I’ve been testing Huawei smartwatches for over a half decade, and all my reviews say similar things: the hardware is the most premium among the smartphone space, battery life is epic, but I’m frustrated by the inability to respond to incoming text messages directly on the watch the way I can with Apple or Samsung’s wearable offerings.
All of that is still true—and taken to another few levels higher—with the Huawei Watch Ultimate Gold Edition, which as the name suggests is a gold smartwatch. It retails for £2,699.99 in the U.K., which is equivalent to roughly $3,400. In China, the watch has a 23,392 yuan retail price, which is around $3,250. Prices throughout the rest of Europe and Asia are between the two.
This makes the Huawei Watch Ultimate Gold Edition the most expensive smartwatch ever, and a price that really pops off the screen and garner double takes if you’re accustomed to just mobile industry prices. However, what I’ve come to learn in recent years is that mobile product prices are relatively low compared to other industries. In the luxury watch space, $3,400 isn’t anything unusual.
That’s clearly what Huawei is aiming at with this Ultimate Gold Edition watch—it’s not meant to be a mobile gadget, but a luxury timepiece. Will consumers accept a Huawei product as a luxury item? I can’t speak for Europe, but in China, Malaysia, and to some extent Hong Kong, the answer is yes.
Despite the name, the watch isn’t entirely gold. The main frame is crafted out of nano-crystalline ceramic, and the strap is made of titanium. The 18k gold components can be found wrapping around the bezel and coating the rotatable crown.
Huawei says the gold plates are inserted using diamond cut process, and I must say here that I am not familiar with luxury watches, so I have no idea if this construction is beyond the norm. I can say the bezel feels smooth and seamless, without edges between where the gold plates meet the ceramic frame.
The watch is a bit hefty, weighing 78g and measuring 49.4 mm × 49.4 mm × 13 mm, the butterfly buckles in the strap means adjusting the strap for different sizes requires removing or adding buckles. Huawei includes three extra buckles, so it should be able to fit most adult wrists (Huawei’s website says the watch fits wrist sizes between 140 and 210 mm).
The watch has a gorgeous 1.5-inch LTPO OLEd screen with a refresh rate that varies between 1-60Hz. The ability to drop lower in refresh rate helps battery efficiency, and indeed this watch can last 14 days on a single charge, which is impressive because Apple, Samsung and Google’s smartwatches can last between one to three days at most.
The back of the watch features Huawei’s TrueSeen sensor which can detect heart rate and heart rhythm, as well as check Spo2 level and conduct EKG (electrocardiogram).
In China, the watch also supports satellite calls via two-way Beidou connection, but this feature is obviously not available to users outside the mainland. Huawei did not specify the silicon powering the watch, but the UI behaved smoothly.
The UI has a gold colored theme, of which I am not the biggest fan. I like my UI colorful. The software is mostly good, with the ability to track walks automatically and dozens and dozens of exercise modes.
The watch’s software can also take voice calls, with a really loud and full set of speakers. Exercising and sleep tracking seemed accurate from casual testing—meaning I didn’t have professional tools against which to compare, but I used an Apple Watch Ultra 2 and Google Pixel Watch 2 for benchmarking.
The gold watch can also go 300 feet (100 meter) under water, meaning Huawei designed this watch to be a dive watch, too. To that end, the software also has a dive computer built-in that can detect crucial metrics. I am not a diver, so I was not able to put this feature to the test.
Huawei’s watch face selection has improved, with some really useful ones available, including one with six customizable complications. However, as I said earlier, I still cannot respond to incoming text messages dynamically. The best I can do is send back canned responses. This isn’t a major deal to some people, but for me, I really enjoy being able to quickly respond to WhatsApp or WeChat messages directly on the wrist.
Ultimately, this gold Huawei watch caters to a specific group of people, one in which I do not belong (the most expensive piece of on-body item I wear is a $220 pair of Nike sneakers).
While this watch is priced high enough I don’t think it will move millions of units, there are definitely collectors and Huawei fans who would be interested in this watch. Huawei watches have always felt more premium than the rest— this one is extravagantly so.
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