Huawei Watch D Review: Smartwatch

The Huawei Watch D is a smartwatch quite unlike any other, built around a genuine inflatable-cuff blood-pressure monitor. This review is based on that published test, not on a hands-on trial of our own.

The look is, to put it mildly, specific: imagine a shrunken wrist blood-pressure monitor with an AMOLED touchscreen bolted on. It is a big device, larger even than an Apple Watch Ultra — 90 g including the airbag strap, 13.6 mm thick (before the TrueSeen 5.0+ sensor island), a 1.64-inch Always-On AMOLED panel, and 51 mm long by 38 mm wide. It is hard to forget once on the wrist, and the design is a long way from attractive, yet that unusual shape is what makes the inflatable strap work: the case houses a set of micro-pumps to inflate the cuff. The strap cannot be swapped for something more elegant — only the butterfly-buckle half can be changed, the other being bonded to the case. Two buttons sit on the right of the aluminium body: the upper one opens the app list, the lower one carries the ECG electrodes, is customisable and opens the Blood Pressure app by default. The screen shows the compromises: the 1.64-inch AMOLED is pleasant enough but is ringed by large, inelegant bezels, far from the refinement of the Huawei Watch 3, and the old-school design will give more than one buyer pause.

Huawei continues with HarmonyOS, little changed from recent models, the headline addition being a dedicated Blood Pressure app. Once the watch is set up and the correct strap fitted, a reading can be taken at any time; a screen reminds you how each time — seated, feet flat and uncrossed, arm at heart level — and the watch warns you if you are badly positioned or moving too much. Results sync to the Huawei Health app (where some translations are missing) and appear as a graph across the day, week or month, each measurement viewable individually, with the option to note whether you had exercised or just woken, and to set fixed reminder times. The essentials are there, but once the results are in, more detail would have been welcome — Huawei Health only uses a coloured bar to say whether you are within range, and the published test, from the perspective of a hypertensive user, wished for more guidance on managing blood pressure, such as walking or watching one's diet, short of a medical diagnosis.

Given the relatively high price, strong sport tracking was expected, but the Watch D quickly disappoints on that front. The good news first: Huawei again offers the broad set of metrics amateur athletes want, from VO2Max, recovery time and aerobic and anaerobic training load to SpO2, stress level and skin temperature. There are 70 sport profiles, though no multisport or triathlon — for those you would look to the GT Runner — and, since the cuff strap is not waterproof and the watch carries only an IP68 rating, there is no swimming profile and no prolonged water use. There are no AI-guided programmes and no turn-by-turn navigation either, which frustrates, even if a "guided runs" mode remains for beginners. On accuracy, the heart-rate sensor does not disappoint: it reuses the TrueSeen 5.0+ module from the Watch GT 3 Pro and, compared against a Polar H7 chest strap, tracked cardio more than satisfactorily, even through the rapid swings of HIIT. The integrated GPS is another matter, the single-band chip struggling to reflect routes taken: the trace is poor in urban settings, with big accuracy gaps, distances that come up short and an occasionally wild pace — the cuff integration has probably imposed some technical limitations.

On the cuff itself, used here during hypertension treatment, the app lacks coaching, and accuracy leaves a little to be desired: Huawei claims plus or minus 3 mm Hg, but the test unit tended to over-estimate, the systolic figure generally 10 mm Hg higher than a reference arm monitor, while the diastolic reading was better handled and fell within the stated range. As Huawei itself notes, the watch's measurements are for reference only, so the Watch D will not replace a proper, more precise if bulkier, monitor.

Frustrating on sport, the Watch D does not redeem itself on everyday use: a Huawei phone running HarmonyOS is needed to unlock its full potential, without which the Celia voice assistant and third-party AppGallery downloads are off the table, leaving an iPhone user rather stranded. The basics are covered — weather, notifications, alarms and timers, remote camera control — but there is no speaker for wrist calls as on the Watch 3, and no pairing of Bluetooth earphones. Battery life, usually a Huawei strength at nearly two weeks, is the ugly duckling here at a claimed one week; that is not bad in itself, and better than an Apple Watch Ultra or a Wear OS Pixel Watch, but it leaves a faint sense of disappointment for a Huawei, and the roughly 1 hour 45 wireless charge is nothing special at this price. In all, the Watch D is a genuine UFO: by targeting a niche, Huawei takes a big risk, and its cuff-based blood-pressure system could make it a pioneer or, like many products ahead of their time, a flop. The technical feat deserves applause, but between the design and feature concessions made to fit the cuff, the less-than-precise measurements and the thin guidance on managing hypertension, it is hard to recommend — big, unglamorous and less well-equipped than same-price rivals. Unless you specifically want an atypical blood-pressure monitor on your wrist, a Galaxy Watch 5, which also measures blood pressure, is the safer choice.