Watch 4 Pro Space Edition is a smartwatch for aerospace enthusiasts

Maybe Huawei knew I was a fan of space and aviation when they asked me to test the new Space Edition of the Watch 4 Pro. Maybe they didn’t know, but they got me right anyway.

The Watch 4 Pro is their best performing smartwatch at the moment, a model that integrates all possible functions and is also built from premium quality materials. This Space Edition comes as a special edition of it, with the following two main aspects: the outer design and the additional faces integrated into the watch.

It’s hard to fault the materials used in the construction. The watch itself is made of an aerospace-grade titanium alloy, meaning it is stronger than other alloys. The specs also talk about a DLC coatingthat is diamond-like coatinga titanium treatment that makes it even more resistant to the scratches that can appear in daily use, when you rub against your laptop, walls, furniture and other objects.

The watch is also very light thanks to this material, it weighs only 65 grams and measures approximately 49 x 49 x 13 mm.

Moreover, the 1.5-inch AMOLED screen is covered with artificial sapphire, a material that is highly resistant to scratches and shocks. As far as I know, it’s second only to diamond on the hardness scale.

The outer frame of the screen, that red and black circle, is made of a durable ceramic material. The official specifications also talk about the use of a material called cerium here. From what I’ve read, cerium oxide is a substance that fuses at a molecular level between the molecules of another material to stabilize its color, to give it a very good uniformity of color (or something like that). That ring of ceramic material was then produced by sintering, i.e. strong pressing, and this compaction gives it increased resistance to scratches.

The metal bracelet is made of normal titanium. It is also very light and attaches to normal watch telescopes. Several links of the bracelet can be easily extracted using some buttons on them. I shortened my belt by a za in less than a minute and without the need for any tools.

Like the entire Watch 4 Pro series, the Space Edition has a crown button on the top right and a normal push button on the bottom right. The crown is highly faceted for good finger grip and also has a small red ring for a unified design. The bottom button is about a millimeter sticking out of the case. Both have a nice click when pressed.

Overall, I think it is difficult to find a better made watch. I don’t think there are any with better materials, and the joints are also well made.

And as I said, the second point of a special edition of this type is related to the appearance of the watch faces. For example, Omega has a special edition related to Apollo 8 in which the central part of the dial imitates the cratered texture of the moon, and one of the small tongues of the chronometer is shaped like a Saturn V rocket. Such small details are specific to special editions.

Watch 4 Pro Space Edition is a digital watch, and with digital faces you can play more. The main one, the star so to speak, is the one below. It is officially called “Laval face” and the name seemed to remind me of something. It really is something.

Gustaf de Laval was a Swedish engineer who lived in the late 1800s. He was an inventor who, according to Wikipedia, had two major inventions that are still widely used today. The first, a method of separating the milk. The second, a nozzle used in virtually all rocket engines today.

How do you get from milk to rockets? De Laval actually did research in the field of fluids. One of his inventions is the de Laval nozzle, which looks like an hourglass. Its property is that from one side enter gases with subsonic speed, for example the jet from the propulsion of a rocket, and the gases are accelerated when passing through the “hourglass” to a supersonic speed, so at the other end they come out with a much higher speed large and therefore can give a stronger impulse to the rocket.

The explanation is on Wikipedia, it has to do with the group velocity of gas molecules and the transformation of its heat into kinetic energy. Something simple, but very useful. And it’s not about an hourglass, but in reality the shape is asymmetrical and specially calculated for each individual engine, in order to obtain the highest possible efficiency.

On the watch screen, however, the default face has this kind of Laval nozzle drawn there, and whenever you open it or go back to the main screen or tap on it, a stream of flames also goes through it, from left to right. Moreover, the color of the flames depends on the battery level of the watch. When discharged, the flame is fainter, bluer.

It took me about two days to realize that in fact even the case of the watch was thought in tandem with this digital face. If you look at the ceramic ring beyond the screen, the transition from its red to black area exactly delimits the entrance and exit of the de Laval nozzle from the screen.

This face itself displays at the bottom which planet you want or our Moon (or it changes randomly). By the way, when you press there, the respective celestial body becomes fullscreen and you can rotate it to whichever side you want, so you can see how it looks. If you choose Earth, the area you are in will be displayed there anyway, that is, for me it was centered on Romania.

Another very enjoyable one is called Planet Quest. There you can choose a planet and it is displayed in its entirety on the screen. If it’s Terra, it also tells you the exact coordinates of where you are. If it’s the Moon, it tells you the percentage of the Moon’s illumination, for example right now we’re only at 4% because we’ve barely passed a new moon night. If there are other planets, it tells you their diameter (Jupiter is 139,000 kilometers, for example).

You can rotate them as you want on the screen, and if you rotate the crown you can see the terminator line (the area that separates day from night) moving across the planet, and in the case of Earth it also tells you what time would correspond to that situation.

And there are other faces. One that I really liked is related to the zodiac, it’s called Star Explorer. I’m not good at zodiac signs, but others care, and this face is designed for them, which is also well-crafted.

You can choose to display a certain zodiac of your choice or the one we are in now. When the face appears on the screen (when you exit the menus or change something, for example), the sign is actually drawn there, i.e. first the respective stars appear and then the outline of the respective constellation is drawn. It’s a short animation, a maximum of one second, but I like it, and the fact that it exists tells me that a little more work was done on such details, not just a static image was drawn.

Another face, called Starry Sky, also has to do with the signs. They appear as constellations in the center of the screen, and on the side there is a rotating ring (from the crown) through which you can switch between the signs and see for each the period in the calendar.

There is even a face with a little game called Astronaut, where you have to guide a character through a tube, but the others seem more effective to me. And they are not the only ones, of course. You also have all kinds of faces pre-installed with two time zones, with weather, with training information or ones with a lot of information displayed on the screen.

You can install others from the control app. For each one you can usually configure some details such as the dominant color or the font or what information the various sections display, maybe you want the battery level, not the number of calories consumed or the time the Moon rises.

I don’t know if they are exclusive faces for the special edition. Planet Quest, for example, appears in official images with the regular Watch 4 Pro as well. I have no way to check.

Maybe they don’t sound like anyone when I describe them like that, but that’s the kind of thing you find on a special edition. There are such details and features to play with if you’re into that sort of thing, or to show your friends and say “look what else I can do, it shows me what percent of the full moon it is tonight and what time hour will be the Moon in the sky”.

In addition, the screen is a 1.5-inch, bright AMOLED with good colors and displays everything in high resolution.

The hardware is that of the classic Watch 4 Pro. The watch has a microphone and speaker for calls, has an eSIM, Wi-Fi for large downloads, several pre-installed apps, including a good Weather one. It has Stay Fit, with which you can monitor how much you eat at each meal, its own map, compass, beautifully designed timer, contacts, calendar, etc.

It combines the three big functions of a smartwatch: phone notifications, sports training monitoring and health monitoring. All worked without problems during the test period.

On the notification side, I didn’t like that the control app was simplified. It lets you choose whether or not you want notifications from the main apps (SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger, email, etc.), but from here you basically want them all. A lot of other applications installed in the phone, however, fall into the “Others” category and you can choose globally if you want notifications or not (at least that’s how it is in the iOS application). I would like control right at the application level, to select exactly what I want and what I don’t want.

For sports training, the watch has dozens of sports it can monitor. It has dual-band GPS and a precise altimeter, it shows you on the map the route you took, it has a robotic voice that periodically tells you the distance traveled, the calories consumed or the pulse or the training mode and so on. It even has a bay, for example, and for diving it withstands up to 30 meters deep.

On the health monitoring side again this Watch 4 Pro does very well. For example, it not only measures the pulse, but also does ECG and detects atrial fibrillation and calculates a score for arterial stiffness. The sensors on the bottom also measure your blood oxygen concentration and calculate your stress level and other indicators.

There’s also a feature called Health Glance that takes 60 seconds to run. The watch takes turns measuring your pulse, skin temperature and other indicators, and at one point even makes you cough a few times into the watch’s microphone, and at the end gives you a health score.

In everyday use of course it counts your steps, monitors your heart rate, blood oxygen concentration, floors climbed, stress level and skin temperature. The temperature sensor works fine. In practice, the value of the temperature on the surface of the skin does not matter, but above all its variation, and the measurement seemed good to me. Looking at her progress over the day on the mobile app, I could clearly see how long I’d been out in the sun or how long I’d been in a cooler room. The data itself then leads to more accurate measurements of stress, calories burned, workout performance, etc.

All in all, in the three “smart” chapters, this special edition also offers the best of Huawei in terms of sensors and is one of the best watches on the market in this field. I won’t insist more here because the classic Watch 4 Pro model has been released for a few months on the market and there are already enough more detailed reviews if you are interested in the health or sports part.

Official autonomy is up to 4.5 days of normal use. In my experience, I got 3.5 days of normal use. There is an Ultra Long Battery Life mode that extends the battery life to 12-20 days by reducing certain functions and animations.

The watch charges wirelessly. I didn’t take the included charger out of the box, but charged it directly on my wireless charger. The metal bracelet protrudes too far down from the watch and therefore keeps it arched on a classic charger. I unscrewed it from one end, seeing as I just push a little button on it for that, and then the angle shrunk and the watch wirelessly charged without a hitch. You can also charge it from a power bank with wireless or on the back of mobile phones with reverse wireless charging, if needed.

Drawing the line, they did well as a special edition for space enthusiasts. Top quality materials, very good construction, included digital faces that have proven beyond my expectations. Autonomy is reasonable, the sensors monitor almost everything possible in terms of health and sports.

The launch price is 3,299 lei. At the moment I only see it on the Huawei Store and the price includes Freebuds 5i headphones. Watch 4 Pro normally launched at 3,000 lei, if I remember correctly, and today it can be found for around 2,600 lei. It’s possible that the price of the Space Edition will also drop over time, depending on whether it will be a mainstream or niche product.