Huawei Watch GT 5 Pro review

Huawei’s GT line has always represented the best of the brand’s smartwatches in a sporty, affordable package – and we’ve got a bumper generation this time around with the GT 5 Pro.

Running on a two-year cycle, the latest iteration of the pricier £329.99 Pro edition delivers premium design upgrades like a titanium bezel and sapphire crystal display, with room also reserved for exclusive golf tracking, freediving support, trail running maps, and additional advanced health features.

The trade-off for this is, of course, the price. Yet, for Huawei fans craving a more active, bolder design than the sleek Watch 4 and Watch 4 Pro released last year, or improved fitness tracking, the GT 5 Pro is a serious option. 

We’ve been testing it against some of the industry’s top trackers over the last couple of weeks – here’s what we’ve found.

Design and display

As is custom with the GT range, the GT 5 Pro is available in two sizes: 42mm and 46mm. Our test unit is the latter, defined by the more masculine look and finer details, though the pair share the same broad design features outside of their overall size and style.

Huawei remains committed to classic watch aesthetics with the GT 5 Pro, retaining the eye-catching octagonal shape of the bezel that debuted last year. This time, it’s been designed to look a little sharper on those edges – and we think it’s much better for it. The shape now looks much more intentional, rather than coincidental. 

It’s true this shape also detracts from the typical stylings of a top-end sports watch, but it’s a tightrope Huawei is treading well. After all, it’s a design we find infinitely more fun to wear during workouts – golf, running, swimming, and cycling during our testing – than the more dressy Watch 4 designs.

That’s mostly down to the titanium alloy Huawei is reserving for this Pro edition. It’s lightweight, but, as we know from other sporty smartwatches like the Apple Watch Ultra 2 and Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra, it’s also incredibly durable. We’ve used the GT 5 Pro around plenty of power tools and DIY jobs in our tests, and it’s yet to pick up any scratches or nicks. 

That durability also extends to the waterproof capabilities. While we’ve not been inclined to make use of the device’s freediving tracking, it is an exclusive feature for this edition – and the design is capable of withstanding depths of up to 40m (IP69K), along with the typical 5ATM water resistance rating.

The button placement, meanwhile, remains the same as the previous generation. There’s perhaps an argument Huawei could have added a third button here and mimicked what we’ve seen from other sport-leaning smartwatches, but we don’t think navigation is really an issue here.

It’s a similar story when you consider the display. The 1.43-inch, 466 x 466 (326 pixels-per-inch) resolution AMOLED is plenty sharp and bright enough to view in all conditions, but it’s also a noticeable step down from the market’s best options. That’s not unexpected given the price disparity, but still something to be aware of when comparing the raft of options out there.

Smart features and software

Huawei typically saves its biggest software upgrades for its more ‘classic’ smartwatch lines, but the latest edition of HarmonyOS does still feature some notable upgrades. 

The UX has been given a fresh lick of paint for the GT 5 series, providing a lot more information at-a-glance. For example, backgrounds will now reflect your fitness status or are grouped by the type of activity you’re performing, while transitions are also much smoother when scrolling through the likes of post-activity screens.

This is also joined by a couple of new abilities: a full keyboard and screenshot support. The former is, we’ve been told, available for both iOS and Android users (though we’ve not seen it pop up for us on iPhone) and supports SMS notifications, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, Skype, Signal, Telegram, and Viber quick replies. 

Screenshots are, happily, a bit more straightforward. Like keyboard functionality, it’s a feature we can’t believe has taken this long to implement, but, with a simultaneous press of both buttons, it’s a simple one we can imagine is handy to to capture a mid-session screen or activity streak (or whatever, really – when do people actually use smartwatch screenshots?).

For the tweaks Huawei has made to its cross-mobile and wearable platform, though, HarmonyOS and the GT 5 Pro are still hamstrung by a lack of partnerships in the wider world – even if they do still hold the ace of being able to connect to iOS and Android phones.

The reality here isn’t as stark as on the Watch 4 series – since those watches are more reliant on their smarts – but not having any current form of contactless payments available outside of China, major offline music support, or smart assistant/speaker combination makes the GT 5 Pro very much a fitness tracker trapped in a smartwatch body.

Typically, an omission of 4G/LTE would also be a downside here. Such is the barebones nature of the smart experience, however, adding cellular support wouldn’t really change much. 

Thankfully for the GT 5 Pro, it does manage to thrive in its focus area – tracking – but, in case it wasn’t obvious, don’t buy it if you’re hoping for a true smartwatch experience.

Activity tracking

The main upgrades Huawei has brought to the GT 5 Pro are in this department. The fancy new ‘TruSense System’ underpins all the heart rate tracking during workouts, while the brand’s Sunflower Positioning System has also been updated to improve accuracy. 

We’ve not traditionally had issues with either area on Huawei’s most recent smartwatches – save for some initial problems with the Huawei Watch Ultimate – but, even still, a small step forward has been taken with these changes. 

Huawei suggests the GPS improvements will boost route accuracy by 40% and distance accuracy by 30%, which in turn knocks on to 20% improved pace accuracy.

Over a couple of 30-mile rides on the bike, the dual-frequency GNSS was pretty comfortably in the range of our Garmin Fenix 8. It always tended to overreport compared to the sports watch, but the difference was only ever around 50-100 meters throughout these rides. As a side note, your phone can now also turn into a bike computer during outdoor rides with the GT 5 series, which is naturally much easier than turning your wrist to check on stats constantly. 

Considering the price difference, and natural variations in tracking, the distance accuracy is easy to approve of – even if, again, it was never really a major issue in the last generation.

We also like the Strava-like flyovers in the Huawei Health app’s post-workout screens. Slightly gimmicky, perhaps, but still a fun way to go over your recent runs or rides and share them (if that’s your thing). 

The accuracy is similarly strong when it comes to heart rate tracking. Testing against the Garmin Fenix 8 and Whoop 4.0, the GT 5 Pro was always within touching distance in average HR and maximum HR figures. If it has a weakness, it’s that it can still be slightly shy when logging higher HR figures – sometimes more than just a couple of beats under our test devices – but the data is more than in a healthy range here. 

We always talk about GPS and HR because it becomes difficult to glean any worthwhile information from the rest of the activity data without this. So, the GT 5 Pro has an excellent platform to build from – and it does. 

The likes of advanced running feedback (which includes metrics and basic gradings for ground contact time/balance, vertical oscillation, cadence, and average stride length), training feedback that analyzes aerobic/anaerobic strain and recovery time, importable maps for on-watch trail running, and advanced golf features and endless 3D course maps make this feel like a genuine sports watch alternative at times.

Not every scrap of data is perfectly aligned with what we’ve become accustomed to on Garmin or Apple, and we do think there’s still a lack of polished integration between the Health app and the watch, but it’s a package that’s incredibly broad – and much more accurate and useful than what we’ve tested in other sports watch imitations in 2024. 

Health and sleep tracking

The all-new TruSense System hasn’t just boosted heart rate accuracy in exercise tracking; Huawei says the redesigned module’s multi-region optical path design and spacing, as well as new glass darkening tech, has helped eliminate signal noise and improve health data.

It’s all pretty technical stuff. For you and me, the improvements mostly boil down to faster measurement times for things like blood oxygen (now just 15 seconds), improved respiratory rate detection, and ECG and arterial stiffness detection making it over to the GT series for the first time. 

We’ve found that these health metrics – from the very fiddly arterial stiffness detection to basic figures like sleeping heart rate ranges – are in line with what we expect from gold-standard trackers like the Oura Ring Gen 3 and Apple Watch Series 10. 

The GT 5 Pro was also able to register our fall-asleep/wake-up times within 5-10 minutes of all our test devices, with plenty of easy-to-digest context for elements like sleep stages and the ‘sleep breathing awareness’ (which measures your breathing disturbances during the night). 

Yet, while it’s all accurate enough, the Huawei Health app – aside from probably the sleep analysis – is still just chock-full of historical graphs and unexciting cards, rather than being a live hub of amalgamated figures that make the most of your body’s key biomarkers. 

Huawei is far from the only culprit of this Apple Health-style design, but it means you’re unlikely to feel compelled to spend time in the companion app once you’ve become familiar with your averages and baselines.

A good example of this is the stress tracking. Like many smartwatches, the GT 5 Pro presents  0-100 figures throughout the day – and also tacks on a calibration process that includes 12 pretty odd, existential questions. The algorithm in place here, which we would guess mostly relies on HRV figures, will ensure scores rarely get below 30 or above 50 no matter what you face during the day, and it means there’s just a real lack of reason to take interest.

It doesn’t cut through to anywhere near the same extent as something like Whoop’s interpretation of stress monitoring, or Oura’s grading system and Resilience feature, though we should caveat this by saying the brand’s wellbeing assistant wasn’t available to test on our pre-release software.

The GT 5 Pro’s top priority isn’t to be a health watch, so, like with its array of smart features, having these tacked on without much focus or depth is no real surprise. It is, at least, able to mostly portray the sea of metrics here with consistency and accuracy.

Battery life

With a lack of power-intensive smart features or apps and only a middling display, the battery life on the GT 5 Pro echoes much of what we typically see from the lineup. 

It’s not a huge jump from what we experienced with the GT 4, but Huawei is still promising a chunky 14 days of battery life with the GT 5 Pro. As ever, once you turn on a swathe of 24/7 tracking features – for blood oxygen, breathing, stress, skin temperature, and sleep breathing awareness – and the always-on display, this estimation sinks to around 6-7 days. 

Considering this included some pretty chunky outdoor tracking time and is roughly the most power-hungry setup we could run, we’ve been pretty impressed – and it leaves us with no doubt that you would be able to achieve the fortnight quoted with more moderate power settings.

Again, it’s not a huge jump on what we’ve seen already from the series, but it’s a huge step up in wearability when you don’t have to worry about squeezing in a charge every other day or so.

If you find yourself in need of a quick top-up, you do also have the option. We found the GT 5 Pro capable of going from flat to full charge in just over an hour, with most of that battery gained back in the first 30 minutes. Impressive.

The post Huawei Watch GT 5 Pro review appeared first on Wareable.

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