The Watch Ultimate has been Huawei’s flagship smartwatch since its inception a few years ago with a focus on expedition and diving, hence the marine blue color scheme. The new Huawei Watch Ultimate Green Edition takes you from the water to the fairways with its golf-specific styling and lengthy feature list.
The watch is presented with a set of three straps so you can continue to wear this watch away from the course, no matter the occasion you find yourself in. The silicone strap is ideal for when exercising, playing golf or exploring. The seamless integrated woven strap is an industry first and is exceptionally comfortable, water resistant and breathable. The titanium strap is the last included and is perfect for the smarter occasion where you still want all the functionality and health features the Watch Ultimate offers.
Built from premium Zirconium-based liquid metal, this watch is extremely strong and durable. Unlike a lot of other smart watch metals, this unique material holds is shine for much longer and is known to be 4.5 times stronger than stainless steel. The dual-color, nano-tech ceramic bezel offers something slightly different to other golf watches on the market and adds to the golf theme this watch is designed around.
The Watch Ultimate features a Sapphire glass dial and 1.5” touch screen that I found to be really responsive and immediate to touch. There are four golf specific golf watch faces, offering information such as statistics on your latest round or a live scorecard feature, lighting up each hole's score in a certain color around the edge of the watch so you can quickly identify where your score stands coming down the 18th hole - something I found particularly beneficial.
As golfers, we’re becoming more aware how technology is influencing clubhead design with many of the best drivers, fairway woods and irons having been created with the help of A.I. but like many, my bad rounds on the course are often caused by swinging out of tempo or making simple course management mistakes.
The new advanced golf mode sees over 15,000 courses across the world available to download onto the Watch Ultimate. I tested this watch on a course I had never played before and was able to quickly identify what distance I had to the fairway and each of the bunkers surrounding the fairway. The Watch Ultimate also gives you the distances you would expect from a GPS golf device, yardage to the front, middle and back of the green, as well as a ‘plays like’ feature which takes into account undulation and gives you a calculated, adjusted yardage for when playing uphill or downhill. I found the yardage given to be accurate and tested it out against on of the best golf rangefinders.
There are a few other new features on the Watch Ultimate that are perfect for social play such as green contouring. When you walk onto a green, you will be presented with a live look at the slopes on the green to help you read a putt. You can also receive information such as wind speed and direction but remember, these cannot be used during tournament play under the Rules of Golf set by the R&A and USGA.
The range feature was what I found to be arguably the most useful on this watch. By swinging on the range, the watch could identify my tempo and offer advice on whether I needed to speed up my backswing or downswing using color coded boundaries. If your swing measures in the green it’s deemed as good tempo and if it’s in the red, you have some things to work on - as you can see below, I must have been swinging well on this particular day!
If you’re someone who likes being generally active outdoors the Watch Ultimate has some impressive trail walking and hiking trail maps as well as boasting a 100m water resistant standard for those who like to scuba or free-dive. As standard you can expect around eight days of battery life, with scope to last 14 days if using features sparingly.
All in all this watch is one that looks great and has some really impressive features that have the potential to really help golfers get better. The punchy price of £749 sees the Huawei Watch Ultimate enter the market as one of the more expensive golf watches comparable with the Garmin Marq golfer and TAG Heuer Connected Calibre E4 Golf Edition, but its versatility, premium design and useful functionality go a long way towards justifying it for those with deep pockets.