Huawei Watch 2 runs Android Wear 2.0, offers LTE connectivity

Before you detail them, we let you discover the Huawei Watch 2 in pictures.

Crucially for a wearable, and for a first impressions hands-on, it’s sufficiently attractive.

A year and a half later, the priorities have changed. At just €329 (roughly $350), the Watch 2 is reasonably priced for what it offers. These watches come with microphone and speakers, and the battery capacity offered in the Huawei Watch 2 is 420 mAh, which the company claims to offer about two days of usage. Huawei will only sell the Watch 2 Classic in the USA, but hasn’t revealed the price at the time of writing.

When Huawei launched its original Watch in the United Kingdom it was in association with GQ, the men’s lifestyle brand. Huawei’s watch, even with cellular connectivity, still has an uncertain fate in today’s market. Check out the specifications and features list below for both watches. It also sports a 1.2-inch AMOLED display with 390 x 390 pixels featuring Corning Gorilla Glass coating.

After what felt like an eternity of waiting, Huawei finally unveiled the successor to its first smartwatch, the 2015 Huawei Watch, this week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The new OS also comes with AI-powered Google Assistant baked into the software. Huawei admits that bringing the watch’s weight down was a driving force in the design process. The Watch 2 Classic has stainless steel and black leather hybrid straps.

Thoughts about Huawei’s new smartwatch?

So these aren’t necessarily pretty watches, but they pack the latest internals, and a ton of functionality along with it. It also comes with several fitness apps, and can monitor the user’s heart rate through its optical heart rate sensor.

The two run on the same Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 2100 chip with 768MB RAM and 420mAh battery. To develop the ideal visionary watch, we will need some ingredients.

However, LTE is available only on the Huawei Watch 2, which is made of plastic in order to accommodate its LTE antenna, making it look bulkier than the Classic. The standard model, as you would expect, is geared more towards a workout, whereas the Classic apes traditional watch designs. Quick start running modes “fat-burning run” and “cardio run” allow runners to start quickly and the watch will guide your speed to stay in the correct heart rate zone.

Huawei emphasized the fitness aspects of the device with apps on the smartwatch to help guide your exercise and training sessions. It can also access users’ VO2 Max, which is a metric used by athletes for measuring the maximum amount of oxygen that can be used during workouts.

If you’re not big into fitness, you can reprogram this button a number of other purposes within Android Wear 2.0.

Ignoring its lack of rotating bezel/crown, the Watch 2 is attractive to look at. However, the Huawei representative I spoke to actually recommended not taking the watch swimming.

But as you can see in the image above, the Classic looks noticeably classier than the sport models on either side of it. This is where you’ll see one of the few differences between the two: LTE connectivity. With my hands on experience of the Sport, I felt the watch was responsive and worked extremely quickly. As analysts argue that things are in the market, none of the smartwatches available indicates how an Android Wear should really be.