The Huawei Watch 4 Pro Space Edition is a high quality smartwatch with a serious amount of health features on board. It’s big, bold and not for everybody. But it performs well across pretty much every metric, both as a fitness, wellness and health focused watch. The challenge is justifying the price tag when the ecosystem is so bare – compared to the likes of watch OS and Wear OS. It’s hard to recommend over an Apple Watch Ultra for iPhone users, but Android people will find plenty to enjoy if they can look past the lack of apps.
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Great health features -
Bold, classy design with quality materials and top screen -
Diving credentials -
iOS and Android friendly
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Pricey -
No apps and basic ecosystem -
Heavy – no silicon strap included
The Huawei Watch 4 Pro Space Edition landed alongside Huawei Watch Fit 3, as an update to the current Huawei flagship smartwatch. It’s increasingly normal for brands to add interim updates to smartwatches – and nobody truly expects current Watch 4/Watch 4 Pro owners to upgrade.
But the Huawei Watch 4 Pro Space Edition has now replaced the standard Watch 4 Pro on the Huawei Store – which makes it more than a special edition – but the de facto flagship Huawei.
If this has appeared on your radar, the following review should help you decide why it exists, and whether it’s worth your money.
Price and competition
At £549 (there’s no official US launch and it’s not available there yet) the Huawei Watch 4 Pro Space Edition commands a serious price. It justifies that with the materials and LTE, but the price positions it alongside some serious competitors.
The Huawei Watch 4 Pro Space Edition is compatible with Android and iOS, and for Google smartphone users, it stands out as a premium choice.
An Apple Watch Ultra 2 is £799/$799, so still significantly more but within reach. A first-gen Ultra is £699/$699 so even closer. The Apple ecosystem is lightyears ahead of the Watch Pro 4, with the App Store and Apple Pay examples of services that Huawei cannot offer.
On the Android side, the TicWatch 5 Pro Enduro is comparable – and that’s significantly less at $399. But there’s no diving features, and the suite of TicApps lags Huawei’s Health ecosystem.
In short, while it’s hard to justify £549 on a watch with such a limited ecosystem, there’s not much out there on the Android side of the fence that challenges the Huawei Watch 4 Pro Space Edition.
Design
Most of the key changes for the Watch 4 Pro Space Edition are about design. The Watch 4 Pro itself was a great-looking watch that certainly oozed quality – with a titanium build and a large, domed AMOLED screen and metal link bracelet.
It’s massive and masculine, with a 49mm case that weighs in at 65g without a strap. It only suits large wrists, and I found it noticeably heavy to wear. It also comes with a titanium link strap, which I needed to adjust to wear. I’d like to have seen a silicone option in the box at this price, as you just can’t work out with a metal strap. The Huawei strap uses a push-button design for easy swapping, but it’s a standard fitting that supports any third party straps you can buy from the web.
The Watch 4 Pro Space Edition takes the aerospace-grade titanium case, and adds diamond-like carbon (DLC). That makes it tougher and more resistant to scratches. There’s also a new ceramic bezel, which in a huge turn of design prowess, is now red and the back is ceramic, too.
I received plenty of admiring comments in my time wearing it – and it really does have a classy look.
It’s a step up from the older Watch 4 Pro, even though the differences might be imperceptible to the untrained eye. The DLC-coated titanium on the Watch 4 Space Edition is even more premium, and the red bezel makes for a more eye-catching design, even if it can come across as more aggressively styled and masculine.
Screen tech and water resistance
Just like the old Watch 4 Pro, it’s a massive watch. The screen is bright and sumptuous with a 1.5-inch 466×466 pixel AMOLED. It’s easy to read in daylight, and I feel that Huawei makes good use of the screen size to display running stats and other data-heavy elements.
It’s 5ATM water-resistant so good for swimming, but it also retains the EN13319 diving rating for 30m free diving, with built in apps for tracking your time in the water. Other than the Apple Watch Ultra, there’s few mainstream watches that can withstand that kind of activity.
In short, it’s a big, bold watch that won’t suit everyone. It’s heavy and not a natural workout partner – but if you’re looking for something with classy materials – it certainly stands out.
New TruSeen 5.5+ Sensors
The Watch 4 Pro Space Edition is not just a makeover and a new watch face – there are some technical improvements too. These aren’t exactly game-changing, but they are notable improvements over the older Watch 4 Pro and the rest of the Huawei Watch cabal.
The first is that it ups the heart rate sensing package, with the addition of TruSeen 5.5+ (upgraded from good old TruSeen 5.5).
This is the name for not only the heart rate sensor array under the hood, but also all the detection and analysis algorithms that go with it.
Huawei says there’s been a 15% boost in SpO2 accuracy – which was hard to verify in testing. Blood oxygen levels tallied with my finger sensor, but because I wasn’t gravely ill, the high levels of saturation that made testing data relatively meaningless.
It’s also not a medical device, and I wouldn’t trust any consumer smartwatch in this regard.
I didn’t have any complaints over the accuracy of the heart rate sensor on the original Watch 4 Pro – and the lineup of health features is pretty enviable.
Health Feature Powerhouse
The Space Edition still offers 24/7 heart rate tracking, SpO2 levels (although certainly not for medical use), and stress detection.
Health Glance 2.0 takes a snapshot of your overall health and includes body temperature, stress, and a respiratory test that asks you to breathe deeply and cough into the sensor to check for abnormalities.
It now integrates pulse wave arrhythmia analysis and sleep breathing awareness into the reports. These can be found in the Huawei Health app.
It will also take readings for arterial stiffness, which is a good measure of your overall health, and hasn’t seen seen on recent wearables.
To take an arterial stiffness reading, you open the app and place your finger on the lower button for a 30-second test. I found this quite frustrating, as the test kept failing citing a poor connection. But finally, I did manage to get a reading. Arterial stiffness is linked to a number of negative outcomes but can be improved with exercise and diet. A high score could be a good motivator to make changes. I like the inclusion of this score within the Huawei suite of features.
There’s also ECG onboard, which makes the Huawei Watch 4 Space Edition one of the most complete health watches around.
Heart rate accuracy
I retested the TruSeen 5.5+ sensors, and found little discernible difference between this and the older Watch 4 Pro. Both performed admirably, with no clangers in terms of basic HR data or at higher heart rates.
The Huawei Watch 4 Space Edition is one of the most complete consumer smartwatches in terms of the metrics it can generate. It’s less likely to save your life than, say, the Apple Watch Series 9, and doesn’t have fall detection (outside of the Family Health features), nor Car Crash detection. It does have high/low HR alerts and arrhythmia detection.
Fitness Features
As a fitness and workout watch, the Huawei Watch 4 Space Edition carries on Huawei’s excellent suite of running and workout tracking. However, the Space Edition doesn’t add any running features over more modest members of the range, such as the GT4.
The added weight of the watch also makes it a little cumbersome to work out with – and there’s no silicone strap provided. That’s no sweat as it uses standard quick-release bands, but it’s still a heavy piece of kit.
That said, I had no issues with GPS accuracy compared to the Apple Watch Ultra 2 when tracked natively with the Huawei Health app. What’s more, I rarely waited more than 30 seconds to get a GPS lock.
However, I found that some runs appeared shorter when integrated into Strava. This harks back to some GPS discrepancies I experienced when using the Huawei Watch Ultimate.
In short, the Huawei Watch GT4 is a good workout watch – but with exactly the same performance found on Huawei devices at a quarter of the price – so fitness alone isn’t a good reason to choose the Watch 4 Space Edition. So the choice for most people will come down to how the Space Edition compares to other health and wellness watches.
Sleep
Sleep tracking is a big part of the Huawei Watch 4 Pro Space Edition, but none of my previous observations about the effectiveness of Huawei’s sleep tracking have changed. It’s data-heavy, and even more so here with breathing disturbances tracking – and you can opt into the Huawei Watch 4 Pro keeping tabs on things like snoring.
Night-time blood oxygen and heart rate are all tracked, and there’s heaps of data on regularity, how much you woke up, and time spent in different stages.
There’s no evidence that the Huawei Watch 4 Pro Space Edition tracks sleep stages accurately. This issue isn’t limited to Huawei but wearables in general – you can read my thoughts on this here.
I’d advise people to use sleep tracking as a motivator to spend more time in bed, and more consistently – rather than worry about sleep stages. But I could see from the data that Huawei’s sleep duration tracking overestimates that of rivals such as Whoop/Oura.
But Huawei sleep tracking is less sensitive to wakeups and disturbances. This causes the longer sleep durations compared to our control devices – and it wasn’t hard to see concrete examples in the data.
In one baby-driven 5 am wake-up, which I found it hard to return to sleep from, Huawei registered it as a mere blip. So this isn’t a world-class sleep tracker. It also lags behind the likes of Whoop and Oura in making sense of sleep and recovery, with no readiness scores or measures of sleep debt, which is a staple of top wearables these days.
Smartwatch Skills
The Huawei Watch 4 Pro Space Edition has a wealth of smart features, but it’s still hamstrung by the limitations of Harmony OS just as other Huawei watches are. This does put pressure on its £549 price tag.
There are no third-party apps of note, with a handful of integrations hardwired into the Huawei Health app – such as Strava. There’s also little European bank support, so you can’t use Huawei to make wrist payments.
However, you will find eSIM/LTE compatibility, which makes the Huawei Watch 4 Pro Space Edition one of a privileged few smartwatches that can go untethered. That helps justify the price tag IF you’re willing to pay for a secondary eSIM data plan.
And while there’s so much to like here, these features start to make it hard to justify its price tag over the likes of the Apple Watch Series 9, Pixel Watch 2, or Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 Classic.
Personally, I like to cut down the number of notifications on my wrist, but Huawei doesn’t offer enough control.
So it’s a middling smartwatch experience, especially compared to the big Apple Watch and Google ecosystems. With no apps, payments and the watch on do not disturb most of the time, it’s not an top experience.
Battery Life
Huawei watches usually tear strips off the likes of Wear OS and Apple Watch for battery life – but the gap narrows here.
The Huawei Watch 4 Pro Space Edition offers the fewest hours away from the charger of the Huawei herd, but it still competes well with rivals.
With the always-on screen enabled you’ll get around three days between charges – around the same time as an Apple Watch Ultra 2 or the OnePlus Watch 2.
The downside is that as an ecosystem, it’s supporting far less than those examples, which run watchOS and Wear OS with all their bells and whistles. So if you prefer those richer features, logic points you away from the Watch 4 Pro Space Edition. But if you’re interested in health and fitness then the Space Edition comes recommended.
You can enable a long battery mode from the drop-down menu, which extends to 20 days of battery life. But there are pay-offs – and any internet-connected data won’t be available. I tried it, and it wasn’t as limiting as I expected. I quite enjoyed the peace and quiet of a life away from being bugged by notifications, but the widgets remain blank, and the watch isn’t as useful day-to-day.
But you will still get heart rate and health tracking data, and you can undertake workouts without returning to full power mode.
