Wearables

A £249.99 watch with a titanium bezel, sapphire glass and a 1.92in AMOLED that hits 3,000 nits, and a battery that genuinely runs five to six days. Living with it through Paris, China and jet lag that wrecked my sleep, it never once made me think about charging. The paywalled extras in Huawei Health are the one real gripe, but almost everything that matters is free on the watch itself.

It took me a year to work out that comparing this with an Apple Watch Ultra is the wrong exercise entirely. The Sapphire display is the best thing about it, the heart rate sensor finally keeps up with what your body is actually doing, and I charge it once every three weeks. Garmin's software update process is still a mess, and Spotify took a twenty-minute detour through a desktop app. Worth it anyway.

I was sure I'd drift back to the Apple Watch Ultra and I never did. The Garmin is honest with you in a way the Apple Watch isn't, the data is easier to reach, and five or six days of battery means sleep tracking stops competing with charging. Garmin Pay still won't work with my bank, the heart rate takes 20 to 30 seconds to catch up, and it isn't a proper smartwatch. It doesn't pretend to be, and I like that.

The most beautiful display on any digital watch I'd tried, haptics and buttons that are a genuine delight, and call quality good enough that I actually started taking calls on my wrist. As an average dad rather than an ultramarathon runner, it earned its place. The sleep tracking still needed a third-party app to be truly useful, and Siri in the wind is a lost cause, but Apple smashed this one.