Huawei Watch GT review: When hardware and software don’t mesh

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Only a handful of wearable operating systems exist today. Dominating the market are watchOS and Wear OS, unsurprisingly so, as they accompany the two most popular smartphone operating systems. But there are a few challengers out there, like Samsung's Tizen and Fitbit OS, that give users other options.

Variety is good, so I'm always interested in testing out wearables that don't run the most popular OSes. Huawei's latest smartwatch, the Huawei Watch GT, falls into this category, as it runs the company's LiteOS rather than WearOS. While the Chinese company has primarily focused on its smartphone business this year, going the extra mile to put its own OS on this smartwatch shows that it's serious about wearables (at least, for the time being).

So what do the Huawei Watch GT and LiteOS have to offer? Essentially, the device is a simplified smartwatch that has all the hardware bells and whistles you'd expect from a a high-end Wear OS device or an Apple Watch-things like an AMOLED display, a continuous heart-rate monitor, an embedded GPS, and more. But in practice, its feature set and its real-world abilities don't exactly match its relatively high, $230 price tag.

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