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Huawei Watch GT 2 Pro review: A premium smartwatch for less

If you’re on the market for a new smartwatch, you’re probably looking for three things: A good design, an array of useful features, and the seamlessness of its integration in our daily lives. 

Huawei has an answer to that in the form of its Watch GT series and with the new Watch GT 2 Pro, they claim to have improved the build quality, added new features, but still retains its 2-week battery life. 

How do all these work together on a day-to-day basis? We find out. 

Design

Just like other members of its family, the Watch GT 2 Pro sports a large watch display that looks nice on the wrist. For me, it’s not too big and is just the right size to be noticed even by passersby.

There are two buttons — the Power button up top and a Function button on the bottom. They look simple and are sized decently for easy navigation and input. The Function button can also be personalized to bring up a pre-set function when you press it. I set mine to instantly show notifications from my phone whenever I press it.

The internals are encased in a titanium body so not only does it look really sleek and feel light, but it should also be resistant to extreme temperatures. It has a muted gray color with a little shine on it — exuding a premium and elegant look.

Meanwhile, the backplate is produced with ceramic as the main material. This means it’s less likely to irritate the skin so you can wear the watch for long periods of time without developing any usage discomforts. I actually love how the ceramic back looks and feels more than the titanium body simply because of that extra shine and really smooth surface.

As for the bundled fluoroelastomer strap. It’s flexible enough to look good in formal attire but could also be used for fitness and other activities as it has no problems getting wet.

It’s also lightweight and breathable on the wrist while looking simple. The straps also come off and you can replace them with other designs that better suit you. If you want, you can even change straps depending on the event you’re going to.

Display and features

Carrying a 1.39-inch AMOLED screen with 454 x 454 resolution, the Watch GT 2 Pro displays sharp images and easy-to-read graphics. Colors are vibrant while blacks have deep dark richness in them which is expected of its AMOLED display. It has a strip of bezel around which is not too distracting, but you can choose to use a dark watch face to create an illusion of almost borderless display.

It’s worth noting that the glass protecting the screen is made of sapphire — a really tough material.

Do keep in mind, though, that while it’s true that sapphire is harder to scratch than Corning’s Gorilla Glass, tests have shown that it is less sturdy when dropped. So you still have to be careful when it’s not attached to your wrist. Ive had it on most of the time for almost a month now and the glass has no hints of scratches whatsoever.

Some features for its display include manual or auto-brightness, always-on, and access to different watch faces.

Since a lot of its features are geared towards fitness, it even comes with its own speakers and 4GB of storage to store music for playback. It obviously doesn’t go really loud but good enough for when you exercise on your own.

The Watch GT 2 Pro also comes with a 5 ATM water resistance meaning you can take it to the shower, in the pool and submerge it for about 50 meters deep, and the likes. Just don’t go diving with it. For wireless pairing and transferring of data with compatible Huawei devices, the built-in NFC will take care of those for you.

Trackers and monitors

Now, this is where the Watch GT 2 Pro has been known to really deliver. Huawei didn’t hold back and really equipped this watch with loads of trackers and monitors to give you a detailed breakdown of how you live your day-to-day life.

Beginning with its heart rate monitoring, it’ll be able to record your heart rate, especially when working out and with it, show you other helpful data as well like calories burned. It now uses TruSeen 4.0 that alerts you when your heart rate is too high or too low as it tracks in real-time 24 hours a day.

A step counter is also present and you can still set a daily goal to make sure you’re not just sitting in front of your computer all day long.

Stress monitoring is present and continuously tracks your stress levels. This comes in handy in many instances as it can tell you when you’re getting too caught up with what you’re doing and when it’s time to take a break and take a breather. Coincidentally, the watch also has breathing exercises to help you find your zen when things are getting too stressful.

For measuring blood oxygen levels, its Sp02 sensor continuously gives you updates through the accompanying Huawei Health app. For those not familiar what blood oxygen tracking could do, having enough oxygen in the blood is important more so when doing a strenuous activity. So if, for example, you’re exercising and you see your Sp02 level is below 90%, it might be time to take a quick rest just to catch your breath.

Additionally, the device’s trackers aren’t just for your fitness needs. They also play important roles when you’re out and having an adventure. For one, it comes with air pressure monitoring for added weather information and forecasts so you can plan your trip accordingly.

On the other hand, its barometric altimeter comes in handy for measuring air pressure conditions around you for when you’re climbing mountains, for example.

And of course, when you’re out and about, its GPS with a route back feature will help guide you back to your starting point so you don’t accidentally get lost in the woods or something.

In addition to keeping tabs on your workouts and adventures, you can also track your sleep patterns just like before. It shows you how much time was spent while you were in your state of deep sleep or light sleep and even the duration of your REM or rapid eye movement. The basic goal is to maintain healthy sleeping habits through in-app suggestions based on your daily data.

Fitness

The Watch GT 2 Pro aims to be your fitness buddy. It comes with over 100 workout modes like jogging, yoga, boxing, ballet, roller skating, and even dancing.

Although what I end up using most of the time is its automatic workout detection since I no longer have to select the kind of workout I’ll be doing and as soon as the watch detects my heart rate starting to climb up, it automatically detects the activity I’m doing and logs info like calories burned and duration of workout time.

Having more than 100 workout mods is a lot, but Huawei specifically added new modes like skiing and it provides comprehensive data like average speed, maximum slope, track, and distance. I personally haven’t tried it but it’s supposed to alert you with voice prompts if any data exceeds the normal rate.

And for those into golf, you’d be glad to know that it has driving range mode to analyze your posture, monitor average backswing, downswing, and even swing speed, among others — making it a good gift idea for your dad.

On top of those, you still have the usual running courses and triathlon training sets so you can log all your performances.

Although while having the capability to track almost every activity you do is impressive, your recorded data could only be transferred to select fitness tracking apps and not all. So if, for example, you’ve been using Strava for a long time (after all it’s one of the most popular apps for running and cycling), and you want to import your recent personal records to it, there’s still no support for doing so.

Battery

Just like its previous iteration, this device promises a two-week battery life. And with the way the last GT Watch performed, I’m personally sold that this could achieve the same performance even without having to test it. But after putting it through its pace, it was able to stay on longer than 2 weeks (15 days) probably because I wasn’t as active and wasn’t using its activity tracker most of the time. This battery performance is mainly due to its low-power chipset making it really efficient.

It’s also important to note that the Watch GT 2 Pro supports wireless charging and you just need to dock it on its included charging cradle. If you have a phone that supports reverse wireless charging, you can then use that smartphone and spare yourself from carrying an extra power bank if you’re out and about.

Creature Feature

As always, in our reviews, The Modern Creatures aims to find special features in devices that make them worth having — something that gives a certain product an edge from its peers. For the Huawei Watch GT 2 Pro, it would definitely have to be its reliable battery that delivers two weeks worth of juice. Sometimes, I even forget that I need to charge it and would be surprised when it tells me that it’s low on battery. Yes, its other tracking features are great to have but you really wouldn’t enjoy all of them if your device is out of power.

Final thoughts

Starting from its design, Huawei was able to successfully improve the already-sleek Watch GT and turn it into something more durable so it won’t limit you in terms of usage. You can go swimming with it, take it up the mountains, or wear it on a formal dinner. It’s also loaded with trackers and monitors that indeed help you log all your activities and easily see where you need to improve on. Whatever it is you like doing, the Watch GT 2 Pro is likely to have that preset ready for you.

So going back to our intro above, we found it has a really good design, comes with an entire host of features, and integrates itself seamlessly in our daily lives. It does have its limitations like the need of more support for exporting your data to other apps, but in general this is a feature-packed device that you’d enjoy having on your wrist.

And with a price tag of just PhP 11,999, it’s fairly hard to beat the Watch GT 2 Pro in its own game.

To further sweeten the deal, Huawei is also offering the Watch GT 2 Pro together with a free Entertainment Package consisting of a notebook, multi-connector, and Bluetooth speaker totalling to PhP 2,099 when you buy it starting today, November 27, 2020 until January 17, 2021.