Huawei announces first smartwatches running HarmonyOS: the Huawei Watch 3 and Huawei Watch 3 Pro for £349.99 and £499.99 in the UK, available June 18 and 28
With eSIM compatibility and support for video calls over MeeTime — Huawei has announced its first smartwatches running …
Context & Ripple Effects
Huawei’s watch software has moved from the Android Wear-based Watch 2 lineup to LiteOS on the Watch GT 2. Watch 3 makes HarmonyOS the new platform layer for the company’s smartwatch range.
The launch arrives alongside Huawei’s stated plan to deploy HarmonyOS across phones, tablets and watches, including the Mate 40, Mate X2 and MatePad Pro. That makes the Watch 3 rollout an early consumer-facing test of the multi-device strategy in the UK.
First-order effects
- Huawei gives UK buyers two premium Watch 3 models running HarmonyOS, with eSIM support and MeeTime video calling rather than the software used by its earlier watch lines.
- The Watch 3 and Watch 3 Pro become the wearable endpoints in Huawei’s broader HarmonyOS device rollout, with availability beginning on different June dates.
Second-order effects
- Huawei must make the cross-device experience between its HarmonyOS watches, phones and tablets compelling enough to justify a platform transition from its earlier Android Wear and LiteOS approaches.
- MeeTime support gives Huawei a watch-based communications feature whose value depends on adoption across the company’s wider HarmonyOS device base.
Third-order effects
- If Huawei continues deploying HarmonyOS across product categories, smartwatch competition increasingly turns on ecosystem interoperability and services rather than watch hardware alone.
- The rollout points to a more vertically integrated wearable strategy in which Huawei controls the operating-system layer across its own devices, though its traction depends on the breadth of that device ecosystem.
The trend: Smartwatches are becoming nodes in vendor-controlled multi-device software ecosystems, with interoperability shifting the competitive moat.