The Huawei Watch GT 5 is the Chinese tech giant's latest foray into smartwatches. Arthur Fuentes, ABS-CBN News

MANILA - The Huawei Watch GT 5 is a very well-designed wearable with an incredible battery life. If you have an active lifestyle and do a lot of running and cycling, or go to the gym regularly, or do other sports, this gadget can keep up with you, and you won’t even need to recharge it for several days.

In terms of design, this thing looks very very nice. It almost looks like a Seiko 5, except that the crown is on the upper right side instead of the lower part of the watch. The stainless steel body is classy, and the octagonal frame around the circular watch face adds to the tough, outdoor aesthetic. I even like how solid and hefty the watch feels on my hand and on my wrist.

The watch has two physical controls. The crown accesses the watch’s suite of apps like notifications, calls, contacts, weather etc. The lower button meanwhile gets you quick access to the different activities you may want to record: from indoor running, swimming, cycling and others. It’s very simple to operate.

Its large touchscreen is also easy on the eyes, has great color and contrast, and bright enough to read even under direct sunlight. This is a very good things if you’re doing outdoor activities like running, cycling and hiking—you won’t need to cover the watch with your hand to read it under the sun.

The strap that came with the watch also looked good. It even has a nifty trick where pressing small buttons under the straps lets you release them if you want to swap a different strap.

I was also impressed at how quickly the GT 5 picked up GPS signals. I did not time how fast it was, but it was definitely several tens of seconds faster at getting GPS than my Galaxy Watch 4 and even my dedicated Garmin Edge 830 cycling computer.

But by far the most impressive thing about the watch is its battery life. Huawei claims a single full charge would last up to 14 days of normal use. I have yet to confirm this as the review unit has been with me for only over a week. But I’ve done a 5km run with it, a 27 km bike ride, several hours of gym workouts across several days, and all these activities drained less than half of the charge.

As I write this review, it’s the sixth day since I first charged the watch and did my first 5k run, and the battery is at 60 percent! My Galaxy Watch could barely get through 2 days without getting drained. As someone who likes to do whole day bike rides and sometimes joins trail runs that could last up to 8 hours, having this kind of battery life on a GPS-tracking smartwatch is pretty amazing.

And yeah it does all that other stuff that smartwatches are expected to do: it alerts you when you have a call or message (although I turned off both) and it tracks your steps, heart rate, sleep quality and stress level.

It also has a host of other sports and health-related features that I have yet to try like support for offline and contour maps, route backtracking and real-time alerts. According to Huawei, it will also soon have QR payments with GCash. But the company has yet to announce when this feature will be available.

The Huawei Watch GT 5 has several sports trackers but still needs more specific cycling categories. Arthur Fuentes, ABS-CBN News

WHAT ABOUT STRAVA?

However, this is not a Wear OS device, like the Samsung Galaxy Watch series. Instead, it uses Huawei's own HarmonyOS, which means it may not have the same apps available on Google's wearables platform.

This means that for hardcore active outdoors people, there is one thing that they will have to deal with in the Watch GT 5 — it doesn’t run the popular fitness app Strava natively. While it is easy enough to link the watch’s smartphone health app to Strava, the GT 5’s menu of sports needs to be more specific, as specific as Strava’s.

Cyclists like to be very specific about the kind of biking they are doing: road cycling, gravel cycling, mountain biking, commuting, or e-bike riding and e-mountain bike riding. The GT 5’s menu meanwhile only has indoor cycling and outdoor cycling. You can edit this on Strava, but it's an extra step and not very convenient. 

The menu for running is a bit better with indoor run, outdoor run and trail run. But water sports enthusiasts are left with just pool swim, open water swim and triathlon—there’s no surfing, windsurfing etc.

Hopefully, Huawei can address these limitations with specific sports with a software upgrade as this watch is a really fine piece of engineering. Or if Huawei can port the Strava app to the watch itself, that would be the best. 

The Watch GT 5 starts at P12,999 with a free set of Huawei earbuds.