Huawei’s latest watch has a snazzy new fingertip sensor

You can’t buy the Huawei Watch 5 in the US, but it has an interesting twist on health tracking. Most smartwatches and fitness trackers measure your metrics from a sensor array that presses into your wrist. The Watch 5 has that, but it also adds a new sensor on the watch’s side that measures EKGs, blood oxygen, and arterial stiffness from the fingertip.

Huawei calls this its “multi-sensing X-TAP technology,” which is a fancy way of saying it’s stuffed a bunch of sensors into the side of the device. That includes a pressure sensor to detect how hard you’re pushing on it, an EKG electrode, and an optical heart rate sensor. Huawei claims that this leads to a 10 to 50 times improvement in signal quality, which may not be completely baseless. The fingertip is often considered to be a great area for obtaining heart rate data because it has a lot of capillaries and good blood perfusion. (This is one reason why medical-grade pulse oximeters for measuring blood oxygen are fingertip-based.)

Whether this is useful is debatable, but Huawei says it means it can now take blood oxygen readings in 10 seconds. That’s significantly faster than most other SpO2 spot-check features. It also enables a 60-second “one-tap health glance” feature that gives you your average heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), blood oxygen, skin temperature, stress, EKGs, arterial stiffness detection, a respiratory overview, and sleep disturbance awareness. Most of these were on the Watch 4, though HRV is new.

Otherwise, the Watch 5 feels like a somewhat incremental update. There are two new gesture controls: double slide (where you slide your thumb against your finger) and double tap. The display has a peak brightness of 3,000 nits and thinner bezels. It comes in two sizes, 42mm and 46mm. There are also titanium and stainless options. The 42mm model gets up to three days of battery life (two with the always-on display enabled), while the 46mm gets around 4.5 days (three with AOD enabled). The watch also supports cellular connectivity and works with Android and iOS.

But if you’ll indulge me, one thing Huawei seems proud of is the fact that the new 46mm model in titanium comes in purple. Titanium is a hard metal to colorize and typically requires a process called anodization. So in its press materials, Huwei is pretty stoked that it has managed to create purple using “advanced methods that require oxidation parameter adjustment and hue deviation.” It says this has resulted in an “exact purple with an opaline effect” that, compared to “solid, high-saturation purple commonly seen on other technologies,” this purple has a blue-gray sheen. Perhaps, in person, the watch is truly purple. But as a passionate purple lover, the photos make this look about as purple as the iPhone 14 Pro Max’s deep purple — which is to say, not very purple.

If you can somehow overlook this insult to purpledom, the Watch 5 is available for preorder starting today in the UK and Europe for £399.99 / €499.99 (around $550) and will officially launch on March 26th. The 42mm comes in beige, gold, white, and green in stainless steel. The 46mm comes in black in stainless steel, while the titanium versions also come in brown, silver, and “purple.”