Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've had this watch a week now, and after a very rocky start I'm enjoying this watch. My previous watch was a Microsoft Band 2; a marvel of UI engineering combined with incredibly poor hardware reliability -- the non-replaceable strap broke 4 times in a year and now its out of warranty). But anyway, I want to share my Huawei Watch 2 (HW2) experience to help others get to where they can enjoy this. I paired my HW2 with the Amazon branded Alcatel A30 -- an amazing phone for the price! I've paired it from scratch twice now; the first pairing was seamless. Later after I reset my watch and paired again it would get fail on "copy your google account" with no useful error message; I found rebooting my wireless router fixed the problem (no idea why this helps, perhaps clearing the router DNS cache?). A second note about pairing, you really MUST install the "suggested" apps to your phone or your watch will not sync health data. In order these are Android Wear, Huawei Wear, Google Fit, snd Huawei Health. Important quick tip! the first time you ask "what's my heartbeat" the HW2 will ask if you want to use the "Fit" or "Heartbeat" app, CHOOSE THE HEARTBEAT APP! Once you've picked you will NEVER be able to change to the other without resetting your watch, and the Google Fit's heart measurement UI is lame (actually most of google fit is lame, but you need it to save health data from the other apps). As an aside, you are supposed to be able to change your mind about which app to launch, but the option is missing in the current AW2 (Android Wear 2.0) UI. Out of the box battery life sucks, usually less than a day with light usage. However, after disabling wifi on the watch I easily get over days. I'm now in the habit of manually enabling wifi as needed. Related to this there is a problem maintaining the bluetooth connection to my phone. After a while the phone reports it is connected to the watch, but the watch reports it is disconnected from the phone!? Interestingly the behave as they report, notifications from phone to watch happen reliably and immediately, but the watch to phone direction will fail with a "cannot connect" error; the only thing I've found to restablish the two way blue tooth connection is to reboot my phone (rebooting the watch doesn't help). Replying to an incoming text message is never an issue, I can choose to use voice or keyboard, but a big dissappointment was I was unable to initiate a new text message from the phone. If I select message from the "contacts" it jumps to voice input (keyboard entry is not an option?!) and either loops asking "to whom" even though I just picked who I wanted, or even weirder it skips letting me specify a message body immediatly sends a message to my contact with their last name as the body. (Impossible to believe sombody in QA saw this and said yup, works for me, but whatever). The work-around for me was to install Google's "Android Messages" app; using it I can initiate new texts from the watch. Two last complaint: Huawei email support seems to be non-existant, I got no response after filling out their web based form. And the HW2 doesn't do sleep tracking. It really, really should. So after reading this you might wonder why I like this watch, I have two reasons. First, my problems seem to be endemic to Android Wear 2.0 as all the solutions I found are actually from the forums for OTHER brands of watches. More importantly, with the work-arounds mentioned the watch is doing exactly what I got it for, a fitness tracker I can wear 23 hours a day, that I can use to see and respond to messages and calls. Update 2/21/2018 I'm still wearing this watch daily. The Wi-Fi/Bluetooth connectivity related battery problems went away when I upgraded my phone to a Samsung S7 and re-paired the watch. Huawei added automatic sleep tracking and it seems to work well.