Cheap Smart Watch? Honor Watch Magic Review
The smart watch market has gotten pretty quiet over the last few years, with a steady amount of new models being incrementally improved over time, but nothing substantial enough to make everyone want one. One of the biggest issues was price, with popular early models costing £200-£300 like the moto 360, it created a pretty high barrier to entry, one that Apple is currently still holding onto with its £400 minimum Watch pricing.
Honor, or should I say it’s parent company Huawei, think they’ve got something to remedy that, with this, the Honor Watch. Now before we really dive into this thing, I need to set your expectations. If you are looking for a fitness tracker that happens to connect to your phone and gets some notifications, then this could be for you. If you want a smart watch that can actually interact with notifications, control media playback, send text messages, make calls and use apps, then this is most definitely not for you.
So if we look at this from a ‘smart’ fitness tracker perspective, it’s pretty interesting. You’ve got real time heart rate monitoring that you can leave on 24/7 or turn on and off via the app – and only the app. You’ve got sleep analysis, which again, through the app you can see quite a lot of detail and even gives you an idea of what’s normal and what isn’t. You’ve got waterproofing to 5ATM, which means you can leave this on 24/7, no matter what, and it *should* survive.
Fitness wise you’ve also got a number of exclusively cardio workout options which help you track your exercise and can even be quick launched with the lower of the 2 included buttons. The top one opens the apps menu.
Speaking of apps, you can’t use any on this. This is a custom version of a watch OS which is incredibly locked down, mostly so you get the fairly impressive 7 day battery life – although we will cover that in a sec. You really don’t get much normal “smart watch” features, you can read notifications that come through, assuming the watch stays connected to your phone, although they all use the same icon so you have no idea if you are reading a marketing email, or a whatsapp from your friends.
And as I alluded to at the start, interaction with those notifications doesn’t work. Some like calls I think you can hang up, but there’s no option to reply to texts, or even control media playback which I view as one of the best features I’ve used on smart watches personally.
And since we are well into the “what’s wrong with this” section, I need to talk about the app. It’s the Huawei health app, not the regular Huawei watch app, it regularly disconnects the watch and requires you to unpair and re-pair it with the phone around once a day for me, and they’ve designed it so the vast majority of the information you’d actually like to know about is only viewable on the app, not on the watch itself.
Want to know about your sleeping pattern? Better open the app and unpair then re-pair the watch. Want to know about your heart rate from last night? App. Want to know anything about your step count bar the total for today? App. It’s not the end of the world, but when you have a 1.2 inch 390×390 AMOLED display to play with, it’d be nice to have even a little bit more information available.
And finally we have to talk about battery life. It’s got a tiny 178mAh battery inside – for some context, most phones have between 2000 and 4000mAh inside right now – which with almost everything disabled – that is sleep monitoring, heart rate tracking, weather updates and all, you’ll get about 7 days of battery life. With it all turned on though, you get around 3 days. Happily though it charges with a magnetic base and goes from dead to full in about an hour.
So, should you buy one of these? Well, MSRP is nearing £180 for one, and at that price you may as well go and buy the cheaper but more functional FitBit Versa, but BangGood – the nice folks who sent this over to me – are currently selling it for around £110, and at that price point it’s certainly interesting. If you want a fitness tracker that can occasionally let you check your messages without having to pull out your phone, then definitely. If you want a proper smart watch though, there are other, better, options for you for not too dissimilar money.
Want one? Amazon: http://techteamgb.co.uk/honorwatch
Products shown provided by: BangGood
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TechteamGB assumes no liability for damage, misuse or misunderstanding of the information contained in this video. Use this information at your own risk. TechteamGB cannot guarantee any particular result from the information contained in this video, and all information was presented as correct as of filming. TechteamGB accepts no liability for information being proven incorrect after the creation of the video, and all information should be taken as opinion and guidance, not fact. This video was not sponsored by anyone, and TechteamGB does not accept monetary – or non-monetary – benefits to alter opinions or results.
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