Review: Huawei Watch, G8 smartphone, MediaPad M2

New Chinese Android-based watch, phone and tablet are serious alternatives to Apple Watch, iPhone and iPad.

Huawei tablet, phone and watch

China’s Huawei is upping the ante when it comes to consumer-­focused technology and has unleashed a bevy of new devices — the Huawei Watch, the phablet-sized 5.5-inch G8 smartphone and the 8-inch MediaPad M2 tablet — to spruik its capabilities.

So just how good are these devices?

Huawei Watch

The Huawei Watch is undoubtedly beautiful and it’s more expensive than the $499 Apple Watch Sport. A silver watch encased in its “cold-forged” stainless steel casing with black leather band costs $549, while a black watch with black link bracelet weighs in at $749.

At 42mm it’s the same size as the larger Apple Watch, but round-faced. There’s no smaller size, so it may be too big for smaller wrists. It has a clear 1.4-inch 400x400 pixel screen. Watch faces, of which there are more than 40, look great.

At 13mm, it looks a tad thick but it houses a decent 300 milliampere battery that easily lasts a day. For example, yesterday it consumed just over 70 per cent of battery. Yet the time display is always visible. The screen is so bright I could see its light through my pullover sleeve. The charger is disk-shaped, but you have to line up four metal connection points for charging to take place and this requires care.

You can fit any 18mm watchband if you dislike standard ones. It has a gyroscope, accelerometer and motion sensor so it can independently monitor your activities and heart-rate. Android Wear lets you place calls and write texts from your watch. They are transmitted from the phone. But it still has a habit of sending texts before you complete them. Pause while dictating a memo and it’s off.

I could pair the watch easily with Android phones and an iPhone 6s Plus, as advertised. But Google has sold us a pup in saying Android Wear watches are really iOS-compatible. Sure, they link to iPhones, but you can’t load third party Android watch apps, so you are limited to what Huawei and Google offer in firmware. Huawei has made a really attractive watch, probably the most attractive Android Wear watch I have used, but Android Wear still has a way to go as a watch ecosystem.

Huawei G8 smartphone

The G8 is an LTE phone with an attractive, all-metal body and a 5.5-inch full HD display. It’s no iPhone 6s but a worthy effort nevertheless. Both have a 1080p IPS displays with 401 pixels per inch resolution, although Apple’s adds backlighting. The G8 is a tad shorter and lighter but 0.2mm thicker. There’s an eight-core Cortex-A53 processor with 4 cores at 1.2GHz and 4 at 1.5GHz. You’ll get power saving with the 1.2GHz cores but overall it’s not the most powerful of phones. However, its sizeable 3000 milliampere battery delivers good battery life: 9 hours 31 minutes playing video at 75 per cent brightness. It also has a feature that some premium phones lack: a slot for a microSD card which can extend storage by 64GB. It has 32GB storage on-board, with around 22GB available to users.

With 13 and 5 megapixel cameras, resolution-wise it mixes with the best and has a dual-tone colour flash. But panorama shots lack the depth of colour and detail when compared to the iPhone. It doesn’t shoot or play back 4K either. Huawei’s “Emotion UI”, its variant of Android Lollipop, comes with themes and unusual camera modes. The Stellar theme displays system apps with pleasant gold colour icons, the home screen system icons look like chocolates and the camera modes include beauty and make-up modes.

The fingerprint sensor on the back works extremely well. You hold the phone by the edges, with your index finger on the sensor, and the phone logs you in from locked-standby mode in one, quick action.

Overall this is a very good phone with some premium features but I’d label it a mid-range unit. If it’s significantly cheaper than current premium models, when pricing is announced, it could prove very popular.

Huawei MediaPad M2

Huawei bills this as a premium entertainer at an affordable price. I got 9 hours 11 minutes playing video playback at 75 per cent brightness on the M2, so you’ll be able to watch four two-hour shows back-to-back. There’s a classy 8-inch all metal shell, 4G LTE Cat 4 capability and a microSD card port.

Some variants have a dual SIM, but there’s no word on whether they will come to Australia. The AnTuTu benchmark rated it at 49761, just shy of LG’s G4 smartphone: pretty reasonable.

Screen resolution is good but not stellar — 1920x1200 pixels, at 283 ppi — but the Harmon Kardon sound from its dual speakers is pretty good. You can watch 1080p movies but when I tried 4K ones even my favourite VLC video player app choked with a hardware acceleration error.

Huawei says it will be available in Australia by the end of October.

Chris Griffith travelled to San Francisco courtesy of Huawei