Huawei Fit review

The Huawei Fit tries to answer the call for those looking for a simplistic, traditional-looking fitness tracker. There are even a few surprise features included, but the interface isn’t as intuitive as it claims, and slightly pricier competing wearables offer a much better value overall. Last year’s Android Wear-powered Huawei Watch didn't offer much in the way of fitness smarts, but it acts as the perfect segue to the Huawei Fit, marking the company’s first full step into the fitness tracker space. 

Or, is it more of a half-step?

Buy Huawei Fit at Amazon for $99.99

The Huawei Fit looks and feels enough like a proper effort, with a minimalistic design and sought-after features along for the ride, like waterproofing, continuous heart rate monitoring, up to six days of battery life, and training plan, which helps to prep you for a marathon. 

At $129 (awaiting global pricing and availability details), it sits in an awkward place in the fitness tracker market. It might look a lot like the Pebble Time Round, but it lacks the little things that work so well in setting that wearable apart, like its soulful interface, music playback and native app support. 

Sure, it’s cheaper than the Samsung Gear Fit 2, but we’d much rather pay $50 more to have built-in GPS functionality, and more importantly, the vibrant AMOLED display with the responsive Tizen operating system. The Huawei Fit doesn’t stand out from the crowd, but that’s not its fatal flaw. Huawei’s fitness tracker just doesn’t feel all that smart. 

If the aforementioned features cover your needs, Huawei’s wearable will probably satisfy you. But for everyone else, here are the candidates for best fitness tracker in 2016.

Design : 

Slick, traditional look

Very comfortable to wear on a 24/7 basis

18mm band support offers broad customization

Huawei’s fitness tracker rocks a circular face, which is no doubt a desirable design trait for those looking to replace their watch with something a little smarter, but no less traditional.

It’s clad in an aluminum enclosure, and is capped on its top with a plastic-covered LCD touchscreen, which supports simple gestures, like tapping and multi-directional swiping. 

Surrounding the 208 x 208 monochromatic ambient-lit display, Huawei added a handy ring that shows the minute markers, which works in tandem with a few of the built-in watch faces to give you an analog-esque look at the time. Flipped over, its heart rate sensor comes into view along along with the pogo pins used to charge the Fit on its included micro USB charging dock. Like other fitness trackers, Huawei’s uses photoplethysmography to track your heart rate. If you’re curious how it works in-depth, you can read more about that right here.

Lastly, the Fit supports any 18mm watch strap you may already have laying around. The default orange strap is pretty eye-opening and comfortable, though we take every possible opportunity to swap in Google’s-own Modebands that we use on the Huawei Watch and LG Watch Urbane. Although the fit wasn’t perfect, it made for a more unique-looking wearable. This fitness tracker would also look great with a NATO strap.