After a week on our wrists through hill runs and quiet rest days, here is our honest verdict.
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A box landed on our desk with the new Huawei Watch Fit 5 inside, and our first thought was that the courier had forgotten to put the watch in. It is that light.
We have tested enough wearables to expect a certain heft when we pick one up, and this one weighs roughly 27 grams without the strap. You feel the absence more than the presence.
We strapped it on, headed out for an easy shakeout run along the Avenida Marítima, and promptly forgot it was there. That, it turns out, became the theme of the whole week.
Let us get the obvious comparison out of the way, because every person who saw it on our wrist said the same thing. Yes, the rectangular face looks a little like an Apple Watch. No, we do not think that is a problem, and after a few days the resemblance stopped registering.
The 1.82-inch AMOLED display is genuinely lovely, sharp at 480 by 408 pixels, and it peaks at around 2,500 nits.
We run early, but we also run at midday under the sun that bleaches everything, and we never once had to cup a hand over the screen to read our pace. Small text stays legible at arm's length, which matters more than the spec sheet makes it sound.
The body is aluminium, mostly recycled, and it feels cool and properly made rather than plasticky. Ours came on the standard strap, which stayed comfortable through sweaty intervals and a couple of long coffee-shop sits afterwards.
One small gripe worth flagging early: the straps attach with a proprietary mechanism, so you cannot just swap in any 20mm band you already own. If you like changing straps to match your mood, factor that in.
Here is the thing that surprised us most. We did not charge it for five days.
We are so conditioned to the nightly ritual of docking a watch that going almost a week without thinking about it felt slightly unreal.
Huawei claims up to 10 days on light use and around 7 on typical use, and with continuous heart rate on, sleep tracking every night, and roughly five GPS runs across the week, we landed comfortably in the seven-day zone.
Turn on the always-on display and that number drops sharply, closer to four days, so we left it off and tapped to wake. For anyone who has lived with the every-other-day charging cycle of most smartwatches, this alone changes the relationship you have with the device.
The charger, we will note, is a wireless puck that ends in an irritating USB-A plug, which feels dated in 2026, but you will reach for it so rarely it barely matters.
This is the part that counts. We took it out for everything from a flat seaside 5K to a grindy climb up into the hills behind the city, and the built-in GPS held its line well on open roads.
The distance and pace tracked closely against our usual reference, and the heart rate readings during steady efforts sat right where we expected them to.
Where any wrist-based sensor wobbles is in sharp interval work, when your arm is pumping and the optical reading has to fight through movement, and the Fit 5 is no exception.
For most runners doing most of their training, though, it is more than accurate enough.
There are over 100 workout modes, which is more than anyone needs but reassuring to have.
The feature we did not expect to enjoy was Mini Workouts, a set of short guided stretches and mobility routines led by a slightly absurd panda avatar. We cringed, then we did them, then we kept doing them at the desk between editing sessions.
Sometimes the silly thing is the useful thing.
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The Fit 5 uses Huawei's TruSense sensor system, and the day-to-day health picture is solid. You get continuous heart rate, SpO2, skin temperature, stress, an emotional wellbeing log, and surprisingly thorough sleep analysis with overnight breathing awareness.
The sleep tracking felt believable rather than flattering, which we have learned to value. It also did a good job of recognising when we were awake but still lying in bed, a detail cheaper trackers usually get wrong.
A word of honesty on what it does not do. This is the standard Fit 5, not the Pro, so there is no ECG and no arterial stiffness check. If those medical-grade features matter to you, that is the reason to look at the pricier model. For general fitness and wellbeing, we never felt we were missing anything.
No review is worth reading if it only lists the good parts, so here are the friction points.
Getting set up takes an extra step because the Huawei Health app is not on the Google Play Store, so you download it from Huawei's own app gallery or website. It works fine once installed, on both Android and iPhone, but it is a hurdle.
Third-party app support is also thinner than what you get on Wear OS or watchOS, though the essentials like Strava and Komoot are covered.
NFC payments are handled through the Curve app rather than natively, which works across Spain and the wider EU but adds another account to set up.
At around 199 euros, the Watch Fit 5 is doing something clever. It gives you a premium-feeling, featherlight watch with a beautiful screen, a genuinely week-long battery, and fitness tracking that holds up on real runs, all for roughly half what a mainstream flagship costs.
Huawei Watch Fit 5
Featherlight smartwatch: sleep evaluation, Mini Workouts, fall detection, 10-day battery, NFC payments, iOS/Android.
Buy on Huawei.com
It is not trying to be a do-everything smartwatch, and the app ecosystem reminds you of that. But as a daily companion for someone who runs, sleeps, works, and would rather not think about charging, it nailed almost everything we asked of it.
After seven days we have no urge to take it off. For a review unit, that is the highest compliment we can give.
Disclosure: Huawei sent us the Watch Fit 5 to test.
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