One of Android’s best Apple Watch alternatives

HUAWEI keeps squaring up against Cupertino, and the HUAWEI Watch Fit 5 Pro is the company’s latest attempt at building an Apple Watch alternative for people who want a fitness-focused wearable without getting locked into Apple’s ecosystem. HUAWEI once again sticks with a square design, premium materials, and an even larger edge-to-edge display.

Between increasingly capable budget trackers and flagship smartwatches creeping steadily higher in price, there’s a growing space for a device that prioritizes strong fitness tracking features, reliable health tracking, fantastic battery life, and approachable pricing. The Watch Fit 5 Pro lands directly in that category, and after a week of testing, it’s easy to recommend.

Last year, I gave HUAWEI’s Fit 4 Pro 4 stars, and the foundation of my high rating was how well the watch wore on my wrist. I love that it delivered a rounded-square Apple-inspired option to Android users and was comfortable, lightweight, and durable. At a glance, you could easily mistake it for an Apple Watch. In other words, the company already pushed the Fit lineup upscale with the previous generation. The Watch Fit 5 Pro sticks with all of the same design language but upgrades the experience with a larger 1.92-inch AMOLED panel surrounded by noticeably slimmer bezels.

The screen still gets absurdly bright (up to 3,000 nits of peak brightness), so I never struggled to see the display outdoors, even during midday walks and runs in direct sunlight. HUAWEI also upgraded the display with adaptive refresh rates this time around, helping navigation and animations feel smoother without sacrificing battery life. The responsive modern UI, paired with the elevated build (and functioning rotating crown), makes the watch feel more premium than its price might suggest.

As for colorways, the Watch Fit 5 Pro feels noticeably cleaner and more polished than its predecessor. The white model is easily the standout of the lineup, with a ceramic coating finish that gives it a softer, almost porcelain-like look. The orange option I tested adds a little more personality. I don’t always embrace traffic cone aesthetics, but when I do, I appreciate devices that do it with a little restraint. The thin orange accent around the bezel feels noticeably sleeker than the bolder fully colored bezels on last year’s model, and with the coordinated band, it keeps a more refined overall look even if it’s quite bright. The final option is a black model that’s typical but classic.

Of course, a watch built for all-day and overnight wear only works if the battery can keep up. Thankfully, while devices like the Pixel Watch and Apple Watch have just started to push beyond single-day battery life, the Watch Fit 5 Pro comfortably stretches across multiple days. HUAWEI rates the watch for up to 10 days with light use and roughly seven days under more typical conditions. With Always-On enabled, notifications, continuous heart rate monitoring, sleep tracking, SpO2 monitoring, and regular GPS workouts (aka fairly heavy use), I landed closer to 5 days.

HUAWEI also rates the watch for up to 25 hours of trail running use, reinforcing the device’s fitness-first positioning, but those estimates likely assume AOD is disabled. Still, even during longer GPS-heavy workouts, battery drain was very impressive throughout my testing. A one-hour workout only drained 4% of the battery life. A short night of sleep costs around 5% (just like last year’s model).

The adaptive refresh rate system likely helps here. The display can scale between 1Hz and 60Hz depending on what’s happening onscreen, helping preserve battery life without making the UI feel sluggish. Compared to an Apple Watch, a watch that comfortably lasts close to a week feels downright luxurious. In the Wear OS space, it aligns closest to something like a OnePlus Watch.

My only remaining complaint is the USB charger, which left me digging through my electronics bin for an adapter.

As the sporty UI and gym-friendly aesthetic might imply, the Watch Fit 5 Pro is built to be a workout companion. Fitness was already a strength for the Fit 4 Pro, and the Watch Fit 5 Pro follows suit with an almost overwhelming number of workout modes. The Fit 4 Pro was already feature-packed for outdoor workouts, and the new model continues offering niche tools like Trail Run mode, virtual power metrics for cyclists, and golf features including course maps and swing analysis.

This year, the company introduced a new Mini-Workout mode designed around quick guided exercises that can be completed in short bursts throughout the day. The feature includes 30 short guided movements that don’t require equipment or much space, making it easier to squeeze in a little activity between meetings, errands, or bouts of Netflix binge-induced bedrotting.

It’s a smaller addition overall, but it fits nicely with HUAWEI’s broader approach to fitness. Instead of just positioning the Watch Fit 5 Pro strictly as a hardcore training watch, HUAWEI built a wearable that encourages users to try and stay active more consistently. I’m still not entirely convinced adults need workout motivation from a cartoon panda, but it’s a fun addition, and honestly, I like his vibe.

   For more dedicated workouts, GPS also performed very reliably throughout my testing. I was consistently impressed with how well route maps aligned with notably trustworthy GPS devices, including the Apple Watch Series 11 shown in the map above. Data for details like pace and distance were also comparable.

I was even more excited about the device’s heart rate tracking, which I was finally able to export for the first time off any HUAWEI device I’ve reviewed. As shown in the graph above, the watch offers highly reliable data, nearly matching my dedicated heart strap perfectly.

HUAWEI doesn’t always get the same attention as others, but feature-for-feature, the Watch Fit 5 Pro is fairly loaded on the health front too. The watch supports continuous heart rate tracking, SpO2 monitoring, stress tracking, mental health tools, skin temperature and women’s health tools with cycle predictions based partly on wrist temperature trends.

The device features sleep tracking that I found solid overall, with HUAWEI clearly taking some of last year’s complaints to heart. The watch even adds nap tracking, which I used as an excuse to take a few. Platforms like Fitbit still deliver more polished sleep insights and slightly better overnight stage analysis in my experience, but I was happy to see improvement here. In general, HUAWEI keeps most of its data relatively/straightforward, surfacing the information I care about without making the app feel overly clinical.

With that said, the Watch Fit 5 Pro’s biggest weakness is still HUAWEI’s broader ecosystem. HUAWEI Health itself is fairly polished at this point, but the smartwatch experience feels limited compared to that of Apple, Samsung, or Google. Third-party app support remains relatively small, integrations are weaker, and there are still moments where the watch reminds you it exists slightly outside the mainstream wearable world. Contactless payments are also limited regionally, and there’s still no LTE model.

If you’re primarily after a fitness watch with smartwatch extras and great battery life, this is a home run. If you expect a fully mature smartwatch ecosystem with robust apps, seamless payments, deep Google integrations, and extensive smart features, well, then HUAWEI still trails.

The HUAWEI Watch Fit 5 Pro probably won’t change anyone’s mind about HUAWEI wearables overnight, and existing HUAWEI users may not see this as a dramatic leap over the previous generation. The Watch Fit 5 Pro refines what already worked last year with slimmer bezels, an updated display, and a few improvements to the brand’s toolkit. More importantly, HUAWEI focuses on the things many smartwatches still struggle to balance: battery life, fitness tracking, and approachable health features. The Watch Fit 5 Pro is a genuinely pleasant device to use and a capable gym companion.

But if your priorities lean more toward fitness tracking, long battery life, strong health monitoring, and attractive hardware at a more reasonable price, the Watch Fit 5 Pro becomes much easier to recommend.