The GS Pro is a superb smartwatch packed with potential but limited by its own OS

“Dare to Explore” is the tagline Honor are running with to promote their latest wearable. The Honor GS Pro is a rugged smartwatch packed with features aimed at the outdoor person.

If you’re interested in reading about a sleek, fashionable smartwatch you just probably stop reading here as this watch is not for you, in fact, this watch is not for a lot of people but we’ll get to that.

Before we move into the innards of the device itself along with its features, it’s probably best we start with the design as its not exactly discreet.

 

Design

On first impressions and out the box, this watch has “rugged” written all over it. At 48mm its a fairly chunky piece of equipment but interestingly, it doesn’t feel as chunky as it looks.

Upon wearing the watch it’s actually really comfortable and lightweight. The watch itself is made from a reinforced polycarbonate designed to absorb shocks and generally take a beating without getting damaged in the outdoors and we absolutely love it. It’s not trying to be something it’s not,  this is about as “outdoorsy” as you get.

The GS Pro is said to withstand temperatures of up to 70 degrees on the top end, all of the way down to -40 on the lower end, which are just two of the military-grade standards it holds.

The stainless steel bezel is designed with compass markings to help you get your bearings when using some of its features such “route home” mode.

Typically designed to be worn on the left wrist, on the right-hand side of the watch you’ll find 2 big buttons, The top button will give you access to your workout menus whilst also acting like back button whilst the bottom button can be configured to whatever you want. By default, we had ours set to settings.

The bracelet of the watch comes in the form of a traditional watch strap in a heavy-duty rubber material. Whilst it’s pretty wide, this also sits comfortably on the wrist and has enough holes in to be worn over the top of clothing if needs be. The straps can be easily removed via a pin mechanism and are connected to the watch by a mean-looking set of lugs.

On the back on the watch, you’ll find an un-intrusive heart rate scanner and two pogo pins to attach the (really strong) magnetic charging dock.

By far one of our favourite pieces of design on this smartwatch is the touchscreen itself. Coming in at 1.39 inches, the resolution of the screen pops with colour and really manages to hold its own in daylight and we never once had to crank it up to full brightness.

Features

Fitness and workouts

For the outdoor enthusiast, this watch is packed with features that will assist you in your activities. The regular consumer? probably a bit overload if anything however we sure did enjoy having them all there regardless.

Upon going for a hike, we found the route-back feature pretty handy. Just in case you were out somewhere and got lost, a few swipes to the right of the screen within your activity will give you a GPS breadcrumb type map. It’ll show you just how close you are to where you started and route you back on the exact same path back.

The weather app goes a little further than most outlining sunset, moonset but the geek in us really enjoyed knowing the moonphase.

In terms of fitness, the GS pro has a plethora of workouts to choose from, over 100 to be exact so there will be a tracking activity for everyone. Whether you’re wanting to track a cross-country run or just do a bit of ballet, The watch will be able to track your numbers.

During the workouts, you’re a guided by a voice-activated assistant to give you your KPI’s. Whilst it was very loud and clear, it may not be for everyone and we were struggling to find a way to turn this off.

The speaker also to enable you to take your phone calls and the call quality had a lot of clarity, even outside in windy conditions. The mic, unfortunately, was not as sensitive so you do need to hold your wrist up to your mouth to have a full conversation. Knight rider style.

Upon completion of your workout or activity, all of your data will be stored both on the watch or within the Huawei health app to get a more detailed view on performance. You can see everything from your heart-rate over time, to your altitude and even see what your recovery time was.

Whilst the detail of the graphics, graphs and data seemed really in-depth, the touchscreen was really intuitive and fluid and the data was very easy to read and digest.

The one gripe we do have about this watch is that its own OS does not allow you to install third-party apps. What you see is what you get with the GS Pro.

 

 

Health and Wellbeing

The features of the watch we actually enjoyed more was its ability to track your health at any given time. The GS Pro features 24/7 heart rate monitoring to give you a really accurate view of heart rate, sleep, stress and even blood oxygen levels. The last one probably proving very handy given the recent pandemic.

To get an accurate view of sleep you can activate Trusleep from within the Huawei health app which enables you track all parts of your sleep cycle from the times you wake up and to the moments you’re in REM. The best thing about it is how the data is then visualised within the app for you to use and improve on.

There were times were some periods of us being awake with a bad nights sleep we’re not tracked, however, so any tossing and turning you might do might not be in your data set in the morning.

The App

To connect your watch to your device, you need the Huawei health app which works on both iOS and Android. The app is pretty straight forward and easy to use and gives you a deeper analysis of your workouts, sleep, heart-rate, stress and SPO2.

The app also allows you to change settings on the device such as manage notifications, change your watch faces and also download all of your health reports and put together running plans.

 

 

 

Battery life

Usually, any mention of the battery life would be a comment made in passing, but I think we needed to separate this out from the rest of the review.

This watch has an absolute tank of a battery and is by far the longest-lasting smartwatch we’ve used. Upon writing this review we’ve got around 18 days of battery life out of the GS Pro. It’s fair to say we’ve worn the watch pretty casually having only completed 4 workouts but within the time the watch has never come off. We’ve kept the GPS and heart rate tracker on 24/7 and haven’t once dimmed the brightness down.

The GS Pro promises 25 days on its website however we were still very impressed at just how long the watch stayed alive.

Verdict

The Honor GS Pro does a pretty good job in carving out a little niche for itself in the outdoor watch market. It’s fair to say this is more than a fitness watch but with that, we think it will also attract only a niche audience who are serious about their outdoors and might favour other wearables.

In terms of the design, we got used to the bulky way it is fashioned however we found that an absent button on the left-hand side of the watch face made the watch feel slightly unfinished.

The tracking, screen and user experience of this watch were superb and the battery life topped it off for us. Our biggest gripe, however, was that you’re limited to the Honor OS on this watch. With such brilliant GPS features, it’s a shame that there a hardly any other GPS apps you can take advantage of such as third party golf apps.

Had this watch had the opportunity to access more apps we really do think it would be hard to beat.

 

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