Hublot Big Bang e Premier League review

The Hublot Big Bang e Premier League is the Swiss watch brand’s latest smartwatch that wraps up Wear OS in a design that you’re going to have spend even more this time to own.

It’s keeping the football theme going after launching World Cup and Champions League-themed smartwatches over the last few years. Now it’s showing some love to the Premier League, where it has Tottenham Hotspur head coach Jose Mourinho is also known to show off a Hublot in the dugout.

You’ll need a Premier League wage to strap on the Big Bang e as it brandishes a £4,300 price tag. That’s even more expensive than watches from LVMH stablemates, such as the Tag Heuer Connected, Louis Vuitton Tambour Horizon and the Big Bang World Cup Russia 2018 smartwatch that we have also had the pleasure of spending some time with.

On top of Google’s Wear OS, Hublot offers some its own software extras including Hublot-themed watch faces and a Premier League version of the Hublot loves football app.

We’ve been able to spend some time living with the Hublot Big Bang e Premier League living it with over a weekend of fixtures to find out if it makes a good smartwatch you should consider buying. If you can actually get hold of one that is.

Hublot Big Bang e Premier League: Design and screen

Hublot’s first Big Bang smartwatch was a hulking beast, but was at least in keeping with that signature bold, Big Bang watch look. These are not subtle watches by any stretch of the imagination.

With the Big Bang e Premier League, like the Champions League version, it’s dropped from a 49mm sized case to a 42mm one and it’s definitely for the better. That’s a smaller case than the one featured on the Tag Heuer Connected 2020 edition (45mm).

It’s a step in the right direction in our eyes, but it doesn’t mean it loses the essence of what makes this a Big Bang watch. From the big numbers on the bezel to the satin-look titanium case, sapphire crystal lens and ceramic buckle, it’s every bit a luxury smartwatch and it’s one that will garner attention for the right reasons.

There may well be some indifference over the accompanying purple fabric watch band that uses velcro to keep it in place on your wrist. We’re fans and think it gives it a more appealing, casual watch look, but we know not everyone will feel the same. Hublot knows that too, and that’s why it also offers the ability to pair it up with other fabric bands as well as calf an alligator leather bands, which will add another £500-£600 onto the price.

Hublot doesn’t disappoint as far as offering a good quality touchscreen to host its Wear OS-powered smarts. It’s 1.2-inch, 390 x 390 resolution AMOLED display that’s fully round and does offer an always-on screen mode. It’s offering the same screen size and resolution as the Huawei Watch GT 2 to give you an idea of what to expect here. It’s bright, sharp and offers good viewing angles indoors, though can struggle a little more in bright sunlight.

When you don’t want to swipe your fingers over the screen, there’s a crown here two that can be pressed to launch Google Assistant and twist to scroll through screens. That scrolling action is a little on the stiff side, which makes scrolling a little slow going, but it does what it promises to do in a solid enough fashion.

As a package, it’s water resistant up to 30 metres, which does make it suitable for swimming and showering if you’re happy to keep this luxury smartwatch on at all times.

Hublot Big Bang e Premier League: Wear OS and Hublot extras

Like previous Hublot smartwatches, the watchmaker turns to Google Wear OS to provide the smart features and it’s running on the latest version of Google’s smartwatch operating system.

There’s a Snapdragon Wear 3100 processor powering things with 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage. So it’s a few iterations short of the latest Wear 4100+ that’s starting to emerge in Wear OS smartwatches.

While it’s not packing the latest chipset tech, performance has been on the whole fine. There has been the odd occasion where it’s stuttered to open some settings menus and felt a little overwhelmed at lower battery levels. Overall though, it’s been a generally fine operator.

From a Wear OS perspective, it’s all a very familiar experience. It’s the same gestures to navigate, you’ve got Tiles (widgets) you can add, customisable watch faces, download apps directly from the watch and Google Pay and its suite of Fit apps is on board here too. New additions like the very important Handwash timer is also included here too.

In a trend that we are seeing on more Wear OS watches, Hublot has added some of its own software too and that presence of software from the hardware makers is growing. You will of course find a very nice array of Hublot’s own inspired by Big Bang watch faces that do look great on the AMOLED display.

You also have a chronometer and most interestingly, the Hublot Store. Before you start thinking this some kind of equivalent to Google’s own Play Store, it’s a place where Hublot makes it easier to find its own Premier League and Champions League interactive faces.

Those faces are the real standouts here and really well executed faces that offer richer complications and features. Much like its World Cup watch face, it counts down to kick off times and usefully keeps track of the half time interval to make sure you don’t miss the start of the second half.

You’ll get animated updates for goals scored, substitutions and uses the face to countdown the time left in the game. There’s also a dedicated place to check lineups and get player details.

If you’re watching pretty much every game right now (like we are), it’s probably the not most useful. Finding out a substitution when you’ve momentarily moved away from the TV is actually quite useful.

As we said, it’s really well executed Premier League-themed experience and it’s the same for Champions League version as well. Other than that, it’s very much a familiar Wear OS experience where you’ll love some things and not so much other things.

Hublot Big Bang e Premier League: Sports and fitness tracking

If you’re brave enough to want to get this luxury smartwatch sweaty, then you’re relying on Google’s own apps and the third party apps lurking in the Google Play Store to track it all. That’ll give you features like step tracking, but it’s highly unlikely to be one you’re going to want to take to bed or will be able to take to bed based on its promised battery life.

There’s connected GPS support for outdoor activity tracking, an accelerometer to measure indoor activity, but no heart rate monitor here. The original included GPS and a heart rate sensor, though that may well have contributed to its size and why this version sits much smaller on the wrist.

We’ve focused our testing time using it for outdoor running, indoor rowing and home workout sessions on Fiit. Using Google’s Fit Workout for indoor tracking however raises the issue that there’s no heart rate sensor on board here. So for activities that rely on it, particularly indoors, it’s not going to be hugely useful.

Run tracking compared: Hublot (left), Garmin Enduro (centre) and Under Armour connected shoes (right)

Moving outdoors, we downloaded the Strava Wear OS app to track our activities and found that the connected GPS did a good enough job, but came up a little short against the Garmin Enduro multisports watch and a pair of Under Armour’s connected running shoes. Distance tracking wasn’t hugely off, but it was off. It also clocked us going slightly quicker on average too.

If you compare its sports and fitness tracking features to LVMH stablemate Tag Heuer and its Connected smartwatch, the Big Bang isn’t as well equipped. Though you have to consider how much you want to work out with.a smartwatch that costs as much as the Big Bang e Premier League does.

Hublot Big Bang e Premier League: Battery life

The Big Bang e doesn’t bang when it comes to battery life that’s for sure. There’s a 300mAh capacity battery onboard that should deliver around a day’s use. Dropping it on the charging puck when it hits zero, will take 2.5 hours to get back up to 100%. So it’s not a fast charger either.

Based on our experience, around a day is exactly what we got and not more than that. By about 10pm, it was out of battery on days where we tracked a 30 minute exercise and had notifications streaming through.

The chances of getting beyond that day is small. If you can deal with a smartwatch clocking off before the end of the day, then you’ll probably be happy here.

Bottom line though, this smartwatch is going stay alive for less than 24 hours off a single charge.

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