Smart Watches are DEAD. Honor Band 5 Review
Smart watches, as a product segment, tend to have a lot of trade offs. They cost a lot – a “budget” one is still over £100, they can be pretty bulky and large – sometimes heavy too – and more often than not, have horrific battery life for something that is meant to spend it’s life literally attached to you. So, when Honor, a sub brand of Huawei, said they had something that could remedy all those issues, I thought I should take a look.
This is their Honor Band 5 – a £30 smart fitness tracker that can do almost everything at least a budget smart watch can do, but has a week of battery life, and like I said, costs just £30. Let me show you want I mean…
Lets start with it’s main purpose, fitness tracking. It does the usual step counting, but also has a small list of activities you can start where it’ll track your heart rate – more on that in a sec – and motion to estimate how many calories you’ve burned and all that. While that sort of stuff is common among smart watches, it’s still reasonably accurate on this crazy cheap band, and pretty intuitive and easy to use. You can check your progress and the saved data from the Huawei Health app where you can see how you’ve done over the last day, week, month and year.
On the health side of things, this is pretty remarkable. Like I mentioned, it’ll track your heart rate during exercise or when you manually ask it to, but you can also set it to track it 24/7, either on it’s “smart” setting that’ll only check it if you move, and only for a few seconds at a time, or the full on constant mode that’ll drain your battery nice and quick. But it’s not just heart rate it can do – it can also check your blood o2 levels too. It’s a bit picky about when it’ll do it, but the fact a £30 smart band has blood o2 measurement is pretty insane.
Then, there is the sleep tracking. Now all these trackers’ sleep tracking tends to be pretty inaccurate, but this one seems a lot closer than most. On the band itself it’ll only tell you how long it thinks you were asleep for, but once you jump into the health app you’ll see a pretty detailed breakdown of when it thinks you were in light, deep and REM sleep, and to me that’s probably not too far off being accurate from my experience.
You’ve heard me call this thing a “smart” band, but so far it’s just a decent fitness tracker – what makes it “smart”? Well, not too much, but one nice feature is notifications from your phone. It’ll let you read texts or tweets, decline calls – and probably more importantly see who is calling – and all that while it’s connected via bluetooth. It does drop out a lot, but when it is connected, it’s a great value add. It can also control your music playing from your phone too, the usual play/pause, volume up/down and back/skip options as well as title and song, which again is a great value add on this cheap of a product.
Now you might think that all those features in such a physically small device must mean it only lasts for like a day on it’s tiny battery, right? Well, to much surprise, no. Mine has lasted over a week and it’s not dead yet. I’ve had sleep tracking and 24 hour smart heart rate monitoring on the whole time too. I think it’d last nearing 2 weeks like this, maybe a bit less, which honestly is crazy. Charging is also pretty easy too, it comes with a little cradle you can pop it into, it’s a bit finicky and you actually have to plug it in to turn it on as there are no actual buttons on it, but it doesn’t take long to charge so another bonus.
So you’ve heard how amazing this is, what’s the catch? Well, depending on who you ask, Huawei products might be the most sound of investments. You do have to give the Huawei Mobile Services app basically every permission under the sun, which I know some may not be too comfortable with and I should point out it doesn’t use WearOS or anything like that, all the notifications are based on it’s own app pushing them to your band which on top of it disconnecting every 5 minutes means they have access to every notification you get too.
Of course, you can use it as a “dumb” band only connecting it once in a blue moon to update it or to check in on your sleep or activity goals, and for the money I really can’t recommend it enough for that. It’s a product that really makes me think twice about bothering with a smart watch again, when I can have something so cheap, light, and feature rich like this.
Want one? Amazon: https://techteamgb.co.uk/honorband5
Products shown provided by: Honor
HONOR Band 5 Argos Store: https://www.argos.co.uk/product/2991928?cmpid=SP_HUAWEI_HONOR
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