The smartwatch becomes autonomous and open to iPhone and Android

Huawei aims to make the smartwatch a device increasingly independent from the smartphonealso open to competing iPhone and Android users and with no essential features locked behind subscriptions.

It is the strategy indicated to AGI by Andreas Zimmer, Head of Product Huawei, according to which the future of wearables passes through the ability to bring together health, sport and design without sacrificing one of these elements.

The hardware remains the heart of the offering, but it grows around the clock an ecosystem of applications and services which the company views as an extension of the experience, not a tool to enforce recurring payments. At the same time, Huawei claims the choice to keep its devices compatible with competing platforms: an approach that broadens the potential market and, according to Zimmer, forces development teams to compete with the entire sector on the ground of innovation

The smartwatch market seems to be polarizing: on the one hand generalist devices linked to the smartphone, on the other increasingly specialized tools for sport and health. In five years’ time, will Huawei want to be perceived above all as a smartwatch, sports technology or digital health company?

I don’t think it’s necessary to sacrifice one aspect in favor of the other: it is possible to create a beautiful and versatile smartwatch, capable of offering advanced health and sports features at the same time. Both the WATCH GT 7 Series and the WATCH 6 Series embody this principle. The choice of the most suitable device starts first and foremost from design and personal taste: from the size to the shape of the screen, up to the materials, such as steel, titanium or ceramic. Then there are more specialized features that can make the difference, such as the smartphone-free eSIM connectivity of the WATCH series, the blood pressure monitoring of the WATCH D series or the long battery life during endurance sports, such as trail running or cycling, of the WATCH GT 7 Pro, just to name a few. In this way, each person can go into detail about their needs and understand which features are really important for daily use, choosing the most suitable smartwatch. The ability to offer solutions that cover all these different needs ultimately represents Huawei’s main advantage over other brands. Looking ahead to the next five years, wearables will continue to be an important, but not the only, part of our business. We will continue to invest in research in both sports and health, including through the development, for example, of our Health Lab in Helsinki. This does not mean, however, that we must necessarily favor only one direction. Huawei is a technology company focused on connectivity, and this can take very different forms and applications.

In your industrial model will the value continue to be mainly in the hardware or is the real long-term objective to transform the wearable into access to a service platform? And, in this second scenario, how do you plan to monetize the ecosystem without closing it?

Our core business is to offer highly competitive hardware, characterized by a distinctive design and the most innovative features. Of course, this also includes numerous software-based features. In recent years we have seen a growing trend for companies to ask users to pay for certain core software features through subscription models. Even car manufacturers, for example, are increasingly evaluating models of this type. Huawei, on the other hand, has never put the core features of its devices behind a paywall and we don’t intend to. We believe that product experience is an essential component of why people choose a Huawei device and recommend it to friends and family.

You should not need to make recurring payments to use a product for the purpose for which it was designed. An example is NFC payments via Curve Pay on your smartwatch, a key feature that we provide for free. With services like Health+, we offer the possibility of expanding the experience within the Huawei Health app, going beyond simply monitoring your data and also introducing proactive advice and programs, such as Stay Fit plans, dynamic running plans or guided workouts on your smartphone. Over the last six months we have invested heavily in improving this experience. We therefore see Services as an extension of the user experience, not as a way to limit access to the core features of our products.

Have you deliberately chosen to transform wearables from an accessory of the Huawei ecosystem into an independent gateway to the brand, also open to iPhone users and competing Android smartphones? And how important is this “cross-platform” strategy for your future growth in Europe?

Making Huawei wearables a possible choice for everyone, regardless of the type of smartphone used, is certainly a deliberate choice. In fact, we take this approach globally and across all of our product lines. It also applies, for example, to our headphones and goes so far as to allow the sharing of files between Huawei smartphones and tablets and Apple devices through the new Petal Interconnect app. We believe that maintaining an open approach towards the entire market is the right choice, because it offers greater freedom of choice to people and, at the same time, encourages innovation. Knowing that we have to compete with the entire open market motivates our engineering teams to constantly seek the best and most advanced solution for each challenge. Naturally, this also significantly expands the potential market of our devices, with clear advantages also from an economic point of view. For this reason, continuing to develop products for users who use both iOS and Android will continue to be an important part of our strategy.