Huawei Watch GT 7 Pro Review: A Fitness Powerhouse That Refuses to Quit

The Huawei Watch GT 7 Pro is the latest flagship GT smartwatch that the company has to offer. This smartwatch series is well-known for its sturdy build and long battery life. It’s also known for being sporty while also looking great for regular use as well. In fact, it’s my favorite smartwatch series from Huawei, and it’s not even close. So I’m kind of hyped every time a new watch arrives. I’ve used most of the previous GT watches from Huawei, by the way, so I’ll have plenty of experience to pull from for the Huawei Watch GT 7 Pro review. Before we start, do note that this is the bigger, 46mm model that we’re reviewing.

From the outside, the Huawei Watch GT 7 Pro does look very similar to its predecessor. That’s hard to deny. It is very similar to the Watch GT 6 Pro in general, but still, Huawei did make some improvements here. So, let’s get the specs out of the way so that we can talk more about what this watch brings to the table.

Huawei Watch GT 7 Pro

£379.99

Small changes, same winning formula

Pros

Looks great
Sturdy build
Outstanding ingress protection
Good performance
Great battery life
Rather fast wireless charging
Very comfortable, great strap solution
HarmonyOS on wearables is actually great now
Plenty of useful fitness and health features

Cons

Strap connection is not standard

Huawei supplied us with a review unit of the Huawei Watch GT 7 Pro, but didn’t have a say in our opinion, nor did they see this review before you. We’ve been using the device for about two weeks before forming an opinion

Huawei

Specs

Huawei Watch GT 7 Pro Specs

Display Size	1.47 inches
Display Resolution	466 x 466
Refresh Rate	60Hz
Dimensions	45.6 x 45.6 x 11.25 mm
Weight	55.5 grams (excluding strap)
Chipset	N/A
RAM	N/A
Storage	64GB
Battery	867mAh
Charging	10W wireless (charger included)
OS	HarmonyOS 6.1
Network and Connectivity	Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth 6.0, NFC
Water Resistance	IP69, 5ATM
Colors	Black, Green, Yellow

View Device Specs

Huawei Watch GT 7 Pro Review: Design

The Huawei Watch GT 7 Pro looks extremely similar to its predecessor. It’s not identical, but it’s not far from it either. The top bezel, where the numbers are located, has more of a steep drop towards the base of the watch, but that’s the only change that I see here. Well, there’s also the band, but we’ll get to that. The Huawei Watch GT 7 Pro is made out of stainless steel, and the model we’ve received comes with a green rubber band and a green bezel around the display.

I love green color; I really do, but I can’t help the feeling that the watch would look better if that bezel remained in the same color as the watch itself, silver. It is glossy, and it looks a bit cheap, plus it limits you with options for the band colors. So I’m not a fan of this combo, in all honesty, despite the fact that green is basically my favorite color. The display is still round, and the watch still has two buttons on the right side and no buttons on the left.

The buttons are satisfyingly clicky

The top button on the right side doubles as a rotating crown, and it has indents all around. The bottom button is flat and long, so it’s very easy to differentiate. That button is customizable, by the way, so you can assign it to anything you want. Considering the shape of the watch where the strap is supposed to connect, and a special connector added, you’re kind of limited in terms of straps. Huawei uses a combo of a standard connector plus an added one. So, using a standard 22mm watch strap won’t fly here; you need to get special ones made for this watch if you want to use a different color.

There are some sensors at the bottom of the watch, while the watch band here is great. It’s a silicone band, which is very soft and very comfortable. The best of all, the excess strap that remains when you clip the watch band goes under the watch band itself, and it leans against your skin. That means you don’t need strap keepers or anything like that. It fits great, and I don’t feel a difference versus wearing a regular watch band in that regard. This is an outstanding change, in my opinion, especially if you don’t take off your watch frequently, as it’s slightly more annoying to take off compared to a regular watch band.

It’s very comfortable to wear

Overall, the watch is very comfortable to wear, so no issues there. It feels sturdy, and it’s not too heavy, even though it has some heft to it, which is welcomed by many. If you liked the Huawei Watch GT 6 Pro, you’ll like this one as well.

Huawei Watch GT 7 Pro Review: What’s in the Box

With the watch itself, you’ll also find a charging puck in the packaging. That is a wireless charging puck, by the way, and it’s permanently connected to a Type-A USB cable. The watch magnetizes to it when you’re charging, and it all works like a charm. Other than that, there’s also some paperwork in the box, and that’s it. You have everything you need, basically.

Huawei Watch GT 7 Pro Review: Display

The Huawei Watch GT 7 Pro has a round ???-inch display, which is flat. Bezels around it are taller than the display itself to provide some protection. Huawei used sapphire glass screen protection here, and the panel can reach up to 3,000 nits of brightness. In other words, it’s extremely bright when it needs to be. I did not think, at any point during my use, that this panel should get brighter. It’s one of the brightest smartwatch displays out there, so… there you go.

The display is vivid and bright

The colors that the panel provides are also very good. They’re vivid and deep, and the viewing angles are excellent. The display is also plenty sharp at ??? x ??? pixels, so no worries there either. ou do get all the standard features here, including raise to wake and tap to wake. Both of them work like a charm. You can choose between automatic and manual brightness. I stuck with automatic, as it worked so well. I never really notice the brightness getting up or down, it was always the perfect level when I needed it to… at least for my use.

When it comes to the always-on display, you have several options there. When you enable it, you’ll be able to choose whether the watch face will be shown when you raise to wake your wrist, or just just the AOD display. Furthermore, you can enable AOD display for workouts only, if you want. I find this to be a great option, as I generally don’t use AOD, but I find it useful during workouts, especially if I’m on an airbike or something else where my hand is more or less fixed, so I can glance on the screen without moving the wrist.

All in all, the display on the Huawei Watch GT 7 Pro is great. It’s bright, vivid, offers great viewing angles, and solid protection as well. AOD works like a charm as well, no issues whatsoever.

Huawei Watch GT 7 Pro Review: Performance

The general performance of the watch is excellent. That was the case on its predecessors too, as far as I my memory goes. We’re not sure what chip sits inside of this watch, but it’s most likely Huawei’s home-baked Kirin chip, one of them. The point is, the watch runs great, no matter what you do on it. The usage is smooth, and the animations are very minimal and fast, which is a good thing. You can mess around with the UI and apps as much as you want and not bog down this watch.

We’ll talk more about health and fitness performance in a separate category; this one is reserved for general watch responsiveness. In that regard, there’s absolutely nothing to complain about here. This is one of the most responsive smartwatches that I’ve ever used, and I’ve used a lot of them over the years. The performance is not something that should worry you, not one bit.

Huawei Watch GT 7 Pro Review: Battery Life

The Huawei Watch GT 7 Pro includes an 867mAh battery on the inside, which is the same battery capacity as the Huawei Watch GT 7 Pro. Once again, this is a 46mm version; the smaller 41mm variant includes a smaller battery. In any case, the battery life on the Huawei Watch GT 6 Pro was outstanding, and the same is the case here. Huawei says that you can get up to 21 days of light use and 12 days of typical use out of this smartwatch. What does that actually mean? Well, light use is still use, and quite frankly nobody I know is a hardcore smartwatch user. They usually strap it on, and simply use it to check their messages, control music, check fitness stats, and that’s basically it.

It lasts… and lasts… and lasts

That is considered to be more light use than anything else, even if a ton of features are powered on. I left all the features on, of course, and used the watch pretty much as described. The first couple of days I was messing around with it a lot more until I got everything tuned, and after that, I simply glanced at it when notifications came, checked my fitness stats, fired up some exercises, and moved between music tracks. That’s it. With my use, in about two weeks I’ve been using the watch, I managed to drain a bit more than half of its battery. After almost two weeks, the battery life was at 48%. Those are outstanding results, in my book, and one of the main reasons why I love using Huawei’s smartwatches, the GT series in particular.

You can charge it in about an hour

The vast majority of you will be able to charge this watch, go on a long holiday, and not worry about battery life at all. If you switch over to Trial Running mode, Huawei says you can get up to 51 hours of use. I haven’t tried that, but it’s worth noting. What about charging? Once you magnetize the watch to a charging puck, you can get it fully charged in around an hour. That’s great, especially considering how long a single charge lasts.

Huawei Watch GT 7 Pro Review: Software

HarmonyOS 6.1 comes pre-installed on the Huawei Watch GT 7 Pro. Huawei didn’t change much here compared to HarmonyOS 6.0, but that’s expected. Some refinements have been issued, but the company did not even need to change much. HarmonyOS works great on Huawei smartwatches, and this one is no exception. Minimal and fast animations combined with a great, well-thought-out UI. If you’ve used a smartwatch in general, you’ll be right at home here. Some things work a bit differently in HarmonyOS, but the gist is the same.

The UI is great… and familiar

So as per usual, you have your home screen with your watch face of preference on it. Swiping from the top-down will get you your quick toggles, while doing the opposite shows notifications. Swiping from left to right gets you to ‘Smart assistance’ menu, which is more useful than it sounds. It shows you your preferred widgets in a vertical layout. I use this much more than regular widgets, actually, as it carries the weather and a music control widget. If you swipe from right to left, you’ll be able to scroll between your widget pages.

There’s also a menu if you click the top-right button on the watch, and you can choose how it’s laid out. That’s basically it as far as navigation goes. HarmonyOS handles notifications a bit differently than most watches, and I actually prefer it this way. It will mirror the notification you receive on your phone, but if you remove that notification from the watch, it will not remove it from your phone. This is ideal for me, as I never respond to anything from a watch (even though you can do it from this one), but handle all notifications later on. So the watch serves as a notification center to me, and this one-way mirror is perfect for that. When you remove a notification from a phone, however, it will disappear from the watch, in case you’re wondering.

There are a number of useful software features included

The watch is packed with useful software features. You can customize the bottom-right button via the software, while the Emergency SOS feature is also included. There’s the ‘Focus’ menu for when you don’t want to be disturbed in one way or the other, while you have plenty of watch faces to check out. You can get more via the Huawei Health app, which you’ll need to use this watch. You’ll need to get it from Huawei’s website, as it’s not available on the Google Play Store (due to the US ban).

Huawei Watch GT 7 Pro Review: Health & Fitness

Huawei’s GT series watches are usually focused heavily on fitness and health. Therefore, it has plenty to offer on both fronts. Let’s talk about the fitness side first, shall we? This year, Huawei placed a huge emphasis on skiing, cycling, and golf, while all the usual workout and sports modes are included as well. This watch supports both indoor and outdoor skiing modes, plus alpine skiing and snowboarding modes. Not a lot of watches can say the same. It also allows you to access 3,000+ ski resort maps worldwide. This is not something I was able to test, as I don’t ski in general, but also it’s not winter at the moment, so…

An all-new cycling mode is included, along with added golf features

What I was able to test is the all-new cycling mode that Huawei offers on this watch. It supports urban cycling, road cycling, and long-distance cycling. I usually fall back on the first two. You’ll need to select a specific mode from the menu, like outdoor cycle, and a couple of other parameters. You can select internal training, for example, and the watch will get you going and track what you’re doing. You can select routes, get route preview, and so on. There are also warmups on offer. All of this works very well, and you can get sharp turn alerts, and the watch will even keep track of elevation and everything.

There are five new golf features as well. That includes: Plays-Like Distance, Shot Distance, Custom Green Pin, Auto-Rotating Green View, and Full Course Multi-Color Scorecard. I’ve never seen a watch that comes close to this when it comes to golf features. This is another feature I was not able to test, as I’m not really into golf and there are no golf courses around. Quite a few people seem to be excited about it online, though, and the features on the last Ultra model I used worked like a charm.

A ton of additional sports modes are included, and so is the ‘Mini-workout’ feature

There are tons of additional sports modes available in the watch. Some of them fire up on their own, while others you’ll need to select before you start doing the activity. The Mini-workout is a special mode that will get you going if you don’t have a lot of time. This is ideal for those of you who don’t have a lot of time to work out, or are simply lazy to do so. There’s also that panda figure that makes the whole experience more fun. You can do these workouts while you’re on break at work, or waiting for a bus. They’re really simple. This is the best addition Huawei made in years, in my opinion, I was hooked and did these x times a day.

Alright, what about health? The watch is packed with sensors of all kinds. All the basics are here, plus a ton of advanced features. The main new(er) feature that Huawei included are Health Insights, which are getting better and better. The watch can give you a score based on a ton of parameters. You can get a morning brief, and also a physical readiness score, if you want. Heart rate monitoring is here, sleep monitoring, blood oxygen level monitoring, an ECG analysis, and much more. I’ve tried most of those, and from what I can tell, it all works as it did on the Watch GT 6 Pro, or a bit better than that. No complaints here.

Huawei Watch GT 7 Pro Review: Audio

In case you’re wondering if you can make calls via this watch… yes, you can. It has a speaker and a microphone. So, you’re good to go. As I say for every smartwatch, though, you really shouldn’t do that, especially if you’re in anything but a quiet environment. Granted, making calls on this watch is better than on most others. The speaker is as good as it can get in a watch, and the microphone is not too bad, based on the reactions on the other side.

However, if you are in an environment near a busy road, construction, or anything that is making notable noise in the background, things get notably worse. That is to be expected, of course. The speaker is not too loud, and the microphone does pick up plenty of background noise.

Huawei Watch GT 7 Pro Review: Should you buy it?

Is the Huawei Watch GT 7 Pro worth your hard-earned cash? In my opinion, yes, definitely. The consistency that Huawei has with the GT series is outstanding. Those watches usually work as promised. I honestly don’t remember the last time I had a notable issue with either of them, and the same goes for the Huawei Watch GT 7 Pro. Once you set everything up, everything syncs properly, features work as promised, and the watch lasts… and lasts on a single charge. In my opinion, it’s one of the best smartwatches on the market.