Honor Band 6

According to my observations, the fitness band market is now experiencing a resurgence. Fitness bands of days have a lot to offer, from larger screens to squeezing in as many smartwatch-grade functions as possible. In this case, the Honor Band 6 meets the criteria fairly well and appears to be a great wearable on a budget, which I’ll go over in detail in this review.

SPECIFICATIONS

Design

The Honor Band 6 is a design enhancement over the Honor Band 5 – it appears that some of the DNA from the Honor Watch ES is there. It has the conventional body-and-two-straps construction, although the straps are a little more difficult to remove than on typical bands.

The strap is composed of silicone, which isn’t the most comfortable band material in the world, but it’s common for this type of tracker and can be replaced with a third-party strap if desired. It features a lot of holes for a good fit and is rather lengthy, so you don’t have to worry about your wrist being too huge.

Everyday use

There’s also continuous heart rate monitoring and stress monitoring, as well as step and active-hour tracking. You may also set up reminders to notify you if you are inactive for an extended period of time. Sleep tracking was less amazing, since it felt imprecise at times.

While the data you receive, which includes a sleep score, summaries of the types of sleep you get, and a night-by-night comparison, is important, it is not always dependable, particularly when it comes to start and end timings.

Because the sleep tracker frequently confused ‘lying in bed’ with ‘being asleep,’ whether we laid in bed reading before sleep or slept in bed before getting up, our overall sleep duration may be artificially inflated. We could even utilize the band and it wouldn’t detect that we were awake for some reason.

Fitness tracking

For the uninitiated, ‘connected’ GPS refers to the process by which a fitness tracker or watch obtains position data from a smartphone with which it has been paired through Bluetooth. Instead of having their own GPS, low-cost bands choose to utilize this.For some reason, you can only use linked GPS on the Honor Band 6 if you have a Huawei phone or an iPhone.

So if your phone runs vanilla Android, like the one we used to test the band, or if you own a smartphone from Samsung, Xiaomi, OnePlus, Oppo, or any other Android phone manufacturer, you’re out of luck. We couldn’t find any mention of the fact that this essential fitness function doesn’t operate on the great majority of phones in the marketing materials.

Distance tracking on runs was quite inaccurate if you didn’t use this attached GPS, and we regularly noticed that the watch recorded distances that were way off. When we went on our usual 8km run, for example, the watch believed we’d only gone 7km.

Companion app

We’ve previously discussed why certain users will need to use the app, but in general, Huawei Health is one of the best wearable tie-in applications we’ve tried — it simply doesn’t have a chance to shine here.

You can view the routes you’ve travelled throughout exercises, as well as a kilometer-by-kilometer summary of your workout. A more complete summary of all the parameters recorded is also available. Other types of data, such as your sleep habits or stress levels, are also easily accessible.

Huawei Health can also be used to modify the look of your watch face — there are a plethora of alternatives available from an online gallery, however we like to use our own photographs, which you can do here. You can even pick many photographs to transform your watch face into a slideshow on your wrist.

A Huawei Health upgrade midway through our testing period made us question our previously good feelings about the app. When monitoring workouts on your phone, an always-on data display fills the screen even if the phone is not in use. The display also includes exercise settings, such as the ability to pause the timer or silence the distance announcer, as well as a map of your current location.