Huawei Watch 2 Review – Between sport and style

Negatives

• Battery lasts a day
• Not cheap
• Standard strap can be uncomfortable

It is a well-known phenomenon that many film sequels are less strong than the original; think for example of Jurassic Park, Independence Day or Airplane. Of course there are exceptions; the sequels to Star Wars and The Godfather were better received than the original.

In the telecom world it is often the other way around. Technology companies often learn from mistakes, can often better estimate what current and potential customers want after the release of a first version, and technology also advances, allowing them to make a better product. Nevertheless, even in the telecom industry there is sometimes a successor that can only make few people enthusiastic. The HTC One M9, for example, which was supposed to succeed the One M8. After the OnePlus One, the OnePlus 2 was also not the upgrade that many people hoped for.

The Watch 2 from Huawei has the difficult task of following in the footsteps of the smartwatch that was considered one of the most beautiful and classic-looking watches in the early days of Android Wear. The Watch 2 is clearly different in terms of design and that will not be to everyone’s taste.

Design

The model that we have been able to review is a Watch 2 and therefore not a Watch 2 Classic. Compared to the first Huawei Watch, it has a smaller screen in a larger housing. In addition, the screen is now more in the housing instead of on it.

The Watch 2 is largely made of plastic. The watch has a large, raised bezel with minute markers. This has the additional advantage that the watch cannot fall on the screen in the event of a fall. However, the bezel is quite a bit larger than with the first Huawei Watch, which only has a narrow metal edge. The back is partly made of metal, with a plastic part on the inside, where the LEDs are for the heart rate monitor. There are five pins for the charger on the side. There are also four torx screws in the housing.

There are two buttons on the side. The top one is used as a function button; from an app it leads the user back to the watch face and from the watch face you end up in the main menu. The bottom button leads by default to Huawei Fit, the manufacturer’s health app. This can be adjusted in the settings. The buttons aren’t crowns and the bezel isn’t rotatable either, making the touchscreen the only way to scroll through options and menus on the smartwatch. That’s a shame, because almost all new watches have a way to operate a watch without blocking the screen with the finger.

The strap can be removed with a fairly simple system with the use of a pin. There were no other tapes available online at the time of writing. The standard band is made of a rubbery material and is not very comfortable in my experience when worn for a long time.

Tear down

The Watch 2 is a very complete smartwatch, including a heart rate monitor, nfc for contactless payment if you live in a country and have a bank that support it, and GPS for location tracking. That’s impressive for a watch that’s somewhat large, but not overly so. The LED heart rate monitor is quite common in wearables and many users will know how far it gives them a reliable heart rate measurement. Those who are serious about sports and find heart rate tracking important are better off with a specialized method such as a chest strap. GPS is also very practical for tracking outdoor use, especially when it comes to tracing trajectories and estimating distances.

Speaking of all those functions, how do you actually get that in such a relatively compact housing? There’s only one way to find out, and for that we took our tools and took the Watch 2 apart. You do this by first loosening the tiny Torx screws. Then you pick something in the holes at the bottom, of course with something made of plastic, for example a pick or spudger . With a nice ‘ploink’, the metal plate with the fingerprint scanner comes loose from the housing.

What you see next is a housing with the battery still in it – in the photo above it is already loose – and a cable that connects the heart rate sensor to the pcb. There is a metal plate over the connector of the heart rate sensor and the battery. It is held in place with a small crosshead. Then you can disconnect both connectors and then you can lift the battery out of the housing. So it is indeed possible to remove the battery without touching other parts and that is a step forward compared to the previous Watch, where the entire PCB had to be removed to replace the battery.

The vibrator motor is located at the back together with the heart rate sensor. In the interior, the display connectors are also visible on the left, a few sensors on the top, and the recess for the vibrator motor and below that the moisture indicator on the bottom. That moisture indicator is striking, because Huawei claims that the smartwatch has earned an ip68 certification. This is clearly visible in the design, because the entire inside is protected with a rubber edge. That should indeed provide adequate protection.

Battery life

The battery has a capacity of 420mAh and that is quite good for a smartwatch, especially when compared to the size of the clock. You could expect it to last longer than other watches, but that turned out not to be the case in practice. With all functions on and the screen always on on black and white mode too, the watch got to around 24 hours. With the screen off you can extend that, but you still cannot measure the battery life in days.

This is of course due to the OLED screen in combination with the regular measurement of the heart rate and all kinds of other sensors that have to be on. It is certainly not a particularly bad battery life compared to other smartwatches with Android Wear, but not really a good one either. Of course, it differs per use – the more notifications, the better it goes – and whether you use, for example, WiFi or just the Bluetooth connection. However, charging every night is recommended and the end of the day can fortunately be reached in almost all circumstances.

As you can see in the tear-down, replacing the battery is reasonably doable. The battery is the easiest component of the watch to replace, but replacement batteries are not yet available online.

Screen

The OLED screen of the Watch 2 has a diagonal of 1.2 “and a resolution of 390×390 pixels. It is a round screen and in general it is fine. The readability in direct sunlight is sufficient, but certainly not over. The clock has a light sensor to adjust the brightness of the pixels to the ambient light and that often works well.There is also a mode to keep the screen always active and that works fine, but in sunlight the pixels are of course never bright enough.

That’s a paradox; the Watch 2 is clearly a watch that, given its design and functions, is aimed at sports use and especially outdoors, but the display is better suited for indoor use. Motorola solved that with an AnyLight screen on the Moto 360 Sport. In addition to a regular LCD, that watch has a reflective screen for outdoor use. Casio also did something similar on the WSD-F10, which has a second screen layer with reflective properties and a monochrome structure. Apple did it less subtle on its Watch Series 2 and ensured a maximum screen brightness of 1000cd/m². The Watch 2 doesn’t have any of that and that’s a missed opportunity. It would have been a way to really differentiate the watch and make it usable outside.

Software and hardware

The Watch 2 runs on Android Wear 2.0. We covered that in a separate story . Manufacturers are not allowed to adjust much to Wear 2.0 and Huawei has therefore not been able to do that. There are of course its own apps, such as Huawei’s fitness app and its own watch faces, but that’s it.

The clock has a Snapdragon Wear 2100-soc, a chip designed by Qualcomm for wearables. It has four Cortex A7 processor cores at 1.2GHz and an Adreno 304 GPU, combined with 786MB of lpddr3 memory. Qualcomm has the Wear 2100 made on a 28nm process.

The interface of the Watch 2 runs fine and smoothly, although things could have been a bit faster. On watches, the loading times of apps are even more important than on smartphones, and the Watch 2 sometimes lets it down a bit on that point. Shortly after starting, the watch cannot be burned forward, but that will be because the software is still doing all kinds of things in the background.

Competition

It is difficult to indicate the competition for the Watch 2. When it comes to tracking health or sports performance, fitness trackers can be found for much less money from, for example, Fitbit, Garmin, TomTom or the options of, for example, Xiaomi or Huawei’s own Fit. Those who want a smartwatch can also opt for a Gear S2, Gear S3 or Apple Watch, or wait for a Wear watch from a fashion brand such as Diesel or Armani. Which you prefer will depend a lot on your phone’s operating system and brand, and what you like.

Conclusion

The Watch 2 is not a smartwatch for the general public. It’s a sporty watch with many of the functions of a fitness tracker or other sports-oriented accessories, but with the operating system and appearance of a smartwatch. The lack of an easy-to-read screen in all conditions detracts from the sporty function, while the rubbery strap makes the watch unsuitable for wearing on all occasions. There are more drawbacks. The Watch 2 has a smaller screen in a larger housing and there is no other way of scrolling than swiping on the touchscreen, something that the competitors now do differently.

Yet there is also a lot to be said in favor of the Watch 2. It is great that Huawei has managed to cram so many functions into a watch that is relatively small. GPS, NFC and Wi-Fi: you can’t imagine it without it. If you want to use this watch as a completely independent smartwatch, you can opt for a variant with a SIM card input. It is also large, but certainly not bizarre in size.

In the end, there is a lot to be said for and against a certain model of a smartwatch, but it would be a lot if you decided that you want to wear a smartwatch. It’s a category that, despite the efforts of some of the tech industry’s biggest companies, has yet to take off on a large scale. Many of the tech companies therefore opt for a clear focus, for example sport or style. Huawei does neither. The Watch 2 is not a sports watch like Garmin or TomTom models, but it is also not a style watch, which is why it has made the Watch 2 Classic. This makes the Watch 2 a metaphor for the entire smartwatch market of recent years; in the sharp choice between sport and style, smartwatches still fall between two stools.