Smartwatches are supposed to help you stay healthier, more active, and more mindful of your body. But honestly, over the past couple of years, I’ve slowly fallen out of love with them.
Part of that comes from the constant notification overload. Every smartwatch eventually turns into another screen fighting for your attention, buzzing every few minutes with messages, reminders, and random app notifications. But even fitness motivation has started feeling weirdly stressful.
I’ve been an Apple Watch user for years, and features like the Activity Rings are great in theory. Closing those rings and competing with friends can definitely feel motivating at first. But recently, it started feeling less like encouragement and more like pressure. Miss a workout or have a lazy day, and suddenly your watch makes it feel like you’re failing at staying active.
And as someone who spends most of the day sitting at a desk writing and researching new tech products, those reminders have slowly become more annoying than motivating. That’s why I was genuinely surprised by one feature on the Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro that completely changed how I felt about smartwatch fitness again.
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Huawei’s Mini Workout panda made movement feel fun again
It turned fitness reminders into something playful instead of stressful
Huawei recently unveiled its Watch Fit 5 and Watch Fit 5 Pro, and these new smartwatches include a feature called Mini Workout, which sounds gimmicky at first but has turned out to be really helpful.
The feature is built around a small animated panda on the watch face that encourages you to do short stretches and movements throughout the day. Instead of constantly pushing aggressive calorie goals or activity rings, the watch focuses on smaller desk-friendly exercises that only take around 15 minutes.
The watch includes around thirty guided mini exercises targeting areas like the neck, shoulders, back, and more. The panda demonstrates each movement directly on the watch screen, which somehow makes the whole thing feel a lot more approachable and fun.
Huawei says the idea behind the feature is to encourage movement when you realistically can’t go for a full workout, instead of repeatedly reminding you about calorie goals. And honestly, that’s exactly why I think it works so well.
The watch reminds you when you’ve been sitting for too long, and every time you tap the panda, it gives you a different stretching exercise. It’s genuinely been useful for me lately, especially during long writing days sitting at a desk.
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The Watch Fit 5 Pro is also a surprisingly solid smartwatch
Battery life, health tracking and the display all exceeded my expectations
Apart from the Mini Workout sessions, the rest of the Watch Fit 5 Pro is also surprisingly well-rounded.
It comes with a large 1.92-inch AMOLED display that can reach up to 3,000 nits of brightness, and I haven’t had any visibility issues outdoors so far. Huawei also says it has reduced the bezels this time around, and honestly, the watch does feel more premium than its price would suggest.
On top of that, it keeps some of the features I genuinely like about the Apple Watch, including ECG support and built-in GPS tracking for runs and workouts. Where it easily beats the Apple Watch for me, though, is battery life.
Huawei claims the Watch Fit 5 Pro can last up to 10 days on a single charge. It hasn’t quite reached that for me, but after going through two full charge cycles, I’ve consistently gotten around five to six days with the always-on display enabled. Even at that level, it’s still a massive improvement compared to the Apple Watch.
Better yet, the Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro works with both Android and iPhone. That’s something you don’t get with the Apple Watch, and even most Wear OS watches like the Pixel Watch or Galaxy Watch are heavily tied to their own ecosystems. Huawei’s watch works across both platforms right out of the box.
Of course, there are some compromises too. You don’t get the same deep ecosystem integrations you find on the Apple Watch or Wear OS devices. Third-party app support and software flexibility are still limited here. And if you rely heavily on assistants like Siri or Gemini, you won’t really get that experience on the Huawei watch either.
The Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro starts at £249 in the UK, and honestly, for that price, it has been a pretty refreshing smartwatch for me. The improved battery life, combined with the Mini Workout feature, has genuinely worked well for me, and I honestly hope Apple brings something similar to the Apple Watch in a future watchOS update.
