Honor plans to unveil its first smartwatch on Wednesday October 31, 2018. Ahead of the launch, high-resolution images of the upcoming wearable have surfaced inside the official Huawei Health smartphone app.
Huawei seems to have prematurely added the ability to pair an Honor Watch with the Health app. Unfortunately, the pairing screen includes some mouth-watering new images of the as-yet unannounced smartwatch, which reveals the Honor Watch will follow very closely in the footsteps of the Huawei Watch GT, with the same circular display, inbuilt GPS, heart-rate monitor and 30-day battery life.
T3 unearthed the ability to pair a Honor Watch with the Huawei Health app earlier today – and grabbed the high-resolution images before Huawei could remove them.
First thing you'll notice about the Honor Watch is the circular, stainless steel frame. This is designed to look like a traditional timepiece, rather than a wearable device. Honor has even included a tachymeter scale on the rim.
Like the Huawei Watch GT, there appear to be two physical buttons on the side of the device, as well as interchangeable straps to customise the look of the watch.
That makes sense, given that Huawei is the parent company to Honor. However, it will be interesting to see how many of the features included in the £199 ($230) Watch GT make the cut for the more affordable Honor Watch. The former boasts a 1.39-inch AMOLED display with a 454 x 454 resolution, continuous heart-rate tracking, GPS, water resistance to 50m (164ft), sleep tracking, and workout tutorials.
Huawei Health now includes the ability to pair with the Honor Watch – despite the new smartwatch not being announced until later this week
Previous leaked promotional images of the Honor Watch seemingly confirmed support for contactless payments with Google Pay via NFC.
The Watch GT runs on Huawei's own software, dubbed Lite OS, instead of the Google counterpart, Wear OS. As the name suggests, the Huawei-built operating system isn't as fully featured as its closest rivals – there are no third party apps and very limited customisation for the handful of inbuilt watch faces. The same Huawei-made smartwatch operating system will also power Honor Watch – as evidenced by the inclusion of the Honor Watch inside the Huawei Health software.
It's unclear how much the Honor Watch will cost, but given the firm's track record we don't expect it to cost as much as the £199 ($230) Huawei Watch GT. Should it ship with a particularly aggressive price tag, established players like Samsung Galaxy Watch, Apple Watch Series 4 and Fitbit Versa could lose a few sales.
T3 will have all the latest on the Honor Watch when it's officially announced on Wednesday October 31, 2018. Stay tuned for more.
