Talk to the hands

With Android Wear 2.0 and a 4G option, this is the listening smartwatch that thinks it’s a smartphone

from £280 / stuff.tv/huaweiwatch2 Is there a good reason to own a smartwatch? That relatively few people have bought one suggests many of us still struggle with that head-scratcher. Exercise tracking and wrist notifications are the main excuses to buy – but just having something cool-looking to wear is another. It’s strange, then, that the Huawei Watch 2 actually looks worse than the first Huawei watch.

It’s also pricier. The Huawei Watch 2 starts at £280 – the 4G version costs £325 and the fancier (but non-4g) Watch 2 Classic is £340. And while the Watch 2 does have GPS, NFC and heart monitoring to elevate it into the top bracket of smartwatches, they don’t work especially well. GPS reliability is the stinger, with tracking fidelity much worse than that of a good phone.

If you don’t mind your watch looking like a bit of a lump on your wrist, though, this is still probably the most advanced Android Wear watch yet – thanks to the new Wear 2.0 software and the option of 4G. 1 Tick-tock tacky? The Huawei Watch 2 has the look of a watch from a street market, or the clearance section of TK Maxx. It’s only visual, though. This isn’t some flimsy wrist waif: the shiny bezel up top is real smoky-looking ceramic and the casing is incredibly tough thermoplastic polyurethane. 2 The face fits The screen is perhaps a little smaller than you might expect given the overall size of the watch, but it’s still one of the best around. It’s a fully round screen with no weird cutouts like the Moto 360 2, and it uses an AMOLED panel of 390x390 pixel resolution, which is sharper than an Apple Watch.