The Huawei GT 6 Pro is a feature-packed smartwatch and activity tracker. I’ve never owned a Huawei device – besides a 3G mobile dongle about 17 years ago – and opening the box showed just how far the Chinese company has come with regards to user experience and build quality. The GT 6 Pro has a beautiful titanium case and a soft strap with lots of holes for any size wrist. You can also order the watch with a nylon strap or a fancy titanium strap (more about that later). It’s a substantial thing, weighty, and quite large – something to bear in mind if you have a smaller wrist. But it’s not a massive watch and once you’ve strapped it on, it feels good – and it looks good, too.

The size of the Huawei GT 6 Pro, compared to a Garmin Instinct 2S.

The materials used are top quality. The case is made from aerospace-grade titanium alloy and the big, bright AMOLED display is protected by scratch-resistant sapphire crystal glass. You can wear it in the water and even take it scuba-diving to 40m.

Battery Life and Performance 

What impressed me most after wearing the watch for a few weeks is just how seldom you have to charge it. We all know how power-hungry modern devices are – they want to stay on all the time and track everything, which is great, but you end up having to charge them all the time, too. Not this watch. The battery life is incredible. If you don’t use it to track an activity, you can start at 100% in the morning and it will be at 98% by the evening. Even if you do use it to track your rides and runs, you’ll still be able to wear it for at least a week before it needs a recharge. And when it does need to be charged, the magnetic charger does the business very quickly.

Activity tracking

This is what most of us buy a smart watch for, right? The GT 6 Pro supports more than 100 sport modes, but I only tested it for cycling and running. (I’ll make sure to test ‘kite-flying’ for an update review…) Once you’ve got the hang of how the menu system and the touch screen display works – in conjunction with the Huawei Health app – it’s a breeze to customise your data screens and other settings like auto pause and laps.

The watch can auto start when it senses a certain activity, like if you jump on your bike and ride down the road. I turned this off because it ends up sending a whole bunch of random activities to Strava. I also deactivated all the physical buttons during an activity. Because of the size of the watch, especially on a smaller wrist, your hand sometimes pushes up against the crown dial when you’re in a riding position, which can change your settings or even end the activity. But with the buttons deactivated and the screen locked – and with all my data displayed as I like it – the watch was a dream to use on the bike.

Location tracking is via dual-band GNSS – I found it to be as accurate as any other premium smartwatch and bike computer I’ve used in the past. The wrist-based heart rate monitor was also very good. I wore a chest strap connected to a separate head unit on one ride to see how they compared, and the Huawei showed almost identical numbers to what the chest strap was sending to the computer. That’s great, because wrist-based heart monitoring can sometimes be a bit all over the show.

The watch uses optical sensors to measure blood flow through your wrist and advanced algorithms to calculate heart rate.

One thing to note if you’re considering the titanium strap… The material looks snazzy and matches the casing, but remember that it only fits to one size. A colleague found that the size he’d chosen was a bit too loose, and the watch slipped on his wrist. The heart rate tracking also suffered. He had a link removed, and found the watch to be too tight. If you’re going to use the GT 6 Pro for active pursuits, rather go for a conventional strap.

For cyclists, the most exciting feature of the watch is a simulated power reading, which algorithmically combines heart rate data and saved body data like height and weight, along with speed and incline data, to give you a power number as you ride. I don’t have much experience with crank- or pedal-based power meters, so I can’t comment on the accuracy of this number, but other reviewers have found it to be fairly close. What blew my mind was seeing 240W on the screen while I was going as hard as I could up a climb for 30 seconds, and knowing that 240W is half of what Pogi puts out for hours at a time! Having the ability to track the evolution of your power is a great motivation to improve – and to be able to do so with a R7k smart watch without any external devices is seriously impressive.

You can customise the display in a multitude of ways – using the standard screen options or by downloading one of hundreds of watch faces using the Huawei app.

Living With It

In the early days, Huawei devices were let down a bit by the companion app, which was clunky compared to European and US rivals. But that’s not the case any longer. The new Huawei Health app has a much better user interface and syncs seamlessly with the GT 6 Pro. Huawei Health also syncs with third-party apps like Strava and Discovery. All my data went where it was meant to go – I did an activity, saved it, and seconds later it was there on Strava. Another minute later and my Vitality points reflected.

The GT 6 Pro has a litany of health tracking features, like SpO₂ (blood oxygen), skin temperature, HRV (heart rate variability), stress monitoring and sleep tracking. Wear it for long enough and you get a pretty good idea of the state of your physical wellbeing. Equally useful to me, though, are two key features of any good smartwatch – the alarm function and the torch function. The alarm is easy to set, and it wakes you with a gentle vibration on the wrist, and the torch is the best I’ve ever used on a watch – simple to activate and bright enough to find your way around a tent in a race village, or to the bathroom down the hall at night.

All in all, the new GT 6 Pro is a fantastic product. For the price, there isn’t anything else like it on the market.

Buy the Huawei GT 6 Pro from R6 999

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