows you to receive messages (Telegram, WhatsApp, sms, Instagram and so on) and reply via the keyboard directly from the sapphire glass screen of the watch. For emails there are notifications, also for Gmail, but you can only see the subject of the message and cannot reply.
Watch Ultimate then supports theNFC and Huawei has announced that in 2025 it will propose a solution to enable payments also to the European public. At the moment, however, it cannot be used to pay because the smartwatch is not compatible with Google services (therefore it does not have Google Pay). Huawei will have to develop its own system exactly like Samsung for example, which in addition to Google Pay allows you to use Samsung Pay. Some functions, then, are not active unless the device is paired with one Huawei smartphones: among these is the response to messages via voice dictation. A shame since this is a very useful feature.
To balance these shortcomings, however, there is a fundamental element: the drums. Huawei Watch Ultimate makes the Galaxy Watch or Apple Watch look like toys because it really almost delivers two weeks of autonomy (10-13 days during our tests) without having to recharge it, and it does all this with intense use made of many notifications and continuous tracking of vital signs, including daily sleep monitoring and heartbeat recording always enabled.
Huawei Watch Ultimate: how much it costs
The entry version, and here the difference of price they make the strap and the bezel, it is available at €649. Alternatively, there are two other versions: the one with the single-color blue bezel and the titanium strap, which costs €799.
Huawei Watch Ultimate Green Edition, the most luxurious version with the two-tone white/green ceramic bezel and titanium strap, is available at €899. For all models there are free wireless earphones FreeBuds Pro 3.