The Huawei Watch D2 is an incredible health watch for hypertension sufferers, with great battery life and wider health metrics.
For those with a need to track blood pressure routinely, the Huawei Watch D2 is a superb pick. It delivers accurate blood pressure tracking, with complementary features that make for a great all-round health watch. Best of all, it now does that with a design that doesn’t look like it’s made for sick people — with easy operation that most people can enjoy.
Pros
- Accurate blood pressure tracking
- Great battery life
- Wearable design
Cons
- Lack of Huawei services
The Huawei Watch D2 is a truly unique smartwatch proposition — a proper health smartwatch with serious capabilities.
We were impressed by the original Huawei Watch D, but its big, chunky build made it something only someone with proper medical needs would wear — reluctantly.
That’s changed here, and the Huawei Watch D2 is sleeker, nicer, and more wearable than ever before.
We lived with the Huawei Watch D2 to find out.
How we tested
We lived with the Huawei Watch D2 for two weeks, taking blood pressure readings multiple times a day and comparing to a cuff. We also tracked next to an Oura Ring 4 and Whoop 4.0 to track the accuracy of sleep and wellness data, as well as the overall accuracy and wearability.
Price and competition
There isn’t too much out there that compares to the Huawei Watch D2 in its entirety — but there are a few options.
The Huawei Watch D2 retails for £349, which we’d consider decent value given the smarts and insights on board. It’s also a good smartwatch in its own right. It’s not available in the US.
You might also look at the Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 (or Watch 6), which you can bag for $299/£289 in 40mm, but you need a blood pressure cuff to calibrate the tracking. They can be grabbed for around $50/£40, but you will need to calibrate every couple of weeks.
There’s also the Aktiia band, which will set you back around £209 (again, Europe only). That also requires calibration with a supplied cuff — and offers dedicated, all-day blood pressure tracking. It suffers from being exclusively blood pressure-related, however, and doesn’t pack in tracking of other health metrics. But as it’s a thin band with no screen, it’s discreet.
Design
The design of the Huawei Watch D2 is a huge improvement on the previous generation — and it’s shaken off its medical device appearance.
It looks like an early Apple Watch — albeit, significantly thicker at nearly 14mm. That means, for most people, it just looks like an Apple Watch. With the crown, side button, and shiny aluminum bezel, it’s a pretty derivative design. But for people buying the Watch D2 to keep an eye on their blood pressure, that is a huge selling point.
The strap is fairly chunky and robust, and that’s because it permanently houses the small inflatable airbag underneath that does all the blood pressure stuff. You get two straps in box and a convenient tape to measure the right size. I have thin wrists, and I measured right on the cusp of the two straps, just leaning toward the large. The adjustment was easy and was comfortable despite the large amount of excess I needed to tuck away.
The strap has a proprietary fit, so you can’t swap out the strap too easily. But doing so would mean you can’t track blood pressure, which undermines the whole premise.
The screen is a punchy AMOLED display, and certainly does the job at making on-screen text easy to read. And it’s 5ATM water resistant, so it can survive the pool or shower.
Overall, a winning formula for the design makes the D2 easy to recommend. Yes, it’s not as sleek as rival watches, but importantly, it doesn’t look like a smartwatch for sick people.
Blood pressure and health tracking
The key skill of the Huawei Watch D2 is blood pressure tracking. It doesn’t need calibration with a blood pressure cuff because it is the cuff. However, the D2 works around your wrist, rather than around your upper arm.
When taking a reading, you raise your hand to your chest, sit in an upright position, and take a manual reading. It won’t work if you do it lying down, or have your arm pressing against your chest too hard. The airbag under the strap inflates, and a reading is taken on the screen.
You can also set the Watch D2 to take readings automatically at night, and Huawei says the algorithms can take readings while you’re lying down. It does work, but if you’re sleeping on that arm, you might get invalid readings. Any suspicious ones are flagged by Huawei and discounted, and you can then delete them if needed.
The key question is — are these readings reliable? I spent a whole week testing my blood pressure and then comparing it to a proper blood pressure cuff. The readings were nearly identical every single time.
I also asked friends and family to take guest readings, a neat feature where you can pop it on someone else’s arm and take an unsaved reading — and these also checked out. One family member informed me that their blood pressure was ‘usually fine.’ The Watch D2 showed a high reading, and the cuff confirmed it — and that’s very much the point. The D2 makes it easier to take more frequent readings and users in tune with this critical health metric.
The Watch D2 will set helpful reminders to take readings in the morning and before bed. For the large proportion of hypertension sufferers who fail to regularly record and monitor their blood pressure, it has the potential to be transformative.
Blood pressure tracking isn’t the only health trick up the D2’s sleeve. It also packs ECG and the company’s Health Glance feature.
The latter spot checks four metrics, including heart rate, SpO2, stress, and skin temperature. It’s a good addition to the overall health tracking of the D2, albeit not a hugely useful set of metrics day-to-day. Data tracked during sleep and analyzed longitudinally, such as breathing rate and resting heart rate, would be a much better way of tracking health. It also omits the respiratory check feature from the Huawei Watch 4.
It does pack a separate arterial stiffness check — another helpful metric. That’s performed in a separate, standalone 30-second check, with your finger held against the electrode in the physical button. Arterial stiffness is an interesting stat, and one that can be improved with a healthy lifestyle. Whether Huawei communicates this well enough, however, is up for debate. The arterial stiffness app feels hidden with a lack of explanation. I feel that the ultimate implementation would be a single check that incorporates ECG, arterial stiffness, and the Health Glance, all in one.
The breadth of Huawei’s health features is impressive — for those with hypertension issues, the additions of arterial stiffness and ECG metrics make for a great all-rounder. Longitudinal wellness metrics feel like they could do with a big improvement here, and for those with health issues, the Watch D2 doesn’t feel like it nurtures a healthier lifestyle with its passive tracking.
But overall, this is a fabulous health watch at a great price.
Fitness and health tracking
As we mentioned, the fitness tracking elements of the Huawei Watch D2 are quite passive. It’s good at tracking activity and exercise, but it doesn’t inspire users to get up and get active.
However, it is an excellent fitness smartwatch, and the Huawei Watch D2 brings over most of Huawei’s sports tracking features — and it’s an excellent addition.
I tracked a range of runs from 5-10KM, and they were all tracked accurately.
I also tested the D2 against a chest strap and found that on steady runs, the optical heart rate monitor stood up well, both in terms of data tracking and real-time accuracy. It showed an average HR of 160bpm/max HR of 192bpm for a tempo run compared to 161bpm/193bpm on a Garmin HRM-Pro. So excellent accuracy on a run that tested the sensor to the max.
The activity tracking is also well worked, with Apple-style rings for activity, stand, and exercise. There are also the health clovers in the app, which offer a more holistic look at daily health.
Again, this feels buried within the Huawei Health experience and feels like it could be elevated to make for a more inspiring experience.
Sleep tracking works, although it tends to track longer durations than the Oura Ring 4, which has been proven in studies to have excellent accuracy.
Some nights were on par, but as we’ve found across Huawei smartwatches, it tended to lack sensitivity, so you’ll get a rosier picture of your sleep duration. However, poor nights of sleep were judged as such — so it’s still a useful guide.
Stress tracking is also on board, but as ever, the implementation really doesn’t inspire. A simple stress score with little context will struggle to be useful.
Battery life
If there’s another strong suit for the Huawei Watch D2, it’s battery life. Health smartwatches, like the Apple Watch or Samsung Galaxy Watch, only manage single-day battery life. The Huawei Watch D2 will last around a week.
Huawei quotes around six days of battery life for the Watch D2. With the always-on display set to off, I found this easily achievable in my experience. That included regular tracked workouts with the GPS, and multiple blood pressure readings per day — as well as tracked sleep.
Given the quality of the display and the features on board, it is an exceptional showing. Long battery life also means that there will be fewer gaps in tracking data — which makes it a more useful health smartwatch overall.
Smartwatch smarts
The downside to Huawei smartwatches is the lack of a developed ecosystem — that means no app store or mobile payments. It means the experience of living day-to-day with a Huawei Watch isn’t as slick or useful as something like an Apple Watch, Pixel Watch, or Galaxy Watch.
However, the Huawei Watch D2 does deliver notifications to the wrist, and has some helpful widgets that make the experience feel alive.
It could go further. It would be nice to have things like calendar widgets or to-do lists — or more glanceable data.
That feels less like a complaint here than with other Huawei smartwatches due to the focus on blood pressure tracking. The lack of luxurious watch faces didn’t nag us here, as it has on watches such as the Watch 4 or GT 5, because the default Health Guard face packed with health metrics felt so relevant.
