Huawei Band 2 Pro Smart Fitness Wristband

I have a Garmin Vivioactive HR sports watch and my girlfriend has a Huawei Band 2 Pro. These 2 watches have some similar specs (and some much different). I borrowed hers for a couple of days (wearing both on one wrist) to try compare them. I connected both to my Samsung S6 smartphone. Garmin vívoactive HR GPS Smart Watch, Regular fit – Black

My girlfriend pairs the Huawei Band with her Motorola Android phone and it also works great for her. My Garmin watch is wider and looks kind of clunky on her, but the Huawei watch is slimmer and looks great on her smaller wrists.

First, some specs. Both watches have GPS, wrist-based heart rate monitors, step counters, and sleep trackers. Both use Bluetooth to show you notifications (text messages, incoming caller ID, priority emails, etc) on the watch screen so you don’t have to pull out your phone every time it beeps. The Garmin claims to have 1 week of battery life while the Huawei claims 3 weeks; compare that to 1 day for an Apple watch. The Huawei watch is $70, while the Garmin is 3 times that amount. Frankly, I was shocked that the Huawei watch could claim to have so many features for such a cheap price.

After wearing both watches at the same time for 2 days, I can see why the Huawei watch is so much cheaper. The Huawei’s claim of 3 week battery life is kind of a hoax. The fine print on their website says that assumes only 60 minutes of exercise per week. Most doctors recommend a minimum of 30 minutes of exercise per day, so if you keep up that schedule, battery life will be close to Garmin’s 1 week claim (still much better than an Apple watch). Also, the Huawei screen is black and unreadable most of the time until you shake your wrist to turn it on. Garmin’s screen is dim but readable most of the time and you can brighten it by pushing a button on the watch.

Huawei claims 3.5 hours of battery life when the GPS is activated, but I’m getting more like 2.5 hours and then the watch needs to be recharged. Since I regularly exercise for longer than that (hiking, bicycling), the GPS feature is not very useful to me. In contrast, Garmin claims 13 hours of GPS battery life and I have done 5 hour workouts on successive days without having to recharge the watch in between.

In addition to the GPS, the Garmin has a barometric altimeter which gives you pretty accurate elevation charts of your route, which is very valuable for bicycle training or hiking, especially when paired with GPS tracks. Huawei does not have an altimeter, but the GPS battery life isn’t long enough to really take advantage of that anyway.

If I do not turn on the Huawei GPS, it claims to use the GPS signal from a smartphone that is paired via Bluetooth. I went for a 3 hour walk one day to see how the Huawei and Garmin measured it. Surprisingly, the numbers were very close. Huawei said 15,262 steps for 6.81 miles. Garmin said 14,445 steps for 6.86 miles. Huawei says I burned 396 kcal, while Garmin says 3276 calories. Both calorie numbers are not believable or useful to me, unfortunately.

Since Garmin can run its GPS for the whole length of my walk, I can record a detailed map of my route (in case I want to follow it again later or share it with friends). I cannot find a way to do that with the Huawei GPS, and the battery would die if I tried anyway. I could use Strava on my phone, but Garmin does not require me to carry my phone for the GPS to work.

Both watches upload your activity data to your phone so you can review it on a larger screen. The data is saved so you can see your improvements over time or compare past workouts.

Both watches show notifications from my phone on the watch screen. Garmin’s implementation of this feature is tremendously more useful since the screen is larger and it can show multiple lines of text on the screen. Huawei scrolls through the notification in a single line that scrolls along the watch face, several characters at a time. This is really hard to read, as you might guess, even for simple things like a caller ID.

In summary, Garmin is a much more capable sports watch, but it also costs 3 times as much. Garmin also has watches with even more intensive sports data reports (for higher prices). For casual users who are interested more in activity tracking than detailed sports logs, Huawei offers a lot of functionality for the price. I would have given Huawei 5 stars for value if the GPS battery life was better, though. Build quality seems very good and I have not noticed any software flaws. Even the Bluetooth syncing on the Huawei has been flawless (in my 2 days of testing).