I recently purchased a Huawei Watch W1. Although many other Wear OS smartwatches are available, this one has the smaller 42mm case (recent launches like the Huawei Watch GT have a 46mm case) and it has several really attractive watch faces loaded out of the box:
I paired the watch with my iPhone 6S and the initial setup was pretty painless. The watch connected directly to my home wifi and several updates installed successfully. At that point, I had access to all of the watch faces that I’d seen, and the iPhone forwarded notifications to the watch – happy days.
The downside was that Wear OS App on the iPhone reported that the watch still needed an update – but at this point, the watch no longer connected to my home wifi. I waited a few days, then tried to connect to my office wifi (thinking that was likely to be up to date) – still no joy. It seemed that I was stuck on that old version of Wear OS, which was a shame because I’d read good things about the latest version. Without the update, and without connecting to wifi, I couldn’t use Google Maps or Weather (both need location services which weren’t working in that version either) and Google Fit wasn’t working properly without an update to Google Play Services. There were many articles on the internet about resolving wifi connection issues from the Huawei Watch W1, but I was confident that the problem would be resolved if I could just install the latest Wear OS updates.
The trick that worked was to turn on the Personal Hotspot on my iPhone and connect the watch to that as its wifi connection. Although this meant I was downloading the updates over my mobile data allowance, the patches turned out to be pretty small (less than 20MB each). I suspect that the data was transferred via Bluetooth, which wasn’t quick, but it did enable the watch to install all the Wear OS and Google Play Services updates that it needed. Even better, as I hoped, the watch now connects successfully to wifi and all the issues with location services and Google Fit have been resolved.
Disclaimer: Whilst I currently work for Google, I don’t work on Wear OS/Android and opinions in this blog post are my own.
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