Huawei's Watch GT is a fitness follower disguised as a watch

At a time when the Apple Watch is miles ahead of other smartwatch and Wear OS struggles for its relevance, launching a new smartwatch seems like a reckless idea. That's why I liked Huawei's alternative approach of creating a semi-smart watch, essentially a shape-tracking bracelet with the shape and look of a wristwatch, with its Watch GT. You do not lose much compared to Wear OS, the Watch GT will still receive notifications from your phone, but you will gain an extremely impressive battery life of two weeks in normal use.

Huawei did something similar a few years ago with the Huawei Fit, built around a monochrome touch screen and designed to last six days under load. The Huawei Watch GT upgrades just about everything in the 2016 fitness track. The display is now a 1.39-inch color OLED panel with a DLC coating (diamond-like carbon) on the glass and a ceramic bezel. The watch case is made of 316L steel. The GT Watch also has a GPS, which was missing at the Fit, and it can track your sleep, as well as running, cycling, swimming and, with the help of an altimeter integrated, hiking.

Like the Fit, the new Huawei watch also supports continuous monitoring of heart rate. Huawei promises that its artificial intelligence optimizations will lead to more accurate heart rate readings, the Watch GT being able to detect when it is not worn in the ideal position for accurate measurement, then correct the readings obtained from the optical sensor.

Built around Huawei's internal LiteOS, the Watch GT is designed to be extremely energy efficient. It has a two-chip architecture, a chip designed for low power tasks when the user is sedentary and a more powerful chip to keep pace with more dynamic tasks. Huawei says the battery life of this watch will be two weeks if you monitor your heart rate and exercise up to 90 minutes a week. In the worst case, where you might decide to keep the screen and the GPS on constantly, the Watch GT will follow your manic training session for up to 22 hours. And if you decide not to use GPS, not to use the heart rate monitor and not to activate notifications, you can stay up to 30 days before needing to recharge.

The wearables of fitness monitoring are not lacking in the market so far, so Huawei will surely be aware of its entry into a crowded market. However, the very familiar look of its Watch GT, as well as its minimum thickness of 10.6 mm, should appeal to people who want all these health data without having to wear a gadget obviously sporting the wrist. Huawei's market research says so, so the company's response to Fitbit seems so far removed from the usual Fitbit concept.

Huawei announces the price and the release date of the Watch GT at an event to be held in London today. We will update this article with this information as it becomes available.