Huawei Band 9 : The Biggest Surprise This Year (and it’s not good…)

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Timestamps:
00:00 Quick Intro
00:44 Heart Rate Test 1 : Indoor Cycling
04:45 Heart Rate Test 2 : Running
06:30 Heart Rate Test 3 : Outdoor Cycling
09:21 Heart Rate Test 4 : Weight Lifting
11:19 Limitations, Recommendations & Conclusions

This video serves as a warning, both to you and to me. I expected when I bought two Huawei Band 9’s that their heart rate performance would be as good, or maybe even better than the Huawei Band 8. The Band 9 looks more or less the same as the Band 8, and the Band 8 was one of the top performers in my testing last year. With a lot more time having passed to develop the hardware and firmware, I was hoping Huawei would be able to squeeze even better heart rate performance out of the Band 9, and I assumed it would be at minimum as good as the Band 8. But the saying appears to be true, when you assume, you make an dot-dot-dot out of you and me. Today we will take a look at my initial testing of the heart rate tracking performance of the brand new Huawei Band 9, and you can judge yourself if you are disappointed too.

Now, this is only an initial test, but it was so surprising that I wanted to get this video out quickly. The question remains, why would the Band 9 do worse than the Band 8? Well, one explanation could lie in the sensor set. It seems Huawei changed the configuration of the LEDs and sensors on the back of the watch. Now, this is not my area of expertise, but looking at it you can see the Band 8 has two sets of LEDs on the outside, with the large photodetector in the middle. The Band 9 on the other hand has aone set of LEDs and photodetector very close to each other on top, then another set of LEDs exactly in the middle of the watch with a second photodetector a bit further down. Now, I don’t know how the signals from the photodetectors are combined, but it might be that the software is not optimized enough yet to deal with these two independent signals. However, this does not seem to be the first watch where Huawei uses multiple photodetectors, looking at the back of some of the GT series watches you can also see a symmetrical ring of photodetectors around a central pair of LEDs, so multiple photodetectors does not appear to be a new concept for Huawei. Now, this is all pure speculation, since I am not even sure if both LEDs and photodetectors on the Band 9 are used to measure heart rate, it might well be that one pair was designed for heart rate and the other for oxygen saturation. Still, these initial findings are disappointing, but we will have to wait for my full review to draw any final conclusions.