Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro Review: Big Screen, Long Battery

Huawei's release schedule is a well-oiled machine, with new smartwatches arriving at fixed points each year across a range of positions in the market. The Watch Fit line, which grew out of simple activity trackers, has gained features over the years to the point where the models now sit squarely among genuine smartwatches with openly sporting ambitions.

The Watch Fit 5 Pro inherits options previously reserved for the more premium Watch GT models, and keeps the design used in 2025 for the Watch Fit 4 Pro. On the menu are heart-rate tracking, blood-oxygen and skin-temperature measurement and, of course, handling for a wide range of sporting activities, alongside a satellite positioning chip billed as more accurate than ever.

This review covers construction, software and measured tracking accuracy. The sensors named below are described as hardware and on-screen readouts only; the page makes no claim about health, medical outcomes, joints, injury or weight.

The Watch Fit 5 Pro keeps the lines of its predecessor, whose inspiration appeared to come fairly directly from a certain fruit-shaped logo. This edition does bring a few new flourishes. Huawei has adopted orange as a signature colour and, whichever finish is chosen, rings the screen with a bezel accent matched to the strap.

That strap is 2.2 cm wide and is not a standard fitting, relying on a proprietary attachment, though replacements in nylon in other colours are easy enough to find online for anyone wanting something more discreet.

Unlike some models supplied with two straps, the Watch Fit 5 Pro comes with only one. Its nylon strap has the advantage of suiting small wrists — it adapts to more or less any diameter, even the slimmest — but it is less supple than that of a dedicated sports watch, and it is slow to dry once wet.

Beyond that, the finish of the case is genuinely good. Made from an aluminium and titanium alloy, it houses a 1.92-inch screen running at 408 x 480 pixels. The sapphire crystal, generally the preserve of more expensive watches, is present here, and the glass has a slightly domed finish that is pleasant in use. The case weighs a restrained 30.4 g and stays relatively slim at 9.5 mm, despite its substantial 44.5 x 40.8 mm footprint.

The watch carries a 50 m (5 ATM) water-resistance rating and IP6x certification, with Huawei stating resistance to free diving to 40 m. Screen brightness reaches 3000 cd/m², high for a watch at this level of the market, which makes it comfortable to read in full sunlight; an ambient light sensor accompanies it.

The experience delivered by this watch under Harmony OS 6 is remarkably close to that of a Watch GT Runner 2, except that its default watch face is a little less sports-focused. It does not force a weekly running mileage into view, which is welcome.

Otherwise, it is much the same. Navigation is based on a clickable, rotating crown that opens the list of apps available on the device and then scrolls through it. Away from the home panel, pressing the crown steps back.

A second, oblong button sits just below it and acts as a shortcut to sporting activities. These are numerous — Huawei states support for more than 100 workout types — and some, such as running and weight training, gain additional parameters like interval definition.

The watch's distinguishing feature is a set of mini-sessions represented by a small panda. They can be selected manually from the sports section, or picked from the watch's own suggestions. There are 30 different movements, each to be carried out in 30 seconds or a little longer depending on the session. The concept is likeable, even if it is sometimes awkward to start one at the exact moment the watch chooses. It rests on a gamification principle that hands out badges and rewards for following its prompts.

Like other Huawei watches, the Watch Fit 5 Pro offers a limited number of applications. The everyday tools are there — alarms, music player, weather and so on. The watch can receive messages and reply to them using predefined responses or a very small keyboard, but it does not display any photographs received. Moving between apps is quick and straightforward.

The watch works alongside the Huawei Health mobile app. There is a main panel giving an overview of the readings taken by the watch, a panel dedicated to activities, and another for customising the watch, including the services it synchronises with. In the absence of a dedicated app, activities can be exported automatically to Strava.

The Watch Fit 5 Pro positions itself as both a sports watch and a lifestyle model. It carries sensors for heart rate, blood oxygen saturation, heart-rate variability, electrocardiogram readings at the wrist and skin temperature, which operates overnight, alongside sleep recording. A cycle-tracking readout also draws on the temperature sensor. Detection of the moment of waking is very quick.

The watch also introduces an option borrowed from specialist models and absent from the Watch Fit 4 Pro: fall detection.

On accuracy, the watch was run over several running sessions with its heart-rate sensor compared against a chest strap used as the reference. In steady endurance sessions with only small variations in intensity — a few stops at traffic lights, for instance — the Watch Fit 5 Pro followed the curve recorded by a Polar H10 to within 1 bpm. In every session, however, it tended to display a high figure at the very start, taking a few minutes to settle its reading.

The picture is the same during interval work, where the curves are tracked well. There is only a slight offset against the H10, even with frequent changes of pace — here, 30-second blocks followed by 30 seconds of recovery. Nothing that prevents the reading being followed correctly through the session.

On navigation, the Watch Fit 5 Pro is fitted with dual-band GPS. It deserves credit for a lock time reduced to a few seconds, even in a dense urban environment. It measures distance covered with fairly high accuracy, with a slight tendency to underestimate, and is on the mark during training in open countryside. In town it occasionally loses its grip between buildings, producing zigzag traces that lack precision. Run alongside a Garmin Venu X1, the two agreed closely outside dense areas, with accuracy falling away in the city.

Huawei quotes around 7 days of endurance in normal use and 10 days in moderate use, with real-world figures inevitably depending on how the watch is used. In practice, 7.5 days was recorded with roughly 2 hours of running plus some additional indoor activity. On charging, allow around 52 minutes using the magnetic cradle with a USB-A connector supplied with the watch.

The Watch Fit 5 Pro faces Wear OS watches that have the upper hand on applications. Whether the Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 or the Google Pixel Watch 4, the Play Store bears no comparison with Huawei's App Gallery. In return, the Huawei watch is far more enduring between charges, which is no small advantage.