Huawei’s Watch Ultra is a long-lasting rugged smartwatch that looks the part
Huawei may be persona non grata in the US, but the company is still pushing out products for the rest of the world. The latest is the Watch Ultimate, a super-premium wearable for extreme sports who want a statement piece on their wrist. In the style of a Submariner or Seamaster, the Ultimate has a rotating crown at the top right and two pushers, one at the top left, the other at the bottom right. Available in blue and black, the cases are clad in an “innovative zirconium-based liquid metal material,” which sounds a lot like the LiquidMetal-branded alloy found in a number of modern Omega watches.
You’ll get a different band choice depending on which watch you choose, with the more premium blue option getting a titanium alloy band. Choose black, and you’ll get both a standard-length HNBR (rubber) strap and a long-length one to wear while scuba diving. It is for this purpose that Huawei really pushes the Watch Ultimate, saying that it will last up to 24 hours at depths of 110 meters. Huawei has added a number of extra software features for technical divers, but it’s not clear how many deep diving pros will trade in their mechanical watch for a digital alternative.
Inside the case is a 1.5-inch LTPO AMOLED display with a 466 x 466 resolution and a maximum brightness of 1,000 nits under a 2.3 mm sapphire crystal. It uses Harmony OS, with the same kind of features found in the existing Watch GT line of wearables, with the only major changes being a China-exclusive golf mode and the aforementioned dive-specific features.
Another much-hyped feature is battery life, with Huawei promising you’ll get 14 days of battery life if you don’t use it too much. More realistically, you should expect to get closer to eight days out of it with what I would consider more normal use. The company didn’t disclose how long you’d last if you did, say, a long run with GPS turned on, but we’d expect that 530mAh cell to last long enough for most people to complete, say, a marathon.
As well as integrations with Strava and Runtastic, there’s the usual range of fitness tracking features from Huawei. This includes its TruSeen 5.0 heart rate monitoring, TruSleep 3.0 sleep monitoring plus a built-in ECG and continuous SpO2 monitoring. There’s also a new expedition mode that harnesses dual-band GPS to ensure you know where you are, no matter how far you stray from the road. Huawei says that you will get the battery from flat to full in 60 minutes and you will get a 25 percent charge in just 10 minutes.
As for pricing, Huawei won’t announce it until April 2, the day before it becomes available in the UK and Europe. However, we do know that there will be no LTE enabled model and no emergency call options, it will be strictly Bluetooth only. Of course, with any modern day Huawei purchase the usual caveats apply.
