Huawei Watch GT 3 review: a refined design with excellent battery life

The Huawei Watch GT 3 is a premium fitness watch that performs as good as it looks. It features an abundance of tracking modes including upgrades from its predecessor, the Huawei GT 2, and is designed to provide more accurate data for various key fitness watch features such as heart rate and GPS.

If you are on the go a lot, love keeping active, and spend little time at home then the Huawei Watch GT 3 will be more than ideal for you in terms of battery life. I have been wearing this watch for 11 days now and it is performing as well as it did right after its first charge. Huawei claim that it can last up to fourteen days between charges. This is considerably better than some of the less expensive fitness wearables out there, like the Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2, which is included in our best fitness watch guide.

And if design is a big deciding factor for you, the GT 3 is pretty impressive. Its big, bright watch face is very satisfying to open and navigate your way around the various features. The touch screen responds well and there are only two buttons to press on the right side of the watch face making things nice and simple. The lower button can automatically begin a workout which feels very efficient.

It offers an abundance of advanced metrics, which I think make up for the inability to respond to notifications on the watch. Responding to texts isn’t a feature I personally wish to use when I’m in the gym or out for a run but I understand why this could let the Huawei wearable down for others.  

Below we’ll delve into a more thorough review of the fitness watch breaking it down into Price & Features, Design and Feel, and Performance and Battery Life. Here’s everything you should know before buying…

Huawei Watch GT 3: price & features 

The Huawei Watch GT 3 will be priced around $344/ £349.99. Considering Huawei has included a total of eight sensors within the watch for improved heart rate monitoring results, as well as adding a new nano-coating to improve its AI accuracy, it makes sense why the latest GT model has increased in price by $100/£100. You will find yourself paying similar prices for alternative smart watches like the Samsung Galaxy Watch 3 or the Garmin Vivoactive 4S.

You are spoilt for choice when it comes to making the most of the various features and measurements included in the Huawei Watch GT 3. As soon as you unlock the watch the different apps and services are neatly organized in a cluster of circular icons, which you can select via a tap of the screen.

It can track multiple activities, from triathlon, skiing, swimming, and running to more exercise machine-specific options like tracking a cross-training or rower machine workout. Once completing an activity you can scroll up from a display of more general stats to much more in-depth stats from your training sessions, including things like calories burned and recommended recovery periods.

It also includes training plans meaning you can choose from thirteen pre-defined fitness courses and plans or you can build your own. As a runner, I was especially impressed with the running courses, which offer various different types of runs such as, tempo runs, interval runs, and long runs. This will be really great for any beginner runners looking for guidance or, for the more advanced runners who want to program their own running plans into the watch.

Not to forget the insightful sleep statistics you can view from the watch face from the moment you open your eyes. However, perhaps not as advanced sleep metrics as other fitness watches out there like the Polar Ignite 2 - feel free to read our review on this fitness watch afterward.

Huawei Watch GT 3: design & feel 

Upon opening the packaging that the watch arrived in, it was clear that the Huawei GT 3 is a very slick model. 

I have been testing out the Huawei Watch GT 3 with the black fluoroelastomer strap. It measures up to be 46mm, with a 1.43-inch and 466x466 resolution AMOLED screen. AMOLED just refers to a more advanced screen display technology - something I have appreciated while testing this watch out.

The face is 11mm thick and weighs in at 42.6g, which for me at first felt a fair bit heavier than the Garmin Forerunner 735XT, which I am used to wearing. But if you prefer a more lightweight feel when wearing a fitness watch the smaller version of the Huawei GT 3 weighs in at just 35g and will be available to buy now as well.

On the right-hand side of the watch are two buttons, the top one you tap to get into the app screen of the watch and it is also a dial that you can use to zoom in or out, or use to scroll. The button beneath gets you into the different sports and workout modes and creates shortcuts so you can jump straight in. 

Huawei Watch GT 3: performance & battery life 

I was really pleased with the speed and accuracy of the Huawei GT 3 tracking features. It provides a breakdown of all your individual workouts, whatever they may be, but also lets you see the volume and performance of exercise you engage in over the days, weeks, and months. On occasion, during the testing period, I reviewed stats from the GT 3 and from my Garmin (worn on my other wrist) to see how different the stats were and noticed no major differences. 

If you do want the most accurate results, then I would recommend fastening the GT 3 strap quite tight to your wrist, which some might not find overly comfortable. 

The 46mm GT 3 supports 14-day battery life with light usage and is supposed to last around eight days with heavy usage. I work at a desk five days a week but exercise every day either at the gym or on a run and walk as much as I can. I have benefitted from data provided from various workouts, tracked my sleep, and consistently used the heart rate monitor and I have received no notifications telling me to charge it yet.

To any runners looking to buy this watch, if you are anything like me and like to regularly check your pace or time when running then you might be happy to know that you can set the display screen to always on for this. I completed my first test run using the GT 3 without knowing this and found it off-putting having to flick my wrist up every so often to check my pace. 

It’s good to know this can be amended however, do bear in mind that this is the kind of heavy use setting that will drain the battery a little quicker on this smart watch. Nonetheless, you can compensate by disabling certain trackers such as skin temperature, heart rate, and SpO2 trackers.

Huawei Watch GT 3: verdict

The Huawei Watch GT 3 is an upgrade from the GT 2 and most definitely adds competition for other fitness watch brands out there with its stylish design and advanced tracking upgrades. 

If you want a watch to fulfill your data needs when it comes to monitoring things like heart rate, sleep quality, or workout performance (for various different sports or exercise modes), the GT 3 will do the job and much more. The bonus of this watch is the big, bold, and bright display screen, which is fast and fluid to navigate. The watch strikes a fine balance between appearing sporty yet sophisticated.

The fact that you can’t respond to messages on the GT 3 might not make this an obvious choice for everyone, especially since other brands like Fitbit offer this - such as the Fitbit Charge 5 fitness wearable. However, if this isn’t a deal-breaker for you and you aren’t overly fussed about third-party app variety then this is a fitness watch to seriously consider.

Also consider:

Coros Apex Pro

The Coros Apex Pro is a high-end fitness watch perfect for those who love exploring the outdoors and tracking endurance-heavy exercise. Why? The Coros Apex Pro has an unbeatable battery life on it, it is able to run for up to 30 days between charges.    

Polar Ignite 2

The Polar Ignite 2 also comes with an array of exercise programs and is very light to wear. However, with the Polar Ignite 2 priced at around the $229/ £200 mark you might expect a more impressive UI screen display after seeing the Huawei GT 3 model. 

Garmin Fenix 6S

The Fenix 6s is Garmin's answer to a multisport watch. It is smaller but the size does not limit what the Fenix 6s is capable of. With advanced running analytics such as  VO2 Max analysis, training status, HRV, stress, recovery advice plus recommendations on the types of workouts missing in your weekly plan you can expect to pay more for such data.