The Huawei Watch GT impressed us quite a bit thanks to its stylish design, decent battery life as well as fitness tracking features. Now with the GT 2, launched yesterday at an event in Johannesburg, it seems like Huawei is building on the original’s legacy.

Immediately noticeable is the impressive screen - a 1.39” AMOLED HD precision touchscreen with a display resolution of 454 x 454 pixels, offering an impressive 462 pixels per inch. It’s certainly eye catching and so is the design of the watch that stands at 9.4 mm thick.  

Perhaps the most important improvement is Huawei’s claim of two weeks battery life on the GT 2, at least on the 46mm version. That is quite significant and puts competition from Apple, Samsung and Fitbit in the dust. Your battery life decreases as soon as you start using the GPS to track your runs, but Huawei claims 90 mins of GPS usage will still get you to two weeks.

At the launch we put the watch through its paces, with heart rate monitoring, calories burnt and, of course, distance and heart rate all working as well as expected. We’ve not managed to really take it running to track the onboard GPS, but that will come with our full review.

A quirky addition to the watch is the onboard speaker, which allows you to take calls Dick Tracey-like on your watch. It will also play your tunes and rather loudly announce your exercise status to the rest of the gym. Bluetooth connectivity is certainly preferable, which the GT 2 also provides.

Onboard is a new Kirin A1 processor to speed things up (and help with battery life), while the watch can also take care of sleep tracking through TruSleep, a feature that worked well on the previous version and that the Huawei Health app does a great job of displaying.  

Huawei has once again gone for their own operating system, Lite OS and not Google Wear. While we’re sure that this has something to do with Huawei’s ability to push the battery life, it also limits you to what can apps be used on the watch. We critiqued the previous version for this, especially for not being able to link to services such as Strava.

As for price, the the Huawei Watch GT 2 retails for R5k, which up until 17 October 2019 will also bag you the Hauwei’s impressive FreeLace Bluetooth earphones.