HONOR Watch 6 Review: Battery Life That Redefines the Category

The post HONOR Watch 6 Review: Battery Life That Redefines the Category appeared first on Android Headlines .

HONOR‘s smartwatches are well-known in certain parts of the world, Europe included. The company has been making them for quite some time. That experience is kind of obvious when you check out HONOR’s latest and greatest smartwatch to date, the HONOR Watch 6.

That’s the watch we’re here to review, and a watch I’ve been wearing on my wrist for about three weeks at this point. I have plenty to say. The HONOR Watch 6 does surprise in several ways, but in a positive way.

You’ll be surprised not only by its battery capacity, but its battery life as well. Its design may also look familiar, and for a good reason, and so on. We’ll talk about all that below.

So, without further ado, let’s see what HONOR’s latest wearable offering has to offer. HONOR Watch 6 Rating €249.90 Three weeks on one charge, and it still didn’t miss a beat. Pros & Cons Pros Oustanding battery life Solid performance Good, bright display Fast charging A ton of sports modes Plenty of useful health features Comfortable to wear Standard watch band connectors Good software despite the fact it’s not Wear OS Cons Charging via POGO pins No third-party apps Disclaimer HONOR supplied us with a review unit of the HONOR Watch 6, but didn’t have a say in our opinion, nor did they see this review before you.

We’ve been using the device for over two weeks before forming an opinion. HONOR Specs HONOR Watch 6 Specs Display Size 1.46 inches Display Resolution 464 x 464 Refresh Rate 60Hz Dimensions 46.5 x 46.5 x 10.8 mm Weight 210 grams Chipset N/A RAM N/A Storage N/A Battery 980mAh

Charging Magnetic (charger included) OS MagicOS Network and Connectivity Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth 5.4, NFC Water Resistance IP69 & 5ATM Colors Shadow Black, Twilight Brown View Device Specs HONOR Watch 6 Review: Design If the HONOR Watch 6 looks familiar, you’re not imagining things.

It really does look similar to the Huawei Watch GT 6 Pro, which is not a bad thing at all. HONOR was once Huawei’s company after all. In any case, the watch has a round display and a round design as well, with some design accents to make it look sleeker.

Parts of its top bezel are uneven, for example, plus the shell of the watch itself is not completely round. It offers a familiar design There are two buttons included on it. The button in the top-right corner serves as both a button and a rotating crown.

That button is easy to feel due to its finish, plus it has a completely different shape than the bottom-right button. That second button is flat, and it serves as a customizable key. I could honestly do without the writing on the top bezel, which the vast majority of watches have, but that’s just a preference.

You stop noticing it after a while. The HONOR Watch 6’s frame is made out of stainless steel, while the watch comes in two variants. The Twiling Brown model not only has a silver color, but a brown leather strap.

The Shadow Black model, the one I have here, is black, and it has a black rubber (or as HONOR calls it, fluoroelastomer) strap. I can only speak of the watch I have, of course. That one is very comfortable.

The strap is very soft and comfortable to wear, while the watch’s bottom part did not poke me in the hand or anything like that. It’s surprisingly light considering the included battery The HONOR Watch 6 is not exactly heavy either. It weighs 41 grams without the strap.

The Twilight Brown model is a bit heavier at 50 grams. That’s also surprising considering the beefy battery that HONOR opted for. That’s something we’ll talk more about in the battery section.

The design here is almost perfect, in my opinion. It doesn’t get much (if at all) better when it comes to smartwatches. HONOR Watch 6 Review: What’s in the Box With the HONOR Watch 6, you get everything you need in the retail box.

In addition to the watch itself, you’ll also find a charger, which is permanently connected to the charging cable. At the end of that cable is a USB-A connector. The charging puck itself is not fully wireless, as it has pogo pins on it.

It magnetizes to the bottom of the watch, at which point charging commences. On top of all this, there’s also some paperwork in the box, of course. HONOR Watch 6 Review: Display The HONOR Watch 6 features a 1.46-inch AMOLED display.

The display is round, and it offers 317 PPI. This watch offers a peak brightness of 3,000 nits. HONOR also refers to it as a hybrid LTPS display.

The company said that the whole point of it was for it to be easily visible in any condition, even under sunlight, while you’re running, cycling, or whatever else you’re doing. HONOR certainly managed to achieve that, that’s for sure. Before we get to my experience with it, let me just mention that the watch does support the touch-to-wake feature, which is not the case with every watch.

Flick to power on the display is the main way of using it, though, of course. HONOR also implemented the Wet Touch Control feature here, for the display to remain responsive even if you get caught in the rain. The display is great, basically Now, as far as my experience with this display... it’s outstanding.

I don’t have a single complaint here. It covers all the main bases that a smartwatch display should cover, in my opinion. The display is vivid, the colors are great.

It is also more than sharp enough for whatever you’ll use it for, and even the viewing angles are quite good. Touch response is excellent even when the display is wet, and it gets bright enough under literally any condition. I’ve used it indoors and outdoors, in day and night, in sun and rain...

no issues whatsoever. Even automatic brightness adapts well to all those conditions, so I never felt like the display was too dim or too bright. I can highly recommend it.

HONOR Watch 6 Review: Performance We don’t know what processor HONOR used in this watch, but I can attest that it works great. More on that soon. We also know that the company included 4GB of storage inside the device.

Having said that, the watch offers great performance. While slight stutters can be seen here and there, as on every other device, I did not experience noticeable lag or anything like that. In fact, I’d say the general system performance in on the same level as various other flagship smartwatches available on the market Smooth performance & subtle animations HONOR did implement animations here, but they’re very fast and subtle, which is a great combination when it comes to smartwatches.

Smartphones are something else entirely, and these animations have nothing to do with MagicOS on smartphones and tablets. Regardless of whether I used the stopwatch, one of the many sports modes, going through notifications, or checking the weather, everything was nice and smooth. That is not surprising, though, based on my experience with previous HONOR watches.

The watch never got too warm, not even when I spent my days outside at very high temperatures (it’s summer here). I took it swimming for quite long periods, and it didn’t affect it either. I did manage to leave a mark on the top bezel when I grazed it on something.

I’m not sure what, as I was being careful, but it obviously happened. In any case, I don’t really have much to complain about in terms of general performance. We’ll talk more about fitness and health later on.

HONOR Watch 6 Review: Battery Life When I received official information about the HONOR Watch 6, one thing stuck with me... the watch’s battery capacity. This thing comes with a 980mAh battery, which is a huge battery for a smartwatch. The Galaxy Watch 8, for example, has a 435mAh battery, while the Apple Watch Ultra 3 includes a 599mAh battery on the inside.

Those are just two examples, but the point is, nothing comes close to the HONOR Watch 6. The best of all? You’d never be able to tell that there’s such a battery included here.

The watch is as thin or thinner than the competition, and just as light or lighter. So, considering that battery capacity, I was really wondering what will I get in terms of battery life here. HONOR’s watches usually have great battery life (1 week+), even with notably lower capacities, so... this was intriguing.

The good news is... the battery life is outstanding. Let’s go over the official claims first.

HONOR claims that this watch can last for up to 17 days in “typical usage scenarios,” while in “long-endurance usage scenarios” it can last for up to 35 days. We won’t go into battery life saving modes and all that. That’s not something we do as part of testing.

We’re always trying to use the watch as most people would to see the actual battery life. It offers outstanding battery life, which is difficult to beat With that in mind. I’ve been using the watch for well over three weeks at this point, perhaps even a month.

How long did it last on a single charge? Well, in a week, I lost 34% of the battery. It took the watch 10 days to lose slightly over half of its charge.

It lasted 20 days on a single charge for me. Granted, in the last week and a half, I barely used it other than for notifications. Do note that I did not disable features that were on by default, and most of them are on.

So, yes, HONOR’s claim of a 17-day battery life under typical usage scenarios is spot on. Considering how great the battery life is here, you can easily take this watch with you when you go to a vacation and not bring a charger with it. Everything less than that is also easily doable.

With slightly more modest use, this watch can last up to 3 weeks, especially if you disable some of its features that you’re not planning to use. I love that, in all honesty. I do think watches should not be charged for at least two weeks, and this one delivers on that and then some.

Getting well over 2 weeks of battery life is not a problem at all What about charging? Well, I managed to fully charge the watch in about an hour. It was at 4% when I placed it on a charger.

That’s outstanding considering that you get around two and a half weeks of use after doing that. It’s charging via a magnetic dock, which, unfortunately, has POGO pins, instead of offering fully wireless charging. It’s a small thing, but it’s worth noting.

So do keep in mind that you may have to clean those POGO pins from time to time. HONOR Watch 6 Review: Software The HONOR Watch 6 does not come with Wear OS from Google, not at all. If that were the case, its battery life would be much worse, in all honesty.

The very best Wear OS watch battery life is around 3-4 days, from what we’ve seen. The HONOR Watch 6 comes with HONOR’s very own MagicOS. Yes, the software that the company uses on its phones as well, but this is a watch version, and it’s considerably different, of course.

Nice-looking UI with snappy animations In general, I liked my experience with this software. It’s very smooth, the animations are fast and unobtrusive, and the general UI layout is what you’d expect. Your notifications are a swipe away, with a bottom-up swipe, while doing the opposite brings quick toggles.

Swiping from left to right or the opposite of that will let you scroll through your widgets. With a rotating crown/button on the side you can access your app drawer. That’s basically it.

It’s an experience that you’re used to, basically, if you’ve used other smartwatches. You’re getting all the standard apps here, including the Stopwatch, Alarm, Calendar, Timer, Compass, and so on. They all work fine, in all honesty.

If you are heavy on third-party apps, as you may be used to from Wear OS, well, that’s not what you’ll get here. You cannot grab third-party apps; this watch, other than the pre-installed apps, serves as a mirror for your phone. It also has a capable music player, which you can set to play music from your watch or from your phone.

Yes, you can transfer some music to the watch if you want. Some of you won’t be able to use it for payments There are some things that bothered me, though, of course. First and foremost, payments.

HONOR offers this feature via Fidesmo, a company it partnered up with. The option is listed in the HONOR Health app, which you have to grab from the Google Play Store to set up the watch anyway. The thing is, payments are not supported everywhere.

In Croatia, for example, they’re not supported. That makes me wonder if it’s the same thing in the rest of the EU. If you’re used to paying with your watch, that could be a problem here.

Furthermore, while I love how the watch handles notifications in general, you cannot swipe away a single card. You have to dismiss them all at once. This is not much of a problem, as they won’t disappear from your phone when you do it, which is something I love.

If you sort an unread notification on your phone, however, that will be mirrored to the watch, and you won’t have to dismiss the same card from the watch. I actually love this system, though I’d love it even more if swiping away a single card from the watch was a possibility, and not only all at once. HONOR Watch 6 Review: Health & Fitness HONOR made sure that this watch is well-equipped from both health and fitness perspectives.

Let’s talk about fitness first. There are over 120 sports modes at your disposal here. Some of them can be activated on their own, as the watch will, for example, ask you whether you want to start logging a walking exercise after you’ve been continuously walking for a while.

Others need to be manually fired up from the watch, which is not a problem whatsoever. HONOR added more specialized sports modes here HONOR even included some specialized sports modes to this watch. A professional football mode is here, and it can provide a wealth of data.

You can view your step count and distance in real time, and after the exercise, you can even check your top sprint speed, average speed, and segment data. My footballing days are behind me, unfortunately, but it would be very cool to have them back in the day. A professional badminton mode is also here, and the same for outdoor trail running & exploration.

A bunch of other exercises can be found on the list. Including indoor running, outdoor running, indoor bicycle ride, outdoor bicycle ride, mountain hike, hike, pool swim, skiing, snowboarding, elliptical, and much, much more. While wearing the watch, I went swimming, went for a bunch of walks, went on several bicycle rides, and tried out the elliptical.

I have to say that it did a fine job with all those, and that includes GPS data as well. HONOR used to have less accurate GPS in the past; this one does a fine job from what I can tell, though I was not in spotty signal areas. That could be due to HONOR’s AccuTrack System, which uses a new GNSS chip and dual-band GPS tech.

New posture analysis is also available, as is the AI Running Coach feature. All the health bases are covered and then some What about health? All the standards are here, including heart rate tracking.

This watch offers so much more than that, though. The HONOR Watch 6 is capable of something called Body Energy Assessment. It integrates multi-dimensional health data, including heart rate, HRV, sleep, and stress to detect the body’s energy status.

Blood pressure trend monitoring is also on board, and it can generate risk assessment results within 3 days, which can be very useful to some people. You can also get a quick health scan with a single tap. Sleep tracking is also on board, of course, and more.

Now, I did find the Body Energy Assessment feature to be quite useful, and the same goes for Quick Health Scan. It’s a neat way of getting a bunch of information in the same place. I used the latter very often, I have to say, even though that’s not really something you need to do.

Sleep tracking was good in general. I also love that when I wake up I can manually tell the watch I woke up, and it’ll recognize that. Almost every smartwatch that I’ve used over the years doesn’t realize I woke up and grabbed my phone.

The thing is,I usually stay in bed going through the news, and thus the watches always count an extra half-hour of sleep or something like that. I love the fact that I can manually disable sleep tracking as the option is right there on the screen. I did not have problems with any of the fitness and health features I tried out.

HONOR Watch 6 Review: Audio The HONOR Watch 6 does come with a speaker, yes. It’s side-facing, and...

well, it’s not great, but at the same time it’s what you’d expect. I feel like I’m repeating myself when it comes to speakers on watches. Why?

Because none of them is great. Smartwatch makers are limited by space, and we’re always looking at mono speakers. So, it’s good enough for what it is, but don’t expect miracles.

You can easily conduct calls, if you’d like, but stay away from loud environments while you’re doing so. Speaking of calls, there’s a microphone here as well. Yes, you can take calls directly on the watch if you want, and well... the watch does a fine job.

Once again, don’t expect phone-level quality. But in terms of smartwatch voice call quality, it’s fine. People I’ve called did not complain about the quality, but several of them said I sound a bit weird and “not as good.”

That is a normal reaction when you’re talking through a smartwatch. The functionality is there if you need it, though. HONOR Watch 6 Review: Should you buy it?

Should you consider buying the HONOR Watch 6? Yes! This is actually one of the easiest smartwatch recommendations I’ve made, especially to regular folk who are not extreme fitness buffs.

This watch covers all the basics, and then some. It has some of the best battery life you’re get in a watch, the performance is great, and so is the display. There are plenty of sports modes included, and they work fine from what I can tell.

The same goes for health features; all the ones most of you will need are here, and there’s no issue there. HONOR also offers various deals for its watches, often, especially through its official website, so chances are you’ll find one, which usually cuts the price down one way or the other. This is the very best HONOR smartwatch I’ve used, and it’s not even close.

You should buy the HONOR Watch 6 if you: Want a smartwatch with outstanding battery life Plan on using third-party watch bands Are into a bunch of different sports activities Don’t need third-party apps on a watch Appreciate a comfortable watch with a large display You shouldn’t buy the HONOR Watch 6 if you: Never plan on cleaning POGO pins Need to have third-party apps installed on a watch The post HONOR Watch 6 Review: Battery Life That Redefines the Category appeared first on Android Headlines .