Huawei Watch Fit 3 review: One of the best-value smartwatches you can buy

The Huawei Watch Fit 3 sees Huawei take its fitness tracker and smartwatch hybrid and make it more smartwatch.

Along with a revamped design and a bigger screen, the Watch Fit 3 gets new watch faces, richer sleep tracking, an improved heart rate sensor and now adds more sports modes.

Crucially, it doesn’t budge from its very reasonable price tag that won’t see it measured up against the Apple Watch, Samsung Galaxy Watch or the Google Pixel Watch. Think more Xiaomi, Honor, Amazfit and CMF smartwatches.

On paper, the Watch Fit 3 promises a whole lot for not a lot of your money and with no single smartwatch maker fully nailing things at the affordable end of the market, it’s there for Huawei to grab that best cheap smartwatch crown.

Check out our chart of the best smartwatches to see alternatives.

Design & Build

• New square design
• Available in six colours
• 5ATM waterproofing

Huawei has essentially ripped up the script for the design Fit 3. While the Fit and Fit 2 looked like fitness trackers with slightly wider, Fitbit Charge-like shaped screens, that look goes out the window.

In its place is a squarer design that instantly make the Fit 3 look like a regular smartwatch.

There’s a good range of colours you can pick the Watch Fit 3 up in

Many smartwatches are accused of being Apple Watch clones but that really does apply here with the Fit 3. The 43.2mm sized watch features a matte, aluminium alloy case with two physical buttons on the right hand side, and it’s those buttons that scream Apple. The bottom one is a flat kind that gives you quick access to the Fit 3’s workout tracking screen.

The top button is a red watch crown that simply doesn’t feel as elegant or pristine as Apple’s crown and slightly detracts from what is largely a nice smartwatch to look at.

The crown is useful at least, mainly for scrolling through menu screens and is also used effectively in scenarios like navigating the app launcher, where a twist of the crown can quickly reveal the labels underneath app icons to help identify what they do. You can also double tap it to get into your most recently used apps.

There’s a good range of colours you can pick the Watch Fit 3 up in. Take your pick of Gold, Silver, Pink and Tarnish case shades and there’s also the option of fluroelastomer, nylon and leather straps. There are buttons on the case back you can press to clip away the lugs to make it pretty straightforward to switch up straps. Those additional straps will cost you £30.

Huawei sticks to the same level of waterproofing as the Fit 2, so you’re getting a 5ATM-rated design, which does mean you can take it swimming and submerge it in water up to 50 metres depth.

Screen & Audio 

• 1.82-inch AMOLED screen
• Supports always-on mode
• Includes microphone and speaker

As mentioned, the screen on the latest Fit is bigger than the one on the Fit 2, jumping from a 1.74-inch AMOLED to a 1.82-inch one with a 480 x 408 pixel resolution. Huawei has planted great screens on its pricier smartwatches and it’s nice to see that even the Watch Fit 3 gets a good one too.

Compared to other screens on smartwatches at this price, the Fit 3 is one of the best

Compared to other screens on smartwatches at this price, the Fit 3 is one of the best. It’s sharp, colours are accurate and with a 1,500 max nits brightness, it goes very bright too. When I’ve left it on nearly top brightness at night waking up the screen feels like turning on a smartphone torch.

There is some bezel around the display, though Huawei does a very good job of masking it with the user interface and its collection of watch faces. It’s a screen that’s nicely responsive to touch and is everything you’d expect to find on a smartwatch that costs much more than the Fit 3.

It is a display that can be set to stay always-on, at the expense of the maximum battery life you’ll enjoy in between charges. If you can live without a 24/7 screen, the raise-to-wake gesture support here is very good.

Huawei has also found room for a speaker and microphone and that does mean you can take calls when paired to your Android or iPhone over Bluetooth. It also means you can play music from the watch sans headphones. It’s a surprisingly good performer, offering plenty of volume and good clarity that makes it very usable for handling calls from your wrist.

Software & Features 

• Runs on Harmony OS
• Works with Android and iOS
• Some features work only with Android or Huawei phones

Huawei employs version 4.20 of its own Harmony OS operating system, so that’s the same software running on its Watch 4 and Watch GT 4 series smartwatches.

That means you get something which is compatible with Android smartphones and iPhones. Most features are available across those platforms with some exceptions. You can’t sync music for instance when using it with an iPhone, while you’ll need to have an iPhone or a Huawei smartphone to use the remote camera shutter feature.

Everything is set up in the Huawei Health app, which is a bit busy and is worth spending a bit of time in to work out what’s actually going to be useful on a daily basis.

The watch software itself is at least pretty easy to get to grips with in comparison. Swipe left and right to see your screen widgets, swipe down to see the settings menu and up to see your notifications. I don’t have many complaints with how things run on the watch and it runs nice and smooth as well.

There’s a nice array of smartwatch features. It offers solid notification support, well-optimised music playback controls, a nice bunch of pre-loaded watch faces and a nice weather widget.

There is NFC contactless payment support through Huawei Pay, though unlike Huawei’s other smartwatches doesn’t offer access to the AppGallery storefront. If you’re looking for the basics and those basics to work in a pretty slick manner, the Fit 3 delivers on that.

Fitness & Tracking 

• Upgraded heart rate sensor
• Built-in GPS
• Calorie tracking mode

Fit is in the name so it’s no surprise to find that Huawei promises to track a lot on the health and fitness front.

It has the key sensors you’d expect to find including ones to track heart rate and blood oxygen levels. It also includes built-in GPS, which is always a bonus to find on a cheap smartwatch.

If you’re not the sporty type and mainly looking to use the Fit 3 to track your steps, sleep and maybe pay a bit more attention to stress levels and daily heart rate, the Fit 3 performs well as a fitness tracker.

The improved Activity Ring widget is now more glanceable and engaging than it was on the Fit 2. Accuracy-wise, daily step counts were generally within 300-500 steps of two other fitness trackers I wore alongside it. It supports inactivity alerts and Huawei has gone big with awarding you virtual badges for hitting major milestones, so get used to those appearing each time you launch the Huawei Health app.

Huawei lets you switch between viewing your activity rings and its healthy clover, which are designed to mark when you’ve completed healthy habits during your day. It’s an example, however, where Huawei tries to do a lot, and the wealth of features gets a little overwhelming.

When it’s time for bed, Huawei includes version 4.0 of its TruSleep sleep monitoring system, capturing insights like sleep duration, sleep stages, sleep scores along with offering some sleep analysis and recommendations to improve your slumber time.

Taking it to bed with the Oura Ring Gen 3, I found sleep duration and the time I fell asleep on most nights were pretty similar. It also did a nice job of capturing the extra naps I’d recorded when unwell during testing. The sleep analysis and recommendations aren’t anything groundbreaking, offering tips like telling me to air out the room before sleeping or to try a hot foot bath or stretch before bed.

Huawei’s added some health-centric features it’s already rolled out to its other smartwatches and that includes its scientific calorie counter which will prompt you to log meals throughout the day in the app and then use your workout tracking data with the idea of working towards a calorie deficit to lose weight.

Unfortunately, the concept of manually tracking meals minus a database of foods to lean on makes it a bit of a chore of a feature to use.

It’s also brought in a TruSeen 5.5 heart rate monitoring setup to promise a boost in heart rate accuracy, and the speed with which you can take SpO2 readings as well. For on-the-spot heart rate readings, the Watch Fit 3 felt pretty reliable on the whole and matched up to two other fitness trackers I wore at the same time.

It was a similar story for average resting heart rate readings, though I find the presentation of the data in the app not super intuitive and a bit clunky overall.

As a sports watch, you’ve got your pick over well over 100 sports modes, with core modes including running, cycling and swimming both in the pool and open water. Huawei has added profiles for football, padel and e-sports, and now also includes a new track running mode.

There’s automatic exercise recognition for some of those modes while Huawei has promised a new smart suggestions mode that recommends workouts based on your workout history and calorie consumption. Those didn’t appear at all during my testing.

For some of those core modes, Huawei retains its useful warm-up and cool-down animations, though it appears to have dropped the ability to import routes like you could on the Watch Fit 2.

There’s a single-band positioning setup here as opposed to the newer and more accurate dual-band one that appears on its other watches. In terms of GPS accuracy, I found that on some runs, metrics like distance tracked and average pace were nicely in line with a dedicated running watch I wore on my other wrist.

On other runs, the Fit 3 slightly over-reported distance, but it wasn’t a horror show. Heart rate tracking accuracy for workouts at an easy to moderate pace was generally solid, helped by the good fit I got with the nylon strap that’s available for the Fit 3.

There’s an array of training and analysis available on the watch and off it. You can follow structured running sessions or create your own and follow a range of training plans that can be synced from the Huawei Health app. You can view your running ability index and training load and see your recommended recovery time after you’ve tracked a workout.

Overall, it offers a lot compared to rivals and the core tracking experience is solid.

Battery Life & Charging

• Up to 10 days battery life
• Up to 7 days in heavy use
• Up to 4 days with screen always-on

Huawei’s smartwatches typically put in a really strong performance here and it’s no different with the Watch Fit 3.

For the Watch Fit 2, Huawei claimed up to 10 days in typical usage and 7 days in heavy usage. It’s quoting the very same numbers for the Fit 3, which packs in a 400mAh capacity battery. It now additionally states what you can expect when the screen is on 24/7, with that number dropping to 4 days.

I’d say that those numbers ring true once again. I found that the battery lasted roughly a week, though with more regular workout tracking, that fell just below. Overall, though the showing has been very good, and while it hasn’t improved on the Fit 2, it certainly has performed worse, even with a bigger screen in place.

There’s a quick-charge mode to give you a day’s play from a 10-minute charge and it can get from 0-100% in just an hour, which is impressive.

When using GPS, I found that an hour of tracking saw the battery drop by just under 10%. That’s exactly the sort of numbers I saw with similar tracking on the Fit 2.

When you do get low, you’re grabbing a proprietary charging cable to get it powered back up again. There’s a quick-charge mode to give you a day’s play from a 10-minute charge and it can get from 0-100% in just an hour, which is impressive.

Price & Availability

The Huawei Watch Fit 3 is on sale for £139.99 in the UK and €159, directly from the Huawei website. You can also get it from the likes of Argos, Boots, Currys and Amazon.

If you’re in the US and want the Watch Fit 3, then sadly things haven’t changed on that front. This hasn’t officially gone on sale Stateside, much like Huawei’s other smartwatches and fitness trackers.

To put the Watch Fit 3 pricing in perspective, it’s firmly sitting in that affordable smartwatch category, going up against the likes of the Honor Watch 4, CMF Watch Pro and the Xiaomi Watch S3, with the Watch S3 offering a round case design compared to the squarer looks of the Honor and Huawei watches.

Check out our list of the best smartwatches for the top options.

Should you buy the Huawei Watch Fit 3?

The Huawei Watch Fit 3 is now very much a smartwatch and a very likeable one available at a really good price.

There are some design elements that work and some that don’t in my opinion, with software and performance that feels very much in line with other smartwatches in and around the same price.

It certainly feels like a more polished affordable smartwatch than something like the Honor Watch 4 and the Redmi Watch 4, while its fitness and smartwatch features feel better executed than they are on the Xiaomi Watch S3.

Bottom line, If you’re looking for a cheap smartwatch with a great screen and you can live with the quite blatant Apple Watch-aping look, some pretty slick software with some thoughtful touches, then this is well worth a look.

Specs

• 1.82-inch, AMOLED always-on display
• 5 ATM water resistance rating 
• Built-in speaker
• Single-band, built-in GPS
• 400mAh capacity battery
• Up to 10 days battery life
• Heart rate sensor
• Blood oxygen sensor
• Bluetooth calls
• Sleep tracking
• Stress monitoring
• 26g (without strap)