Finding the right fitness tracker is like dating.
Some potential dates look great on paper: attractive photos, hobbies that align with yours, clear values.
But it takes meeting someone in person to realize that enthusiasm for yoga or needlepoint simply can't outweigh a lack of personality.
The $69.99 Huwaei Band 3 Pro has a hunky headshot with a list of bullet points that goes on for days.
But spend some quality time together, and you might find it doesn't live up your expectations.
It has a beautifully bright display, long battery life, an optical heart rate monitor, GPS, and a price so low it begs for your consideration.
But the app is underwhelming, some features don't live up expectations, and the strap looks cheap.
You can very easily settle for the Huawei Band 3 Pro, but do you want to?
I would be remiss not to mention that Huawei made headlines recently when the company's CFO was detained by US authorities on charges of fraud, specifically covering violations of sanctions against Iran.
This review was written without consideration for any of the company's practices, but it seems relevant to let consumers know that the company is entangled in a serious international confrontation.
Design and Comfort
The Huawei Band 3 Pro is an all-day fitness tracker with a slim design.
Its body measures 1.77 by 0.75 by 0.43 inches (HWD), and the display takes up 0.95 inches of that length.
When I lay my thumb on the rectangular display, the tracker is just a bit longer than the span from my knuckle to the tip of my finger.
And my thumb is definitely wider.
The touch-sensitive AMOLED screen looks bright and sharp.
It illuminates when you raise your arm or touch its lower edge.
You swipe up and down to see how many steps you've taken, read your heart rate, review sleep data from the night before, activate workout mode, mess with settings, and see notifications from your phone.
While the display is sharp, the band looks cheap.
Some fitness trackers jazz up their bands by using chrome or steel for the closing mechanism, but here's it's all silicone rubber and plastic.
I got the obsidian black model, but it's also available in space blue and quicksand gold.
Battery Life and Settings
Huawei advertises a battery life of seven hours with GPS enabled, or about 12 days with normal use.
That's true only if you don't use the heart rate monitor 24/7.
By default, continuous heart rate monitoring is off, although you can take a reading using the controls on the display whenever you want.
With heart rate monitoring off, I charged the device fully, wore it about five days, set it aside for another five days, and noticed it still had about a quarter of the battery power remaining.
That's excellent.
Push notifications are also off by default, and during setup, neither the watch nor the app prompts you to turn them on.
Another options that's off is TruSleep, which makes sleep tracking more accurate.
All three are important selling points for the Huawei Band 3 Pro, so why are they off? It's likely because when you turn on these arguably essential features, battery life takes a hit.
Download the Huawei Health mobile app (for Android and iOS), as you'll need it to enable some of the features and to check for firmware updates.
From the app, you can turn on a weather summary, which is handy, but it's only available on one out of the three clock face options.
In other words, if you enable it but have the wrong clock face chosen, you won't see it.
Bluetooth connectivity was smooth after the initial setup.
During those first moments, the watch and my phone made contact once and then lost it.
It took 15 minutes and two reboots of the Band 3 Pro before they would connect again.
Daily Use
Wearing the Huawei Band 3 Pro is a mixed experience.
It does its job counting steps, measuring heart rate, logging sleep, reminding you to move, and so forth.
It's not a beautiful timepiece, but it's slim and hides easily beneath a sleeve.
The display is bright and crystal clear, but some of the designs in the menu options look like they're from the 1990s.
One major omission is that there's no place to enter your weight.
People want to see how changes in their weight correlate with increased activity or improvements in sleep.
Even being able to log your weight by hand in the app would be an improvement, although using a connected smart bathroom scale to do it automatically would be best.
You also can't log your period, birth control, or pregnancy.
No major fitness tracker and app supports these data points, except Fitbit, which doesn't correlate the information in a way that would be considered useful.
The Huawei Health app comes with training programs, and like some of the other features, it looks good on paper but disappoints in practice.
You can enlist in a program to help you train for a race, such as a 10K or a marathon, and the app will create a plan telling you to run a particular number of miles on a particular day.
But there's no compatibility with the tracker itself.
You never get a reminder.
The plan doesn't adjust if you skip a training day.
The only benefit is a free training plan in the same app where you collect your other health data.
There are a lot of missed opportunities here.
Accuracy
While testing the Huawei Band 3 Pro, I simultaneously wore a Fitbit Charge 3.
The step counts were typically within 1,000 steps of one another, which is a good sign.
The range of difference was always greater in the morning when I had taken fewer steps, and over the course of the day it seemed to even out.
With any fitness tracker, consistency is more important than accuracy, and the Huawei Band 3 Pro reported numbers that seemed to match up with my typical day.
In a one-mile treadmill test, the Huawei Band 3 Pro performed on par with most other fitness trackers in its league.
A mile takes the average person about 2,000 steps, and I know that's accurate for me, too.
After one mile on a treadmill, the Huawei Band 3 Pro was just one-tenth of a mile short, and the total number of steps came to 1,973.
I would call those results accurate, given I don't know when the treadmill was last calibrated.
Sleep tracking was less accurate, especially in the first few days before I enabled the TruSleep setting.
TruSleep helped, but the results still weren't excellent.
What I'd really like is to be able to correct the data, as some fitness trackers and apps let you do.
If the tracker gets it wrong, at least you have the opportunity to make it right.
The Huawei Health app doesn't let you do this.
Conclusions
Within the category of fitness trackers that have a slim design, the Huawei Band 3 Pro is hardly your only option, and you can find something more stylish and with better features if you're willing to pay just a little bit more.
The Fitbit Charge 3, though wider, is easier to use and includes breathing exercises as well as the option to automatically track runs.
Garmin's Vivosmart 4 sticks to the sleek form with a bracelet-like look and offers greater accuracy.
The Huawei Band 3 Pro isn't a bad device by any stretch, and if you're price-sensitive, it's one of the more fully featured fitness trackers you'll find for less than $100.
But if you can afford to pay more, don't settle.
The Bottom Line
While competitively priced and packed with features, Huawei's Band 3 Pro fitness tracker is more attractive on paper than it is in real life.
