Huawei Watch GT 6 Pro

The Huawei Watch GT 6 Pro is an excellent smart watch which builds on previous Huawei/Honor watches and brings everything together very neatly in a package that it’s hard not to be very impressed with.

Huawei Watch GT 6 Pro – build quality

The GT 6 Pro feels like a premium bit of kit. The body is titanium and stainless steel, and the touchscreen is scratch-resistant sapphire glass. There are two physical buttons on the right hand side; the top rotates and clicks for access to various functions, and the bottom both acts as a shortcut to workouts and also as a sensor for some of the heart-related apps.

The 1.47 inch AMOLED screen has a brightness of up to 3,000 nits – the same as the Apple Watch Ultra – and is bright and clear in all conditions. I’m testing the version of the watch with a simple (if comfortable) silicone strap, but a metal strap (£20 extra) and a cloth-covered silicone strap are also available.

It’s a chunky watch but not over-large, fitting a class-leading battery (more on that later), dual-band GPS, Bluetooth, a heart rate monitor, a speaker and a microphone into a pretty neat package.

Huawei GT 6 Pro – apps and smartphone integration

The GT 6 Pro syncs to your smartphone through the Huawei Health app and it comes with a lot of apps built in, and the ability to add more through Huawei’s AppGallery. Once it’s linked you can choose which apps can send notifications to the watch, and whether or not it’ll mirror phone calls.

It’s pretty easy to set up and notifications (both from smartphone apps and also from the watch itself) are accessible at any time by swiping up on the screen. Swiping down gives you access to some configurable shortcuts for some of the most-accessed functions, and swiping side to side from the main face toggles through a set of screens which is also configurable.

The watch face itself can be changed – there’s a huge range of options, some free, some paid – and you can configure data fields within the face to show the things that most matter to you. How much you can edit the face varies, but there’s bound to be one that suits.

You’ve got a heart rate monitor, of course, and that will also tell you your blood oxygenation, but there’s also more complex stuff. By holding your finger on the lower button, the watch will also check your heartbeat for abnormalities (mine’s apparently fine – I had to look up “sinus rhythm”) and even somehow check on your arterial stiffness (not quite so good, but still fine).

If you’re big into your altitude training, there’s even an altitude adaptation app. Accurate heart rate tracking depends, as it always does, on the position of the watch: you can’t wear it loose on your wrist bones – it really needs to be tighter and a bit higher. I found it was pretty reliable when fitted correctly though, compared to a Wahoo TICKR armband.

The sleep app gives you a sleep score every night, along with a breakdown of your night and how long you spend awake and in deep/light/REM sleep. It also tells you your heart rate, heart rate variability, blood oxygenation and respiratory rate, and will alert you of any changes. The Health Insights app amalgamates that data along with things like exercise and stress from other apps to make you aware of longer-term trends.

There’s a load of lifestyle and diet stuff too. The watch counts your steps of course, and with your body data, activity data and heart rate it can make a good stab at how many calories you’ve burned on any given day. That info can be offset against what you’ve eaten (the smartphone app has a decent database to search or you can just add calorie values on the watch) to see if you’re in calorie deficit. You can track your weight, body fat and muscle mass, and you can pair to a Bluetooth scale if you have one.

The smartphone app has a VIP plan, currently £59.99 a year, which will give you access to things like a personalised weight plan, smart training plans, a big library of workouts and other premium features, but the free app doesn’t ever feel like it’s lacking in anything you need on a day-to-day basis, and there are plenty of free workouts if you want to get into them.

Other things include: a remote camera shutter app which worked well with my Google Pixel phone, voice notes, music (which mostly means controlling your music on your phone), weather (not sure of the source but wasn’t as accurate as my phone apps), compass, barometer, calculator, flashlight (just lights up the screen in various colours) and a phone app which allows you to take calls on the bike if your phone’s in your pocket, if that’s a thing you do.

Probably the app I use the most is Find Phone, which makes your phone shout “I’M HERE!” from the gap between the sofa cushions or wherever you left it. There’s a wallet app, and in theory you can use the GT 6 Pro to pay for stuff, but in reality I haven’t been able to make that work in the UK with the cards I hold, so I wouldn’t rely on it. But overall it’s got more or less everything you could reasonably want.

Huawei Watch GT 6 Pro – activity recording

Like many smartwatches, the GT 6 Pro has a frankly bewildering range of activities you can track: everything from outdoor cycling to yoga to parallel bars to [checks notes] esports? Yes, esports. So when you’ve finished your bike ride, you can also log your Call of Duty time, or whatever. But the basics are covered: you can track a bike ride, or a run, and because the watch is rated to 5ATM in the water, you can do your swims as well, if that’s a thing you do (it’s not a thing I do).

The list of workout options that you get by pressing the bottom left button is configurable, and you can pin up to three things to the top of it, which is handy. Out of the box, the GT 6 Pro likes to guess what you’re doing and start a workout accordingly, and it also likes to chivvy you along with voice prompts for distance, and time, and training load, and all sorts. Luckily you can turn all that off.

Huawei says that, “The upgraded Sunflower Positioning System achieves 20% increase⁠ in positioning accuracy through enhanced GNSS algorithms and antenna architecture.” I found the GPS on the watch to be pretty reliable, as watches go. It can wander a touch in urban spaces and under tree cover, but overall it’s very reliable. It takes basically no time at all to lock on to satellites because GPS is on by default. If you’re outside and press go, you’ll be ready to ride within seconds.

Recording stuff is all very well, but you probably don’t just want it on your watch, or in the Huawei Health app. This is an area where Huawei has made some significant strides forward.

Back in 2020 I reviewed the Honor Watch GS Pro, which is a predecessor of this unit, and although it did a great job of actually recording, it was practically impossible to get the data out of the Huawei ecosystem, so it was pretty useless if you habitually use any big cycling platform. But now things are greatly improved. For a start, it’s trivial to get mapping on the watch – just download your region in the app and send it over – so you’re not just following a blue line. But most importantly you can now sync activities directly to Strava or Komoot (as well as Adidas running) so your data isn’t held captive. That makes it a genuinely useful thing for recording activities.

It’s a two-way street, too: you can import routes to the watch – either from linked apps or just by uploading a GPX file – and you can follow them on the watch, with turn-by-turn alerts, mapping and off-route notifications. I found the route-following to be okay rather than great: the mapping certainly helps and you can check you’re going the right way, but it’s not very proactive at telling you things – certainly not as much as the Garmin Instinct 3 Tactical Solar that I recently reviewed. That doesn’t have mapping, just a line to follow, but I was more comfortable knowing where I was going.

If you’re into your running, then the Outdoor Run workout type is fully featured too, and as well as giving you obvious stuff like pace and cadence, there are also charts for ground contact time, vertical oscillation and balance, which I have no frame of reference for (I’m assuming 50/50 for balance would be good), but which you could track over time if you wanted.

Again, everything gets synced to Strava/Komoot/Adidas if you want that. A quick note also on the golf tracking, which may or may not be of interest to cyclists. But if, like me, you enjoy hacking a ball about the countryside with no particular skill then the golf functionality is maybe the most fully-featured of the lot: 17,000 courses mapped (all the local ones I play are there), and you can track distance and keep score directly from the watch. At the end, you can even get a walkthrough of each hole showing you which hedges you were in for every shot, which the GT6 Pro presumably guesses from your stopping and swinging your arms, as you don’t have to tell it.

I had the opportunity to try the skiing mode during testing too, which is also good, splitting your activity into the various runs and ignoring the lifts.

My main bugbear with the activity recording ecosystem on the GT 6 Pro is this: once you’re recording something, the watch is stuck in ride recording mode and you can only see those screens. There’s no way back to the main watch interface to do anything else.

It doesn’t have to be like this and it isn’t on other functions. If you set a timer, for example, you can navigate back to the main watch face and you get a small timer icon at the top you can click on to go back to the timer when you need to. I’d love to see this implemented for workouts. I just don’t need the watch telling me about my workout the whole time, to the exclusion of everything else.

The current time is shown on the workout screen, but in a tiny font. I had to edit the main data screen on the outdoor cycling workout just so I could see what time it was mid-ride. That’s pretty easy to do, and you can have up to three screens (it varies based on the workout type) but it’d be nice to just be able to record stuff in the background.

Huawei Watch GT 6 Pro – Virtual Power

One of the things the GT 6 Pro purports to do is tell you your power, thanks to Cycling Virtual Power. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t have a stab at this: in theory it knows as much as Strava, which is always keen to have a go, and in many cases it knows more. Your heart rate information is there too, for example, where in nearly all cases I don’t share that with Strava.

To check out the accuracy or otherwise of Cycling Virtual Power I did a series of rides, recording the activity both on the watch and on my Hammerhead Karoo head unit with power data from a set of SRAM Rival cranks which I know to be fairly accurate.

The main thing to say about the power data from the GT 6 Pro is: it’s a little optimistic. It was consistently the highest out of the three things I was comparing: actual power data from the cranks, Strava’s estimated power (from the watch activity) and Huawei’s virtual power.

As an example, on one two-hour ride with an average of 220W from the power meter, Strava was a fair bit below (199W) and the GT 6 Pro substantially higher at 247W. The watch knows the terrain and my speed, and my heart rate, but there’s some stuff it can’t know: this was a 2-up ride, for example, so half the time I was hiding behind Jez. It was quite a windy day which made speed more hard-fought, which is maybe why the Strava estimate – which I’ve generally found to be closer than the 10% out in this instance – was a bit low. Other rides with the watch varied in how much they overestimated power a little, but they did all overestimate it.

Is it a useful feature? Not especially, I’d say. I don’t think it’s accurate enough to give you any meaningful insight that your heart rate for the ride doesn’t already. With a power meter you can map your power output against your heart rate and that can give you some insight into how well rested you are, but I think there’s too much noise here for you to learn all that much.

Huawei Watch GT 6 Pro – battery life

The battery life of this watch is a huge plus. Huawei uses a high-silicon battery in the GT 6 Pro, which it claims increases the energy density by 37%. I’ve recently reviewed the Garmin Instinct 3 Tactical Solar, and with an LCD screen and solar charging you can basically wear that all summer without plugging it in if you’re outside a lot. The GT 6 Pro isn’t going to match that, but for a normal-sized (if fairly chunky) watch with a large and bright AMOLED screen the battery life is hard to beat.

The £749 Apple Watch Ultra 3 claims a battery life of up to 72 hours in low-power mode, and if you have the GPS on you’ll be sticking it on the dock again in less than two days. I’ve been wearing the GT 6 Pro for a few months now, and using it with everything turned on – GPS, Bluetooth, notifications – and it’ll reliably last two weeks on one charge.

I’ve recorded activities up to an 11-hour, 200km audax, and that consumed about a quarter of the battery, so the claimed 40-hour life when recording – enough for that 600km you’re planning – seems to be about on the money.

Battery life is just not an issue in normal use. If you’re heading away for a week, just charge it up before you go and there’s no need to pack yet another charger. For the type of watch this is, I don’t think you can currently do better. The charger itself is a wireless magnetic cradle and it’s simple enough to use and gets you back up to full juice in a couple of hours.

Huawei Watch GT 6 Pro – value and overall

This is Huawei’s flagship smartwatch and it has the functionality to back that up, all at the comparatively low price of £329. Okay that’s still a pricey item, but realistically you need to be comparing it to other flagship watches like the Samsung Galaxy Ultra (£599) and the Apple Watch Ultra (£749), at which point it begins to look like a bit of a bargain.

This is a premium smartwatch with hugely capable hardware, a great range of apps and unbeatable battery life. There are a couple of tweaks I’d like to see made to the firmware, but nothing major. The GT 6 Pro is easy to get along with, genuinely useful for recording activities and a good companion for more generally monitoring your health and activity. I’d happily recommend it, and I think it’s going to be a much better buy than other big ticket premium watches for many people.

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