Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro review: Small upgrades, still one of the best fitness watches around

I’ve been thoroughly impressed with Huawei’s smartwatches in recent years. The Chinese brand quietly built one of the most comprehensive portfolios of wearables, from premium options like the Watch Ultimate 2 to sportier models like the Watch GT 6 Pro.

One of the brand’s most accessible and popular franchises is the Watch Fit Series, which has only got better with each iteration. Last year’s Watch Fit 4 Pro was one of my favourites from last year, so I was looking forward to testing its successor in 2026.

The Watch Fit 5 Pro is an iterative update over its predecessor and sports a larger, nearly 2-inch display, a new mini workout mode, a ceramic-like metal finish (White Edition), and some cool health and fitness features that trickled down from last year’s flagship Watch 5.

It might not be the most significant update in the watch’s history, but the Watch Fit 5 Pro remains an excellent value-for-money, compact (just about) wearable with long battery life that now also supports NFC payments thanks to Curve, leaving very little for reviewers like me to criticise.

Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro review

Price and availability

The Watch Fit 5 Series was officially launched in China on 20 April with international availability set for 7 May 2026. It’s available now from Huawei in certain regions, including the EU, the UK, and Australia, for £249.99. It's the same price as the Watch Fit 4 Pro was when it launched, which is no small feat, considering the situation with component prices around the world.

Of course, you can buy the Watch Fit 4 Pro for a lot less these days, selling for as little as £166 at Amazon at the time of writing. I'm fairly certain there will be launch offers and discounts on the new watch soon, though.

The Watch Fit 5's price increased £10 compared to its predecessor (£159.99).

Design and build quality

The Watch Fit 5 Pro has an Apple Watch-like square design, weighs 30.4 grams and measures 44.5 x 40.8 x 9.5 mm. It sports a brighter display than its rival (vs Apple Watch Series 11). The wearable 1.92-inch screen has a maximum brightness of 3,000 nits, which is on par with the Apple Watch Ultra 3.

The screen panel has been upgraded to an adaptive 1-60Hz LTPO display. In always-on mode, the watch refreshes every second (1Hz), which saves battery. The panel is protected by a 2.5D (a.k.a. slightly raised) sapphire glass lens.

The bezels are 1.8mm wide and uniform around the rounded-square “aviation-grade” aluminium body. Huawei says the Watch 5 Pro also feature “high-end watch oil-filling” technique to make the bezel “gleam brilliantly” from every angle.

The company also claims the White Edition of the watch has what’s called “Micro-Arc Oxid” surface treatment, which supposedly makes the metal feel more ceramic-like and harder. I didn’t have the White Edition, so I can’t really say much else about it.

The Orange Edition has an updated fabric strap with dual-layer water- and oil-resistant organic silicone coating. I didn’t have this version either, so sadly, I can’t confirm how well it works. (Evidently, I was sent the most run-of-the-mill version of the watch.)

The Watch Fit 5 Pro has the same one-push-button-and-watch-crown setup as before. It also has a microphone and a speaker. As far as I know, the sensor on the back hasn’t changed.

The build quality of the watch is excellent, overall – Huawei knows how to make handsome watches that feel good on the wrist. The only thing is the size. Wrist-worn smartwatches will forever be limited by the size of people’s wrists, so you can’t forever make them bigger and bigger.

Some Huawei watches, such as the Watch 5 or the Watch Ultimate 2, are borderline too big, and the Watch Fit 5 Pro is getting there too, with its nearly 2-inch display, no matter how thin the bezel is.

The non-Pro Watch 5 is slightly smaller, with a 1.82-inch screen, so if you have smaller wrists (and budget), that might be a better option for you. Making either version any larger in the future could risk alienating the crowd that used to choose the Watch Fit over fitness bands for its compact form factor.

For now, though, it's not terribly big, and certainly smaller than most Huawei smartwatches mentioned above.

Features and performance

The Watch Fit 5 Pro has inherited some of the Watch 6 Pro’s features, including advanced cycling metrics, and also carries over the trail-running prowess of its predecessor.

One of the headline features the brand is keen to push is Mini Workouts. These are short exercises you can do anywhere, such as neck circles or side stretches, with the help of a cute panda that does the same exercises on your wrist.

Even though the panda is adorable, and I also appreciate Huawei trying to introduce healthier habits to Westerners – lots of people in China exercise together almost daily, something the good people of the UK should do more often – on-wrist exercises aren’t anything to write home about.

Not only have brands like Garmin and Polar had similar features for years, but I also find it cumbersome to look at my wrist while performing any exercise other than planks. Plus, does anyone really need a virtual panda to know how to do shoulder circles?

The panda pops up when you haven’t moved in an hour, too, suggesting you should get up and stretch your limbs. (I’m writing this while sitting on the train and can do nothing about being stationary. Sorry, bear.)

The Watch Fit 5 Pro is equipped with Huawei’s Sunflower positioning system, which can accurately track your location outdoors. The brand claims the GPS can also follow you better when you’re under cover (e.g. in a tunnel), but in my experience, it only works if you’re moving at a steady pace.

You can track more advanced running and cycling metrics on the Watch Fit 5 Pro, including running power and real-time grade, as well as virtual power and virtual cadence on the bike.

Most of these are estimations on the watch’s part, of course, based on algorithmic magic and sensor data, so don’t expect the Watch Fit 5 Pro to replace your power meter, for example. Nevertheless, it’s excellent that non-professional cyclists can access an approximation of these data points without external sensors.

Huawei added a ton of third-party applications to its workout roster over the years, and these now include Kotcha, URunn, RacePace, Intervals.icu, FiiT, Strava, Komoot, etc.

The company lagged behind competitors regarding app support for its watches, and though it’s not there yet, from an everyday athlete’s point of view, you get more than enough for daily training. Just don’t expect to find every popular app in the Huawei app store.

One long-requested feature that’s now available not just on the Watch Fit 5 Pro but on other Huawei watches is NFC payments in the UK via Curve. Garmin uses a similar system where, instead of loading your bank card directly onto the wearable, you add it in the Curve app, then you add the virtual Curve card and use that for payments.

I’ve yet to try this, but it's certainly available, removing one huge obstacle the brand had to work around for years.

Health management

One area where Huawei’s wearables really excel is health tracking. The brand places a strong emphasis on health-related features and has been tweaking its sensor and algorithm to better match them. You get all the now-essential stuff, such as sleep and stress tracking, but the Watch Fit 5 Pro can also track your mood and automatically log naps, just to name a couple.

The wearable doesn’t actually introduce anything dramatically new, but still, it's an impressive roster. You can check for pulse wave arythmia (PWA), monitor your ECG and arterial stiffness, and more; the brand says the PWA is also CE-certified in the EU.

One of the newer features is sleep breathing awareness monitoring. The Watch Fit 5 Pro tracks your respiration during the night and layers this info on top of the already impressive advanced sleep metrics it provides.

Thankfully, the wearable confirmed that I don’t have any breathing issues during the night, which aligns with what other smartwatches have told me in the past.

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Huawei says the sleep monitoring has also been approved, but the app on the watch looks pretty similar to what I remember the Watch Fit 4 Pro can do. It's sure comprehensive, and the sleep stages look similar to those provided by the Oura Ring 4 (though not exactly the same). The Huawei certainly tracks the start and end of sleep perfectly and logs any disturbances in between.

Nap Tracking, as mentioned above, is also new. I tried this on a long-haul flight to Thailand, and it picked up one of two naps on the flight. I'm not sure why the first one was missed, but I suspect the feature would be more accurate if I used the Watch Fit 5 Pro for a bit longer than a week. After all, machine learning needs data to learn your habits.

Naturally, the watch can also track steps and general activity throughout the day, and estimate calories burned.

Battery life and charging

Huawei watches generally have a very good battery life, and the Watch Fit 5 Pro is no different. It has a 471mAh cell, which the company claims has a 14% higher density than the predecessor, improving capacity by 18%.

This translates to roughly 10 days of battery life in smartwatch mode (light use) and up to 25 hours of GPS battery life. In my experience, the Watch Fit 5 Pro should easily last a week with mixed use – mine lasted just over eight days while I wore it almost 24/7.

The watch charges fast, too. I plugged it in at 8%, then stepped outside for 40 minutes. When I returned, it was already fully charged. I don’t actually know how long it took to get it up to 100%; it could have been 20 minutes for all I know. Even if it was 40, it’s still pretty impressive.

Verdict

The Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro doesn’t reinvent the series, but it doesn’t really need to. The brand has taken an already excellent fitness-focused smartwatch and refined it with a brighter LTPO display, faster charging, expanded health tracking, improved sports metrics, and finally, NFC payments in the UK via Curve.

It must be said that these improvements can feel evolutionary rather than transformative. If you already own the Watch Fit 4 Pro, there’s probably not enough here to justify an immediate upgrade unless you particularly want the larger display or payment support.

The predecessor already delivered excellent battery life, strong GPS performance and comprehensive health tracking, and the Watch Fit 5 Pro mostly builds on those strengths rather than pushing the category forward.

That said, for newcomers, it remains one of the best compact (again, just about) fitness smartwatches on the market. The build quality is excellent, the battery life comfortably outlasts most rivals', and Huawei’s health ecosystem continues to impress with detailed insights that rival those of significantly more expensive wearables.

The Watch Fit 5 Pro is another polished, feature-rich wearable from the Chinese manufacturer and further proof that the company understands how to make attractive smartwatches with genuinely useful fitness and health tools.