The Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro resembles the Apple Watch Ultra visually, but it’s very much its own kind of smart wearable.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Great battery life | Limited apps – much more a fitness tracker than a true smartwatch |
| Stylish design (even if it does remind me of… something) | Huawei Health has to be sideloaded on many Android devices to use the Fit 4 Pro |
| Includes loads of golf course details (if you’re a golfer) | UI learning curve takes a while to get to grips with |
Score: 3.5/5
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Buy The Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro! | Buy On Amazon |
In this review
Specifications
Design
Performance
Battery
Conclusion
Ethical disclaimer: Huawei sent me the Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro for review, and it will be going back to Huawei. Does that buy Huawei any particular favour or oversight over my review?
Hell no.
ART is independent and I strongly believe that ethical disclosure is something sadly lacking in far too many “reviews” these days. Sending me the Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro gets it reviewed, plain and simple, and that’s all.
For more on ART’s ethical position, click here.
Design
There’s no getting around the fact that the Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro looks an awful lot like Apple’s Apple Watch Ultra – but then if you’re going to design a relatively heavy duty sports smartwatch with a rectangular shape, that comparison is going to be rather inevitable.
The Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro is built around a 1.82 inch AMOLED display with a peak claimed brightness of 3000 nits, which means that it should – and indeed it does – work very well in direct sunlight.
At a resolution of 480×408 it’s not the most densely packed display you’ll ever see, but Huawei’s use of rather bright contrasting colours throughout the user interface means that there’s not much that doesn’t end up being clear enough to see whether I’ve been sitting at my desk or going for a run, or anywhere in between.
The Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro sells in a Green, Blue or Black finish. The Green model supplied to me has a silver framing, while the Blue model has more of a metallic blue tint to it, and predictably, the black model features a black bezel.
Colour choices. Three of them. (Photo: Huawei)
Those colours also extend to the wrist straps, with the Blue/Black models having simple coloured fluoroelastomer band, while the green model has a nylon woven band. That’s all your official choices for band styles, but rather predictably the bigger online China-based retail stores do have a quite wide array of other bands to pick from if you fancy mixing up your styles.
No matter which model you choose from, you’re faced with a sapphire glass to protect the main body of the watch, ringed with titanium, though the sides of the watch are more simple aluminium.
The Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro is rated by Huawei as being dive suitable, and with full disclosure in mind, I’ve not gone diving with it. Here Huawei’s claims however get a little weird. According to Huawei Australia’s specifications, it’s rated at 5ATM – which you’d want for a diving watch – for up to 40m of depth.
However, it’s also rated at IP6X for dust and water ingress, which suggests that no dust should be able to enter, but it’s not been tested for water ingress… which is just downright odd for a dive watch. As noted, I’ve not gone diving with the Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro, but I have immersed it in a glass of water, and it survived just fine.
If all this talk of IP ratings has you scratching your head in confusion, I’ve got a full guide to understanding water resistance here (or you can watch the video below!)
If you’re wondering, by the way, if the presence of the Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro suggests the existence of a regular Huawei Watch Fit 4, well… you’d be right.
The regular Huawei Watch Fit 4 is slightly lighter, slightly less rugged and slightly less equipped with tracking functions for golf, dive support and ECG. It is however, somewhat less expensive, retailing in Australia for just $299.
Performance
The Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro runs on Huawei’s own proprietary HarmonyOS platform, which means it also relies on Huawei’s own Huawei Health app for pairing to a smartphone.
If you happened to have a Huawei smartphone, that’s almost certainly going to be preinstalled, but it’s been years since Huawei actually sold its own brand phones here in Australia – the last one I tested was back in 2020 – so that’s probably not going to apply to you.
The Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro is compatible with both Android and iOS, and if you’re sporting an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy phone, you can find Huawei Health in the App Store or Galaxy Store respectively for installation.
If you’re using any other Android device, you’re going to have to sideload Huawei Health, a process that isn’t terribly well handled or explained if you’re not already au fait with such approaches.
It does work, and on a test device (in this case, a Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold) it installed and kept itself updated without requiring an external third party app store to run.
Huawei Health’s approach gives you a lot of data, though it doesn’t always provide a whole lot of context to help you make sense of that data, and some sections are just downright confusing.
For example, when checking the details of a run, I was presented with an onscreen query about how to get even more data. Tapping on that told me that I needed to wear a Huawei Wearable to get more data such as heart rate and running form.
Which felt odd, given that the data I had was because I was wearing a Huawei Wearable at the time… and the top of the run page gave me heart rate data as well!
Does it want me to wear two fitness trackers at once? I’m genuinely baffled…
The Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro tracks – or claims to track – a lot of exercise types, including your classic running indoor or outdoor, most gym exercises and a whole host of tracking types I don’t recall seeing in any other wearable to date.
I don’t know what the difference between Plaza Dancing and Jazz Dancing is – OK, OK, I don’t actually know what Plaza Dancing is at all – but it can track either as an activity. Ditto for skipping, roller skating, karate, laser tag and even eSports.
There you go, eSports types. Huawei thinks that you’re a sport that can be tracked. Argue about that in the comments below if you feel so inclined.
For my own tracking purposes, I’ve mostly used it to track runs and walks, with mixed success. The Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro tends to slightly overestimate my step count relative to other trackers. Given that the core benefit of that kind of tracking is to look at longer term trends, that’s perhaps not a huge issue, because you’d be comparing like-for-like even if it was a little higher than with other platforms.
The Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro has inbuilt GPS for tracking outdoor activities, though it’s on the slower side to get its initial lock when starting an exercise session. That’s almost certainly a battery saving measure, but it does mean that if you’re heading off on your Saturday parkrun, it’s worth putting the it into its exercise mode before the run starts; you can then tap the “go” button to actually start tracking your run.
The Watch Fit 4 Pro also comes with golfing features that differentiate it out from the regular Watch Fit 4, with the promise of more than 15,000 golf courses to choose from. As per Huawei, you can use it to not only find nearby courses, but track your play around the course, fine-tune your golf swing and keep score of every round you play.
Track your golf game in real time. Is this smart play, or cheating? Discuss below.
It’s at this point in the review that I’d like to take a brief pause to apologise to my late paternal grandmother.
Why apologise?
Well, there could be many reasons, but the one I’ll hone in on today is that while she did love golf with a passion in her younger years, it’s never been a sport that’s really interested me in any way at all.
As such, while I did experimentally download a course to the Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro to prove it could be done, that’s about as far as I got to testing out its golfing prowess.
Actually, now that I think about it, I suspect she might not have approved of anything that made it easier for just one player to compete, which in theory this would, so maybe I don’t need the apology after all.
Huawei does provide access to its App Gallery platform via Huawei Health for apps that will work with the Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro.
The issue here is that this is a pretty far step away from any WearOS or WatchOS device in terms of available apps. At the time of writing, there are just 25 available apps, from Camera Opus (for remote camera control) to Otter Life (for… actually, I don’t know what Otter Life does, it looks like it’s health tracking for… Otters, I guess?).
I didn’t choose the Otter Life. The Otter Life chose me.
Like many of Huawei’s previously tested Smart wearables, this really sits more in the “smart fitness tracker” space than it does the “Smartwatch” space, despite having the visual trappings of a more fully featured smartwatch.
Does this matter?
It really depends on what you’re going to use the Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro for on a day-to-day basis. If you’re just fitness tracking and need simpler matters like notifications from your smartphone apps, then it’ll work nicely; if you want more discrete app control or features like NFC payments, then you’d need to look elsewhere.
Technically, it does have onboard NFC, but because it’s HarmonyOS, there’s no tieup with Australian banks or popular payment gateways such as Google Pay, so it’s effectively disabled. For now, the same is true of its ECG functionality; the hardware is there but it’s yet to (presumably) pass TGA certification to work in Australia. It’s also lacking in eSIM capability if you wanted that, though it’s uncommon at this price tier to be fair.
While the Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro is limited in an app sense, the same isn’t true for watch faces, with a very wide variety of both paid and free watch faces to choose from.
Did I buy any watch faces for testing? In all honesty, no. However, I reckon most folks will find something they like in the selection of free watch faces anyway, whether you favour an analogue or digital style.
Battery
Huawei’s smart wearables have long excelled in terms of battery life, and the Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro is no exception. It packs in a 400mAh battery, about average for a watch this size, but here the lack of apps and the default screen off behaviour of the Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro helps it a lot to maintain its power levels.
Huawei’s claim here is for up to 10 days of battery life, though as always that’ll depend on how you use it. In my own review time, I’ve managed an easy 6-7 days with the always on screen disabled; if you do want the Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro to always be visible, that drops to around 2-3 days.
The Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro recharges wirelessly with a wireless charging cable included in the box, though you will have to bring your own plug into play here to top it up.
Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro: Alex’s Verdict
While stylistically it resembles the Apple Watch Ultra, the Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro is very much its own creature. While I’ve not extensively tested out the cheaper Huawei Watch Fit 4, with only a little hands-on time with that unit, the differences between it and the Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro do make me feel that it might be the better buy unless the golfing or diving features – or possibly in the future, the ECG features – matter a lot to you.
At its $469 asking price, the Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro is on the higher price side for a fitness tracker, but it’s not quite a fully featured, app-heavy smartwatch. At $299 for the Huawei Watch Fit 4, I have fewer reservations in that respect.
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Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro: Pricing and availability
The Huawei Watch Fit 4 Pro retails in Australia for $469.
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