Huawei has made available for purchase a new watch in its sports watch lineup. This one is called Watch GT Runner. It is a lightweight timepiece targeted at the sporty types. The highlights are the lightweight design, performance metrics for runners, and improved sattelite connectivity.

Watch GT Runner comes hot on the heels of Watch GT3. That one was announced in late October. Its improvements over GT2 come in the form of some design and sensor upgrades, more sports modes and additional performance metrics.

Essential reading: Top fitness trackers and health gadgets

Now we are getting a tweaked version of that. Watch GT Runner was originally unveiled at Huawei’s product launch event in November. It is only now that it is being made available for purchase in a select number of countries.

The clue is in the name. This is a timepiece designed mainly for the runners amongst us.

Built to maximise the speed of the wearer, Watch GT Runner adopts a high-strength compositive fiber case that is thin and lightweight. But at just 38.5 grams (dimensions 46.4 x 46.4 x 11mm) it is also robust and waterproof. It is said the design was inspired from a supercar motive. The ceramic bezel and titanium crown contribute to a premium look.

The body of the watch holds a 1.43-inch circular AMOLED touch-display. All of this is attached to an antibacerial silicone strap.

As far as features, GT Runner runs on the lighweight Harmony OS. This ensures long battery life. With normal use the thing keeps going for two weeks between charges. With heavy use you can expect about a half of this.

Battery life falls rapidly if you switch on the built-in sattelite positioning (GPS, Beidou, GLONASS, GALLILEO and QZSS). Huawei says it has integrated a floating external antenna which enables dual-frequency GPS. The antenna is concealed within the polymer fiber material. Apparently, the tech greatly improves the antenna performance and lock – up to 135% better accuracy as compared to the traditional design.

This will be very important to runners. There is nothing worse than arriving at your starting point and waiting 10 minutes to secure a GPS signal. Or finishing a run and seeing that the sattelite positioning data is out of whack.

Runners will also benefit from a range of performance metrics including Training Load, Vo2Max, recovery insights and more. The device ports these over from GT3 thanks to an upgraded TruSport system. Of course users will also get detailed heart rate and other activity info, along with altitude. So that they don’t get lost, there’s route sharing and track back.

There’s also something called the Running Ability Index. That takes into account your historical running heart rate, pace, distance and frequency to spit out your estimated “level” as a runner.

Other than that, you get the TrueSeen 5.0+ heart rate monitor which has a total of eight phtodiodes and two sets of light sources. The company says you’ll get 97% accuracy – comparable to what you’d get from a heart rate chest strap.

The device is not cheap. It is available in a choice between two colours (Black Durable Polymer Fibre and Grey Durable Polymer Fibre) for around €299. For now you can only purchase it in Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, China and Russia. More countries are likely to follow soon.

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I often exercise with an external heart rate monitor paired to my sports watch. As good as wrist based heart

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