Huawei's latest smartwatch has a hiding place for your headphones

Why carry a charging case when you can put your earbuds in your smartwatch instead?

Huawei smartwatch with earbud charging
(Image credit: Huawei)

If you've got a pair of the best wireless earbuds you'll know that going on longer trips means remembering to bring the charging case along with you. Wouldn't it be great if your smartwatch had a secret compartment that you could pop your earbuds into instead? That's exactly what Huawei's come up with.

As originally reported by The Register, Huawei is teasing a flip-top smartwatch with integrated earbud charging. It's so odd that many people think it's fake, but it's a real product and would have been unveiled a few days ago had Huawei not had to postpone its Winter 2022 event.

Huawei Watch Buds: it's a watch! It's a charging case! It's massive!

If you'd like to see some real pictures of the Huawei Watch Buds, Huawei Central has some images that show it open and closed. Closed, it looks like a really chunky watch, very similar to the Huawei Watch GT. Open, and you can see that there are two recesses for the earbuds to fit into and two bits in the top of the watch to attach them to. There's a video too, which I've embedded below.

From a purely engineering point of view, the Watch Buds is (are?) brilliant – but from a putting-it-on-your-wrist point of view, it's clearly is far too thick even for my enormous Gulliver-sized wrists. But thickness isn't necessary a deal-breaker for serious watch fans: the Guinness record-breaking, $5,740 Swiss Military 20,000 feet diver watch is nearly 3cm thick. By comparison, the Huawei is pretty skinny.

We don't know the Huawei Watch Buds launch date or price as yet, but hopefully Huawei will enlighten us soon.

Carrie Marshall

Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series. When she’s not scribbling, she’s the singer in Glaswegian rock band HAVR (havrmusic.com).