In addition to smart phones, Huawei has also dabbled in the wearable field, such as sports bracelets, Bluetooth headsets, heart rate headsets, and of course, smart watches. With Huawei's introduction of Mate20 series new products, the WATCH series is also updated. This new product is not named as WATCH 3, but as HUAWEI WATCH GT, which has enabled the system developed by Huawei itself. Let's see how it has changed from the previous one.
Appearance and wear
In terms of appearance, the HUAWEI WATCH GT is divided into two versions: the sports version and the fashion version. The main difference lies in the color matching of the ear and the material of the strap. The former is made of silicone strap+pure black body, while the latter is made of leather/silicone composite strap+black body and white ears. In terms of price, the sports model is priced at 1288 yuan, and the fashion model is priced at 1488 yuan. This one in our hand is a sports version, which is designed in pure black, and its appearance is relatively low-key and simple.
Similar to the previous generation, the watch body is made of stainless steel, while the watch ring is made of ceramic. The watch ring has a time scale. The ceramic watch ring is durable and not easy to scratch.
The back of the watch body is a heart rate sensor. The new optical structure design can achieve 24-hour heart rate monitoring. Real time heart rate monitoring is also a compromise for many smart watches due to their endurance.
It is still designed as a double crown. Huawei series smart watches have all adopted this design since its birth. Double crowns are also quite common in non smart watches. Although the system developed by ourselves is adopted, the operation logic has not changed much, and the design of touch screen+double crown is still continued. It is still left stroke return, upward stroke notification, and glide control center; The top crown is the APP candidate page/Home, and the bottom crown is the activation key of sports record. In the dial interface, you can also slide left and right to switch between different interfaces, such as sports record, heart rate, Alipay payment, etc.
The holes are very dense, and it is easy to wear both thin wrists and thick wrists. The strap is made of soft silicone material, but the thickened part at the edge and middle retains a certain hardness, so it is neither too hard nor too soft when worn.
The watch buckle is made of solid and firm materials. The inner side of the strap fixing ring has a projection design, which can be stuck in the opening to prevent back and forth sliding.
In terms of charging, magnetic suction+contact is used. The watch is placed on the base in the right direction, and the watch starts to charge automatically. (The two metal contacts on the back of the watch are charging contacts)
The charging base provides power for the USB-C, which is no longer Micro USB. It has kept up with the trend. In just a few years, USB-C has become the most popular interface.
Screen and Touch
HUAWEI WATCH GT uses a 1.39 inch AMOLED screen with a resolution of 454 * 454, which is relatively large in smart watches. The visual perception is pretty good. The brightness and color are both good, which are the performance of OLED screens. They are not Jiaming's 64 bit color semi reflective screens. In terms of fineness, you can see the traces of pixels when you look carefully, but it is enough.
With touch control, there is nothing wrong with the screen. Today's OLED screens are quite mature, so you don't need to worry about the display effect. The main problem is that the system seems to be a little behind the times. It is not that applications start slowly. On the contrary, applications start in seconds. The main problem is that some frames are stuck and dropped. I hope it can be improved with the firmware update. This involves the change of WATCH GT positioning, from Android Wear to: self-developed embedded system+Cortex-M4 custom processor+16M RAM+128M ROM. This configuration is obviously different from smart watches such as Android Wear or Appele Watch. It is more like a sports functional watch, such as Jiaming and Soto.
Hands up&heart rate&sleep monitoring
In fact, it has never been a strong point of Huawei WATCH. Fortunately, HUAWEI WATCH GT has made some progress in this regard. (In the earlier version, the transition animation is highlighted when lifting the hand, which has been removed after the later firmware update)
As for sleep, the HUAWEI WATCH GT is similar to Huawei's watches/bracelets of the same generation, and also carries out in-depth cooperation with the Harvard CDB Center. Sleep monitoring is one of the most accurate products among domestic watches/bracelets. Sleep data is quite detailed, which is still of some reference significance.
Heart rate is the highlight of HUAWEI WATCH GT. Yes, this watch has a real-time heart rate function, which can detect heart rate around the clock. Similar to Fitbit, its heart rate sensor works continuously around the clock. As long as users wear it on their hands, it will continuously monitor heart rate.
The system has a built-in heart rate dial, which can display the real-time heart rate and provide a whole day heart rate route, which is quite practical. In addition to the heart rate dial, there is a special heart rate page on the right, which also provides real-time heart rate, heart rate route, maximum and minimum heart rates, resting heart rates, etc. At this point, a friend might want to ask, "Is there no power consumption for all day heart rate?" We will answer this question in the next part of the endurance.
Endurance
If you want to pick out the most impressive point of HUAWEI WATCH GT, it must be the endurance. Perhaps this is also related to the adoption of the self-developed system+Cortex-M4 customized processor. With the notification of some applications enabled, sleep monitoring enabled, and the use intensity of real-time heart rate enabled throughout the day, only 32% of the power was consumed in three days, that is, under normal use, the daily power consumption was only about 10%. With this endurance, charging once a week is not a dream, This is not common in current smart watches. It can be said that the HUAWEI WATCH GT is the king of endurance.
What needs to be noted here is that if the competitors of HUAWEI WATCH GT are converted from Android Wear/Apple Watch to sports function watches like Jiaming and Songtuo, the endurance is basically at the same level. Here we take Jiaming Fenix 5 as an example. Under normal use, the endurance is about 7 days (the real-time heart rate is also turned on), but its screen is 64 bit color, with poor color and low resolution. The 1.2 inch screen is only 240 * 240. The advantage is that the semi reflective screen can achieve continuous display, without the need to "raise your hand and light up" like the OLED screen. In contrast, the screen of HUAWEI WATCH GT is the current popular OLED material. It has high resolution (454 * 454, 1.39 inches), bright colors, high contrast, and looks very beautiful. However, if it is always lit, it will cost power. Therefore, it is usually lit up.
summary
As a new work of Huawei in the field of smart watches, the HUAWEI WATCH GT has several obvious changes compared with the previous one. The first one is the weight. Although the size of the watch body is still huge, the weight reduction makes it more comfortable to wear, without heavy lateral tilt. Users with experience in wearing watches should understand that once the strap of a heavy watch is not tight enough, the watch body will tilt outward, which is neither comfortable nor beautiful.
The second point is the strong endurance. After being replaced with your own system+customized processor, the power consumption is greatly reduced, and the endurance becomes very strong. Charging once a week is no longer a dream. This was also the biggest pain point of smart watches before. Charging once a week and once a day is not an order of magnitude for a watch.
The last point is the enhancement of motion recording function. Thanks to the improvement of power consumption performance, real-time heart rate becomes possible. One week long real-time heart rate is no longer the patent of the bracelet. With real-time heart rate, Samsung positioning system and various motion recording algorithms, the function of motion recording has been further enhanced compared with the previous Android Wear.
It should be noted here that the enhancement of sports record and endurance is related to the positioning of HUAWEI WATCH GT, and to some extent, it is at the expense of "intelligence". For example, the built-in applications are sufficient, but not much expandability; It has enhanced motion recording capability, but does not support e-SIM and Bluetooth calls. To sum up, it is not so much a smart watch as a sports functional watch. If you can accept sports watches like Jiaming and Songtuo, or highly customized smart watches like Huami, then this watch is not a problem. If you are a sports enthusiast, if you want to buy a smart sports watch, if you don't need too strong scalability, or if you think that the price of Apple Watch and Jiaming Fenix5 is too high, then this HUAWEI WATCH GT mobile version with strong endurance and a price of only 1288 yuan is worth considering.
Follow our Weibo @ Love Computer
Follow our WeChat official account: playphone
Of course, we also pay attention to our Bilibili account: love computer
