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.

Samsung Gear S3 Arrives November 18

In the market for a new smartwatch? Then do consider the Samsung Gear S3 as it will be available from November 18 2016, starting at US$349.99. Pre-orders in the US start this coming Sunday, November 6 2016.

The watch will be available through retailers like Best Buy, Amazon, and Macy's, as well as wireless providers and Samsung's website.

Like its predecessor, the timepiece features a rotating bezel and comes in two designs—the rugged Samsung Gear S3 Frontier and the sleek Samsung Gear S3 Classic. An LTE version of the former will be available via AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon.
The Samsung Gear S3 is water- and dust-resistant, and offers "military-grade durability to protect against extreme temperatures, scratches and impact," Samsung promised. You can, of course, also customise it to match your outfit or mood, thanks to thousands of watch faces and the ability to swap out the band for any 22mm offering.

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The watch features a built-in GPS, letting you monitor your fitness activities, share your location with friends, or use an SOS feature in the event of an emergency. You can use it with Samsung Pay to purchase items from your wrist "virtually anywhere you can tap or swipe a credit or debit card," Samsung said.

The LTE version lets you receive texts and alerts as well as listen to music, track fitness routes, and download apps even when your phone is stowed away. All models have a built-in speaker and microphone, so you can take calls without reaching for your smartphone.

First Look: Audi and LG's Mysterious WebOS Smartwatch

Audi and LG don't want to talk about the webOS smartwatch. The car company made a splash here at CES when it showed tap-to-unlock technology in the new Audi S7 using a tablet, phone, and a previously unseen LG smartwatch. The watch's user interface doesn't look like Android Wear (see the images below), and after a closer look at the watch, reporters from Android Central saw that it said it was running Open webOS.

After LG folks told me that there was actually no webOS smartwatch, I ended up talking to visibly frustrated Audi automotive security engineer Roman Kochanek. "It's a prototype," he sighed. "Some people say they saw a settings screen which says it's webOS. We're not saying it's webOS."

Well, obviously, it is a webOS smartwatch. But presumably what LG and Kochanek were trying to get across was that the companies may have no plans to release this model, for now. Kochanek said it was a co-developed prototype designed with a phone-like "secure element" so it could activate the new S7's remote unlock and start functions.

The remote-unlock feature can also let you "lend" keys to your friends' smartphones and smartwatches, Kochanek said, showing a Samsung phone that could open not only his demo vehicle, but two of his friends'. All of the devices involved need the Audi app and the appropriate security hardware.

The Audi/LG smartwatch's body is very similar to LG's existing G Watch R . The watch has Audi branding on the watch face, but an LG logo on the band clasp. The UI is like a spiral of built-in and third-party apps retreating into the distance. The apps include a phone dialer, SMS, music player, step tracker, calendar, language translator, email, voice recorder, and some things that were in Korean.

In any case, things have gotten more locked down since yesterday, when Android Authority and The Verge were both able to get the watches off of the Audi engineers' wrists. Kochanek kept driving the watch back to its remote-unlock and remote-start functions, both of which are cool but not what everyone's going crazy about: a full-scale smartwatch OS with a clearer and more usable interface than the pervasive and disappointingly confusing Android Wear.

Kochanek said that the Audi remote-unlock function will come to more smartwatches than this one, as long as they have NFC and the appropriate security hardware. As for the LG webOS smartwatch line, which The Wall Street Journal says is a real thing, we might learn more at Mobile World Congress at the end of February.