The Huawei Watch Fit 4. Arthur Fuentes, ABS-CBN News

MANILA — The Huawei Watch Fit 4 is a really good fitness wearable that offers a lot of features usually found only in more expensive sports watches. It’s a good fit (pun intended) for those who want more out of their sports watch but don’t want to pay for a more expensive device.

But first, let’s clarify that this is not a Wear OS device. It’s not like the Samsung Galaxy Watch or the Xiaomi Watch 2, which use Google’s Android-like platform for smartwatches. This means you can’t install apps here like Strava, Runkeeper or Nike Run Club. But you can still send your stats to Strava by linking it to the Huawei Fit app, so you can still brag to your running or cycling buddies about those PRs and KOMs.

To use the watch, you first need to connect it to the Huawei Health app, which is available for both iOS and Android devices. The app itself is pretty good and compares well with other health and fitness tracking apps in terms of features. 

The Huawei Watch Fit 4. Arthur Fuentes, ABS-CBN News

Fitness wearables come in three varieties: fitness bands for those who want the basics, fitness watches for those who need GPS tracking and some smartwatch features, and full-fledged fitness smartwatches for hardcore athletes. For the latter, Huawei has its very good Watch GT 5 series, and for the former, there’s the Huawei Band 10.

The Huawei Watch Fit 4 is the second variety–more than a fitness band, but not quite a full-blown sports/smart watch. But it also offers a lot of features that even serious runners, hikers and cyclists will appreciate.

Its design is something we’ve become quite familiar with–a squareish screen with a brushed metal frame and a rotating crown, a button on the lower part, all paired to a fluoroelastomer strap. Our review unit however, came with a nylon band that was easier to slip a wrist into.

While I prefer round watches, I have to admit that the Fit 4 looks pretty sleek. It's not going to look out of place on your attire even when you're not doing fitness stuff.

The Huawei Watch Fit 4. Arthur Fuentes, ABS-CBN News

The 1.82-inch OLED screen is also easy to read even in bright daylight. With a rating of 2,000 nits, the Fit 4’s screen is probably even brighter than those of more expensive smartwatches. I’ve tried it while biking at around 11 a.m., while wearing dark sunglasses, and I had no trouble reading the screen. Its more advanced sibling, the Watch Fit 4 Pro, gets even brighter with a 3,000-nit screen.

Using the crown is pretty intuitive–press it to move from the watch face to the app menu, rotate it to scroll through the different apps. You have to tap the app on the screen to launch it. You press the crown again to go back to the watch face.

Pressing the lower button meanwhile takes you to the list of sports that the watch can track. Huawei says there are over a hundred of them, ranging from running, cycling, hiking, swimming etc. But again, I wish Huawei could have made it more specific when it came to cycling–there’s only indoor cycling and outdoor cycling. It would have been better if there were categories like road cycling, gravel cycling, mountain biking, or bike touring. Hopefully, Huawei can implement this through a software update.

GPS tracking on the watch is top-notch. With dual-band GPS, it’s even faster at picking up a signal than my Garmin Edge 830 bike computer.

You can even download maps in case you need to find your way while hiking. The process though, is not pretty straightforward as you first need to download the Petal Maps app on your phone and then connect it to the watch.

The Huawei Health app. Arthur Fuentes, ABS-CBN News

In terms of heart rate tracking, Huawei watches consistently perform at the high end of a range of wearables from different brands, according to “The Quantified Scientist,” who is one of the more credible sports tech reviewers on YouTube.

Sleep tracking also seems accurate, and more importantly, it was comfortable enough to wear even when going to sleep.

As someone who has been using fitness watches for several years now, I’ve never really gotten used to wearing them while sleeping, which is a shame because tracking your sleep and making sure you’re getting enough sleep is the most important thing for recovery after a grueling run or bike ride. But I couldn’t wear them while sleeping because I always found them too tight or heavy on the wrist and could never get used to them.

It’s different, though, with the form factor of the Fit 4. It’s actually light enough on the wrist, and I never felt uncomfortable. The sleep scoring seems to be accurate too, which should be a cause for worry for me, as I never seem to get a score above 90.

The Huawei Watch Fit 4. Arthur Fuentes, ABS-CBN News

Its battery life is also pretty good, lasting nearly 10 days in casual use. But if you run or bike frequently, like thrice a week for more than an hour or two, the GPS and heart rate tracking take their toll and battery life goes down to a week or so. In my weekly use–biking twice a week, running once a week, and doing long walks, I was usually able to get 4-5 days.

I suspect that a big drain on the battery, aside from the GPS, is the speaker, which can get pretty loud. It notifies you about your running stats every kilometer, and of your biking stats every five kilometers, and it can get pretty jarring, especially when you just want to zone out and Zen out during a run or bike ride.

A bonus feature is the Watch Fit 4’s ability to link to your GCash account. Activating this feature seemed pretty straightforward, you just scan a QR code on the watch with the GCash app on your phone. I was not able to try this though, as I’m wary of linking banking or wallet apps in gadgets I review that have to be returned afterwards. But the good news is GCash is baked into the watch if you ever need to use it.  

Huawei has yet to announce pricing for the Fit 4, but it should be around the same price range as the Fit 3. It will be available on Huawei’s official stores on Shopee and Lazada starting May 22.