Huawei Watch D2 Review: Incredibly important

Verdict

There isn’t a better smartwatch for those wanting to keep an eye on blood pressure than the Huawei Watch D2. This is an impressive looking wearable considering what’s been included, and it excels elsewhere too with accurate tracking.

Introduction

Lots of smartwatches claim to offer the most holistic health and fitness tracking abilities. Whether it comes down to activity tracking, ECG, stress, sleep and recovery, there are lots who can do it all. 

But then there’s the Huawei Watch D2, which offers all of that, and one extra thing that no other smartwatch can do without an additional accessory: ambulatory pressure monitoring.

This addition makes this one of the most important smartwatches on the market for those who need to take regular readings, and here’s why.

Design and Screen

• Nice, readable AMOLED display
• Simple design that looks good
• The strap can be a little uncomfortable after multiple days of wear

There’s a very real chance that if you were to take a glance at the Huawei Watch D2 you’d think “Oh, Apple Watch”. It does have a bit of a resemblance to the popular smartwatch from the iPhone maker. 

It’s square, not round, and has a rotating crown and a secondary, clickable pill-shaped button on the right side.

Click the crown in and it launches the App view, which arranges small round icons in a cluster, which you can zoom in and out of by rotating the crown. All pretty Apple-like.

Still, there’s enough about the design to make it look at least a little different. The longer rectangular shape is quite different, thanks to the shaping and sloping of the metallic frame and bevel around the display. 

This watch is only IP68 rated. That means it can be submerged in shallow water for a short period, but there’s no extra depth rating. So unlike the Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 or Google Pixel 3, you shouldn’t take this swimming. 

Of course, the biggest indicator that it’s a little different to the usual smartwatch is that the strap features an airbag that runs all along the inside of the longer section of the strap. It’s grey and collapses to become slim when not in use, and is barely visible when worn. 

I won’t say it’s unnoticeable, mostly because it’s not at all a breathable material. So what I found was that after a couple of days of wearing it, I’d want to take it off for a little while just to let my skin breathe.

Given what Huawei has needed to pack this in to make the key feature work, it’s pretty sleek. Helped, no doubt, by the fact that the strap fits right into the casing of the watch, and doesn’t have any protruding lugs taking up space.

All of this information is displayed on a rectangular, AMOLED display that’s crisp, colourful and relatively easy to read in most conditions. 

Outdoors during running, I found the data to be clear and easy to understand on the move, plus, the fact I could just scroll up and down through different views during an activity was convenient. 

Blood Pressure Tracking

• Incredibly important features make this a strong purchase
• Accurate readings, with useful information too
• Simple process to activate

Now, that airbag on the strap is the one feature that gives this watch its unique feature set. Look under the watch and you’ll see how one end is sealed to the watch body to ensure an airtight fit. 

Inside the watch body – if you were to take it apart – you’d find a tiny, digital air pump which fills the airbag, increasing pressure on your wrist while the highly-sensitive system of sensors and diodes under the watch reads your heart rate to determine your blood pressure. 

The thing that surprised me most about this little pump is that – unlike the original Huawei Watch D – it’s virtually silent. I couldn’t hear the air being pumped at all, not without holding the watch right up to my ear in a quiet room. The only sensation confirming that it’s working is the increasing feeling of pressure around the forearm. 

Because it’s all about that blood pressure ability, the shortcut key on the right of the watch launches right into the blood pressure feature. You then tap ‘Measure’ on the screen, it gives you a short countdown to raise your arm to chest level, and the watch starts pumping air into the band.

The process takes about a minute to complete, and at the end you have your blood pressure reading, plus indication as to whether that’s low, normal, elevated or showing signs of hypertension. 

Now a one-off reading might tell you how your blood pressure is at that moment, and it can change depending on several different factors. Things like recent exercise, if you’ve eaten, if you’re really stressed at work, if you’re tired or if you’ve consumed alcohol. 

One of the great things about this watch is that you can set up a 24 hour period where it measures your blood pressure every thirty minutes. During the day you’ll get a notification and vibration reminding you to take a reading – hit measure and do your reading as normal. 

It will also measure it at night time as you sleep automatically. You get to set what time it starts doing it automatically based on when you’re usually in bed, and once the 24 hour period is up you get an average reading calculated using those regular readings throughout the day and the night. 

I found it to be pretty consistent during testing, and while it can be scary to get a high reading, it can be an indicator that helps in a couple of ways. If it’s really high, obviously you can go to your doctor and get it checked professionally.

You can also make changes to your diet and lifestyle, which I did when I was getting elevated readings during my first day of testing. Within a week, I’d managed to bring my average down slightly with a change of diet, change of caffeine and alcohol drinking habits and exercise. 

Activity and Sleep Tracking

• Accurate tracking, including while you’re asleep
• Some issues with the way the app deals with data
• The app isn’t the most fully-featured

Given that Huawei loaded this watch with a unique blood pressure feature, you might think it would take a bit of a backfoot on the other health tracking abilities. But actually, Huawei’s gone all-in here too. 

This watch has the upgraded TruSense system with It’s rearranged system of lights and sensors paired with advanced algorithms to ensure accurate readings of all manner of health and fitness metrics. But just as important – is that it can read them all quickly. 

I wore it alongside the Garmin Fenix 8 for almost two weeks. Wearing both during the day, at night for sleep tracking, and during any exercise sessions – whether it be HIIT kettlebell workouts or outdoor walking and running. And for the most part, it matched close to what the Fenix 8 was measuring. 

Distances tracked during runs and walks were pretty much bang on, with the automatic 1km updates hitting within a second or two of each other for the first 2-3km. The two watches weren’t exactly identical distance throughout every single run. Sometimes, by the end of a 30 minute session the Huawei would measure 20 metres or further, or 20m less than the Garmin.

In short – it’s a pretty reliable system despite not having the advanced multi-band GPS of the Garmin. It has to be said though, for all of the runs and walks I did with the Huawei Watch D2, it locked on to the location signal quicker than the Garmin every single time. It was only by a couple of seconds, but it was consistently ready to go before the Fenix 8 was. 

It was a similar story with heart-rate monitoring during workouts. The average heart rate across activities was generally the same as what Garmin measured, within about a beat or two per minute. And, it even coped well with those high-intensity kettlebell sessions. 

Those sessions where the heart rate jumps up from resting to really going for it within just a minute or so, and with the arms moving and bending constantly, used to be a bit of a challenge, but this new Huawei watch does it well.

Sleep tracking is pretty consistent too. But it does show that there’s still work to be done on tracking the different sleep stages. 

It seemed good at detecting when I was lying down ready to sleep, although sometimes it also included the 20-30 minutes that I was reading in bed.

On the whole though – looking at the Garmin data and the Huawei data – I found sleep time was usually within about 10-20 minutes of each other. However, the measurement of deep sleep and REM sleep stages were quite far apart.

With that being said, the actual sleep score which looks at all the data – including breathing regularity – to score the night’s sleep out of 100 was pretty much the same on both watches. 

I’d like a better system for looking at recovery and readiness. Garmin still has the upper hand when it comes to informing you of how much recovery you need before the next run, and personalises and adapts to what it knows of your maximum heart rate. 

What that means is that because my maximum heart rate is quite high during running sessions, Garmin will know that despite spending a lot of time with a heart-rate over 170bpm during a run, I’ll have recovered within a day or two.

Huawei seems to go based on what global average heart-rates are, rather than personalising it, and so always suggests a much longer recovery period, which I don’t need. 

Huawei Health also doesn’t have a recovery or training readiness graphic front and centre on the Home Screen of the app, whereas Garmin makes this a pretty important metric. Whether through the Body Battery, Health or Training Readiness widgets. 

Still, if what you want is a watch that will give you accurate, consistent data on activities, all-day health tracking and sleep, this will certainly do that well. 

Smart Features and Battery Life

• Good battery life – just like other Huawei watches
• Support for both iOS and Android
• No contactless payments

You get basic smartwatch features like notifications from your wrist if you enable them, but because it’s a pretty self-contained operating system you don’t get easy access to contactless payments. 

There’s no support for music services like Spotify, YouTube Music or Amazon Music. You can load offline music tracks directly to the watch, but that’s far from convenient. 

The other annoying thing I found was it doesn’t seem to have a built-in priority feature for software updates. Once during a workout, it just started a software update In doing so, it stopped tracking the workout, and spent the next few minutes updating, before rebooting and forcing me to start tracking manually afterwards. 

It feels like there should be something in the software that automatically blocks any update requests when you’re in the middle of a workout.

Battery life is solid too, with the watch generally lasting about 5-6 days on a full charge during the week when I recorded an activity most days. It’s worth noting, that on one or two of those days, I had the automatic blood pressure system enabled too.

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