HUAWEI Watch GT 3 Classic 46 mm GPS + Bluetooth Smartwatch (Brown) - International Version

Huawei do not have support for the US, no way to activate.A waist of time.

Anyone using the App in the USA will find that you will NOT be able to change watch faces, install other apps. So you will be stuck with the few watch faces that is on the watch, which the installed ones look tacky . I am sure there is a way around this but ,after wasting hours trying, I just returned it. Again this is only applicable to people in the USA. UK residents , it seems, are ok. Google Play App store has removed the app from the store. Shame as it is a nice watch thought the strap looks and feels cheap. In short I really think people selling this watch should make it clear that this is the case or not sell it in the USA when it cannot be fully functional in that location.

I was hugely surprised to unwrap a Christmas gift and see a smart watch, and even more surprised to find it was a Huawei. To be honest, I didn’t think you could buy them here anymore, and given the bad press about the company, I did a lot of Googling before I was confident enough to register the watch. The app for that isn’t in the Google Play Store, but you can sideload it, and the only reason I did that was that Huawei has incorporated the app in Ireland, so data collection is covered by the European GDPR. Which makes the privacy overlay more restrictive than most local laws. To be fair, some user data does dribble over to China, but I figure every government and every company is spying on us so relentlessly that avoiding it is essentially impossible, even if you threw away your phone and lived a hermit lifestyle (which would, of course, be captured by the absence of transactions etc. You really can’t win!).Anyway, I’m glad I did. This is an awesome watch.It looks smart, with its round face and bright AMOLED screen, and the battery lasts many days. I’ve only recharged it three times since Christmas day, noting that I don’t have the always-on display enabled.Apart from the time, the watch reads your heartrate, tracks skin temperature, and measures blood oxygen. I had the chance to compare its heartrate and SpO2 readings with a hospital grade finger SpO2 pulse oximeter, and the Huawei read the same heartrate and was within a percent on blood oxygen levels. Huawei is not claiming it as a diagnostic device, but it seems to be accurate enough for consumer use.It also claims to assess your sleep. I tried it and it categorized my deep sleep, light sleep, REM sleep, etc., and gave me a rating, but I realized that I don’t need a watch to tell me whether it was a bad night, so I turned that off. It is also one less data set sent to a company, GDPR aside.And it tracks your exercise—including GPS in the watch—which is how I have confirmation that I’m not doing enough of that. I mean, I knew it, but when your watch urges you to get up and move, it’s a more direct reminder of your sedentary lifestyle. The watch is waterproof, but I’ve not tested that in the pool yet, which also means I cannot report on its ability to tell different types of exercise, including Huawei’s claim of “over 100 different sports.”More usefully, I now get email, calendar, and messaging alerts on my wrist and can send simple preset text or emoji replies for a few of my message apps, which is handy when in meetings. The watch silently connects to the phone via Bluetooth, and it seems robust enough given how much I walk away from my phone.The watch supports an eSim, which would be useful but there are no eSim service providers available. That’s a shame (and probably caused by government restrictions) and it would be nice not to need my phone. You can also answer calls on the watch, which I’ve not tried because I’ve not taken any somewhere private enough that using a speaker would be polite.The watch supports NFC payments, but that function does not seem to connect to the necessary server when I looked at setting it up. Though I would not have loaded my cards details if it did connect, but I have not enabled contactless payments on my phone, either so that has nothing to do with Huawei.One other aspect I’ve not tested is the app store. You can buy watch faces—I’m using one of the defaults, it looks good and works fine—and load other apps, but the installed ones are okay for how I use the watch. That includes weather and phases of the Moon, plus alarms, a compass, stopwatch, and a ‘drain the water’ function for if you’ve been swimming.In terms of Huawei’s phone app, as far as I can tell it’s not draining the battery unduly. I also found the interface clean and easy to use, so that’s a win for an app that works round the clock. The watch also has a ‘find my phone’ feature which forces the phone to loudly call out, “I’m here,” even if it is set for vibrate-only or silent-mode.So, with all this amazing tech on my wrist, why only three stars? That’s because Huawei has been hobbled for me. The company has done a terrific job, but not all countries allow you to access all the features, and on that basis, I cannot give it the five-stars it deserves.