The Huawei Watch Fit 2 is the follow-up to the Huawei Watch Fit, a fitness tracker/smartwatch hybrid with an extremely affordable price tag.

It debuts big running smarts brought over from the Watch GT Runner, smartwatch features like a built-in music player and Bluetooth calling and over a week of battery life.

We've been living with it to find out. Here's our comprehensive verdict.

The Huawei Watch Fit 2 comes in at £130/149. As usual, there's no official US launch, pricing or details when or where you might be able to pick it up Stateside. But it will likely appear on Amazon in the coming months.

But it's an attractive price tag, that makes few compromises – and seriously impressed us during testing.

That price puts it squarely up against the likes of the Fitbit Charge 5 ($149/£129), which scored a solid 4 out of 5 score in our review. But does the Huawei Watch Fit 2 deliver on design, performance and features?

And for reference, if you want a smartwatch equivalent then the Huawei Watch GT 3 comes in at £209/$288 – which is a lot more, and sacrifices few features.

The first Fit was a lovely-looking device, with Active and Elegant versions – and this time out Huawei has added one more.

The Watch Fit 2 comes in Active, Elegant and now Classic versions – with all offering different case and strap colors. But the key things that separate them are slight differences in overall weight front case materials and one additional sensor.

The Active edition we tested is a few grams lighter than the Elegant and Classic editions. Those editions include aluminium front cases instead of a polymer one. The Elegant and Classic editions also include NFC to enable Huawei's new tap to transfer photo feature.

Every edition features a 46mm-sized cases that measure in at 10.8mm thick, and include a 1.74-inch, 336 x 480 resolution AMOLED touchscreen display with a single physical button on the side of the case. That's slightly thicker and heavier than the Watch Fit, but in reality, the main difference here is the change in the look of that main body and screen.

Huawei Watch Fit 2 (left) and Huawei Watch Fit (original)

While the first Fit was longer and slimmer in look, the body on the Fit 2 is a lot more square in comparison. In the hybrid scale, the Fit 2 has edged closer to a traditional smartwatch.

We actually preferred the slender Watch Fit, but squaring things has enabled Huawei to fit more data on the display. If it goes any wider though, it's going to essentially feel like a proper smartwatch.

Ultimately, it's a comfortable and easy device to live with. The silicone strap has been comfortable to wear and the only minor gripe we had is that the groove in the second clasp could do with being deeper as it did occasionally flail about during a swim.

Huawei has now made it much easier to take off those straps and does offer additional leather and Milanese-style options you can snap in to smarten things up.

The screen is bright, colorful, responsive and you now have an always-on display mode and the raise to wake gesture support has been generally fine day-to-day and when on the move during exercise.

Huawei has stuck to offering the same 5ATM water resistance rating here too, so you can keep it on in the shower and it can be used in shallow water for pool and ocean swims.

Fitness tracking on the first Fit was good, but not without its issues – particularly on the accuracy front.

The Watch Fit 2 brings tracking steps, sleep, heart rate, stress, blood oxygen levels and menstrual cycles.

Huawel also includes its Health Living clover, reminders to remind you to drink water, smile and keep your step counts up among other things.

The fitness and health tracking experience is solid overall. For step counts, it delivered similar daily data as Garmin's step tracking and it will throw up animations on screen to tell you to budge when you've been inactive for too long.

You've got an easy to read watch widget to display progress and you can see a breakdown of the activity those steps were generated from inside of the Huawei Health app.

Step tracking compared: Huawei Watch Fit 2 (left) and Garmin Epix (right)

When it's time to sleep, There's a dedicated watch menu to show off the previous night's sleep with more data and analysis inside of the companion phone app. It's here where you'll see sleep stage breakdowns, a sleep score along with insight on what that sleep score means and it also captures breathing rate.

Sleep tracking compared: Huawei Watch Fit 2 (left and centre) and Oura Ring 3 (right)

We pitted it against the very reliable Oura Ring 3 – our benchmark – and found that sleep data in general was similar, particularly for sleep duration and sleep stages. There weren't any nights where the data felt off the mark, so it was a good showing for the Fit 2 overall.

Resting heart rate compared: Huawei Watch Fit 2 (left) and Oura Ring 3 (right)

Elsewhere, continuous heart rate data felt more reliable than it did on the first Fit, offering similar resting heart rate data to Garmin and Oura.

On the spot SpO2 readings were good too, though monitoring 24/7 does eat into the battery.

The Fit 2 also monitors skin temperature and collates that information in the app. It generally floated around the 33 degree centigrade mark, which is considered normal skin temperature.

However, this isn't measured against established baselines, nor does it seem to be incorporated into other wellness or health features – so it essentially plays lip service to body temperature tracking without being useful in any way.

You can also continuously monitor stress via heart rate variability measurements, letting you know when stress is low, high or normal over a day to help you see what might be causing more stressful moments in your day.

The Watch Fit 2 feels like a more reliable activity tracker than the first Fit and is definitely more fitness tracker than health tracker. The experience on the watch is better off it, but it's all steps in the right direction.

This is arguably the department where Huawei has made the biggest changes with the Watch Fit 2.

It's not only added features from its GT series watches, but it's actually taken ones that debuted on the Watch Fit and made them more useful.

You've got your pick of 97 workout modes and that includes the likes of running, cycling, swimming (indoor and outdoor) and indoor activities like rowing and the cross trainer. There's also automatic exercise recognition for a small portion of those 97 workout modes.

Runners seem to be the biggest beneficiaries of the key new features. You've now got the ability to follow running training plans along with existing running courses where you can now create your own running courses and sessions too.

You can set up running interval training sessions, customise data fields and you're getting the running-focused training insights like running ability index, training load, race predictions (in the app only) and recovery recommendations from the GT Runner.

Like the GT Runner, the insights are useful if the data you're piling into them is reliable – and one the whole we were pleased by the accuracy of heart rate and insights spun off that data.

Huawei debuted animated workouts on the first Fit and that remains, but now it's incorporated that feature into helping you get warmed up before a run and to stretch after a run. The recommended exercises are all familiar things that can help runners get ready and stretch off and they're well integrated into the workout screen.

Outdoor run tracking compared: Huawei Watch Fit 2 (left) and Garmin Epix (right)

Huawei has improved outdoor tracking, and has added dual-band, five-system GNSS support to let you grab extra signals from supported satellite systems to improve accuracy.

We pitted it against the largely very accurate multi band tracking on the Garmin Epix, and while it was good on the whole, it had its sketchy routing moments. However, so did the very reliable Garmin on occasions as illustrated in the screens below – so GPS device is infallible in built up areas.

GPS accuracy compared: Huawei Watch Fit 2 (left) and Garmin Epix (right)

It wasn't spotless and still plotted us running through water while distance tracking seemed to be a short of the strong tracking on the Garmin Epix.

Core running metrics in general though did seem similar, particularly on shorter runs, 10k or less.

Heart rate during exercise compared: Huawei Watch Fit 2 (left) and Wahoo Tickr X (right)

Heart rate accuracy during exercise was generally fine for steady paced workouts, but it was no surprise to find it struggled to keep up with sudden spikes and drops in heart rate during high intensity use. The max HR in the example above lagged a chest strap, but the average data for the session was spot on. It's more than acceptable for guiding your recovery and driving those training insights, but we wouldn't rely on it for heart rate zone training.

Unlike Huawei's latest GT series watches, you can't pair up an external heart rate monitor to improve accuracy here.

The Fit 2 also manages to squeeze in space for the ability to import routes and offer basic navigation features here too. Uploading routes is done via the Huawei Health app and when you select a course, you'll follow a blue line and arrow pointing you in the right direction on a blank screen.

While basic, we found navigation support worked pretty well. The watch gives you a gentle vibrating buzz before you need to make a turn and while you don't get a screen filled with detailed maps, it's a handy enough feature to use when you're out exploring or need to get back home safely.

Swim tracking compared: Huawei Watch Fit 2 (left) and Garmin Epix (right)

We did spend some time outside of running with the Watch Fit 2 as well, and it performed well on most fronts. we took it for some pool swimming time and it delivered similar data to Garmin's swim tracking support.

It was a similar story for indoor rowing here as well. We could access all of the workout modes and animated workouts was one of those missing in action, but what we could test offered a good tracking experience overall.

If you care about syncing your stats to apps outside of Huawei Health, then there is a way to do it. Huawei doesn't offer its own official support, but grab the Health Sync app from the Google Play Store and you can start sharing stats to apps like Strava if you want.

Pretty much everything you could do on the Watch Fit from a smartwatch features point of view is available on the Fit 2, plus the pretty big additions of Bluetooth calling, a built-in music player, with room for up to 5,000 songs, and access to Huawei's AppGallery.

There does also remain some inconsistency across what features are on offer if you're an Android phone or iPhone user and whether you're pairing it up to a Huawei smartphone.

So iPhone users cannot store music onto the Watch Fit 2 or send quick SMS replies when using the Bluetooth calling features. There's a new feature to send photos to the watch to use as watch faces, but that can only be done when paired to a Huawei smartphone via NFC. You also need a Huawei phone to access the onboard smart assistant.

We used the Watch Fit 2 with an Android phone and we'd say the smartwatch experience is good enough on the whole. You have a nice stream of notifications that while you can't respond to them, they are well optimised to that AMOLED screen.

The music playback controls are easy to use too and while you can send music over to the watch and pair up Bluetooth headphones to listen sans smartphone, it needs to be purchased music because this doesn't work with music streaming services like Spotify or Deezer.

There's features here too like weather forecasts, the ability to set alarms and you can add up to 10 favourite contacts that you can quickly ring from the watch. The Bluetooth calling feature worked fine and the call quality and loudness was strong enough to take calls outside.

Huawei also offers a very good collection of watch faces here too and there's more available via the Huawei Health app. Though some faces can cost as much as $5/£4, which seems needless There's a nice bunch already preloaded, which we think will satisfy most people.

Then you do have access to Huawei's AppGallery, though it feels like it's a slightly scaled back version. During our testing, there were six apps available and that included things like a calculator and Huawei's Petal Maps navigation app.

Small collection of apps aside, the apps do seem a little slow to download and you'll need the corresponding AppGallery phone app to get things like Petal Maps set up. Granted, it's not a big storefront, but the fact you do have some access like you do on Huawei's full-fat smartwatches is good to see here.

You're getting more smartwatch features here, some that quite frankly, we were surprised to see. If you're an Android phone or Huawei phone user, then you're going to be able to make the best use of those new features.

With the original Huawei Watch Fit, Huawei promised 10 days of battery life in what it referred to as 'typical use' and then 7 days in heavy usage. That heavy usage involves doing things like using the continuous heart rate monitoring and advanced sleep tracking or using 30 minutes of Bluetooth calling. With the Fit 2, it's touting the very same numbers and we found it performs similarly.

In more heavy usage, you are looking at a week of use between charges and we'd say that's based on regularly using the GPS, having the screen nice and bright and having those more power-hungry health and wellness features in play. You can definitely get longer and there's no worrying drain day-to-day based on our experience.

When you're using the GPS, we found that over an hour of running saw battery drop-off around 10%. Huawei doesn't talk GPS battery numbers, but that would roughly equate to about 10 hours of battery life. Dedicated sports watches at around this price will get you a few more hours, but that's not a terrible showing in our book.

The Watch Fit 2 will typically last you week, but you definitely have the capacity here to go longer when you sacrifice some features. You also have handy quick-charge feature, which gets you a day of watch time from spending just five minutes on the charger.

Huawei Watch Fit 2 By Huawei There really is a lot to like about the Huawei Watch Fit 2. It looks great, the software runs smooth and Huawei has managed to cram in a lot here for a very good price. Crucially, it can back up that extra features list with a strong performance and it has nicely evolved some features, which appeared on the original Watch Fit. The natural comparison here is the Fitbit Charge 5, but for performance and hardware, Huawei, for us, comes out on top. Fitbit does have the slight edge on the software front, particularly off the watch, but as an overall package this feels like Huawei's standout wearable and a strong rival for the Charge 5. Hit Great look and screen Packed with features Solid sports and fitness tracking Improved features from original Miss Battery life in heavy usage Improved GPS isn't spotless Can't respond to notifications Experience across Android and iOS