Think of the Huawei Watch GT2e as your personal virtual sports trainer

Huawei’s Watch GT2e is great for all-round family health and fitness. Lockdown in SA has seen many people turn to fitness as a stress reliever or for their general wellbeing. The ability to track what you’re doing and to see physical results could be addictive, especially if you’re into gamification. 

The Watch GT2e is the perfect companion to any Huawei smartphone as it also supports notifications such as calls, texts and alarms. You can use it to make phone calls over Bluetooth but it goes beyond a smartwatch by offering health and fitness monitoring, heart-rate and sleep tracking and supporting music controls. Use it for other wellbeing aspects such as tracking your menstrual cycle and pressure monitoring.

It’s powered by a dedicated Kirin A1 chip set developed by Huawei that has an intelligent power-saving mode, so it’s designed to last you all day and night for up to two weeks of usage. This s impressive for a smartwatch when compared with other wearables on the market.

One of the biggest features of the Watch GT2e is its ability to act like a professional sports trainer.

Track 100 workouts 

It offers fitness tracking that supports 100 workout modes, 15 of which are professional ones. Eight of these support outdoor activities such as running, walking, climbing, trail running, hiking, cycling, triathlon and swimming. Indoor activities include workouts at the gym using a treadmill, rowing machine or elliptical, free training or swimming. 

The rest of it is comprehensive and supports 85 types of activities in various categories such as extreme, leisure aquatics, fitness, ball games, or winter sports such as like hip-hop, rock climbing, parkour, skateboarding, surfing, tennis and baseball. 

Automatic detection

Aside from the extensive activity support, it also has an automatic detection feature that will record workouts even if you don’t start them yourself. These include popular ones such as outdoor running and walking; indoor running and walking, and elliptical and rower machine support. All the user has to do is confirm they are working out and has to end it when it is over.

Heart-rate monitoring

Huawei uses its self-developed technology, TruSeen, to accurately track heart rate, and uses a heart-rate algorithm enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) for faster tracking. It also uses a discreet, non-visible, light monitoring method that is not intrusive. 

The real-time feature works while swimming and notifies the user if your heart rate is too high or too low for more than 10 minutes — a potentially life-saving feature. It works in conjunction with the Health app providing further information for overall physical health status. The value and alerts can be set per individual. 

Sleep tracking

The Watch GT2e can be worn while asleep to monitor all sleep activity. This includes monitoring sleep quality, real-time heart rate, breathing, and other big data that will be available to you. Eight detailed sleep reports are available that cover duration, deep or light sleep, REM, number of times you wake up and ways to improve sleep.

SpO2 monitoring

For those into fitness, it can also monitor single blood oxygen and teach you more about your status and how to improve health conditions. Huawei says ordinary people’s SpO2 levels should be between 90% and 100%, and anything below 90% is insufficient.

The Watch GT2e promises up to two weeks of battery life and uses artificial intelligence to detect when and where power is needed. Smart Power will allocate it to various scenarios such as working out or being idle for the best power consumption.

The Watch GT2e costs R3,499 and is available at most retailers.

This article was paid for by Huawei.