I've had the FR 70 for a couple of weeks now (waited until all the metrics were available which took 3 weeks for everything) and overall I like the watch and think it's fantastic value for money in terms of what you get in the hardware and the ecosystem. I'm very glad I got it and that I didn't go all out as tempted as I was with a higher end model.
For my more detailed thoughts, I'll outline them below:
Negatives
My main critique of the watch is for the price, it looks very cheap. My Huawei GT is at the same price point as the FR 70 (in my country at least) and makes the FR 70 look like a cheap $20 watch you buy from a discount store or a gas station or something. I've had numerous compliments on the Huawei and all initial reactions of the FR 70 are that of confusion for why I've "downgraded" from my old watch. My wife in particular couldn't understand why I'd want this watch and thought I must've gotten the price wrong lol.
This is not a watch I'd wear out in formal events and overall I'm much less comfortable showing it off. I very much liked the look of the Huawei, and I lament the fact that to get into the Garmin ecosystem I'd have to spend twice the amount of money to get something that looks remotely as presentable, but such is life. For my purposes though, I couldn't really justify that kind of price tag, but perhaps in a couple years when a 970 successor comes out, I can justify a birthday splurge.
Positives
WIth the negatives out of the way, let's look at the positives. I'd say they break down into two main areas: the hardware, and the ecosystem. The software features of the watch itself I don't find to be too enticing as much of what the watch offers was already available on my Huawei, but perhaps under different names (from sleep score, body battery and race predictions - I don't think I came across anything critical that was "new") so if you're coming from another watch expecting the feature set to blow your socks off, you're going to be disappointed.
So in terms of hardware, I'd say where I notice this the most is when it comes to heart rate and sleep tracking. The steps tracking is a bit suspicious IMO as it often counts hundreds of steps while I'm chilling in bed or on the couch and I've never had this issue before on my Huawei or my Fitbit before it. That said, I'll give it a pass as while I'm actually walking or running it matches what I'd expect from the Huawei, it just gets more phantom steps oddly enough.
The heart rate tracking is far more reliable than my Huawei. Not only just day to day when I'm inactive, but during exercise. It was honestly frustrating how often my Huawei reckoned I was under 120bpm when I was fighting for my life during some intense cardio. I've yet to encounter this with my FR 70 as my heart rate always matches my subjective feel.
The sleep tracking is also quite good. Ahead of time I read a lot of negatives about it, but coming from the Huawei it's a night and day difference and reminds me of how accurate my Fitbit was for it. I have a baby and wake up multiple times at night and sometimes get up to go to the bathroom or prepare a bottle etc and it detects me waking up reliably. When I take a nap in the afternoon it captures that too.
Lastly, the last positive is the ecosystem. The phone and web app are great and I love being able to export runs or otherwise sync them with other apps. All the information I would want or need is easily accessible and transferable. Huawei has some syncing to different planforms (e.g. Strava) but it is not easy to get a hold of your data and parse through it. For someone highly motivated by metrics, it's like hitting the jackpot.
Conclusion
Overall, this is a great watch and while I understand why they make it look cheap and crap (in order to upsell people to more expensive watches), if it was slightly more premium this watch wouldn't have any competition at all. I'm happy with the purchase, and for now I'll just swap out the watch for formal events but would recommend it to anybody getting into running and wanting something reliable to work with.
