Honor Watch 6 Review

Design and screen

• Available in two colours
• Touch controls built for wet weather
• 1.46-inch AMOLED touchscreen

The Honor Watch 6 comes in shadow black or twilight brown, with both featuring 46 mm cases made from aluminium or stainless steel. At 10.8mm thick, it is a bit chunkier than an Apple Watch Series 11 (9.7mm thick). It’s a watch with a bit of heft, but it’s the manageable kind. 

There are removable fluororubber or leather straps attached to those cases, and the leather version I had to strap on featured a traditional watch clasp. Opting for leather does push the price up, however, from £229 to £249. As a package, is the watch design exciting? Not really.

Controlling the software is left to two physical buttons down one side of the watch, with a 1.4-inch, 464 x 464-pixel resolution AMOLED display sitting front and centre. You do have some additional gesture controls that let you rotate your wrist to skip music tracks, snooze an alarm, or answer or reject calls.

The display quality is pretty much on par with most smartwatch screens at this price in terms of vibrancy and visibility. That visibility is aided by a peak screen brightness of 3,000 nits. Honor has also designed the display to make it easier to interact with when hands are wet or sweaty. I’ve tried it, and I’m happy to say it does work well.

On the subject of resistance to water, the IP69 water and dust resistance rating and 5ATM rating provide ample protection for submerging the watch. It’s not, however, fit for activities like scuba diving or recreational diving.

Performance and software

• Runs on Honor’s MagicOS software
• NFC payments available in some territories
• New dynamic video watch faces 

Honor’s smartwatch software, both on and off the watch, has been one of its weaknesses. Like Honor’s other watches, the Watch 6 runs on its MagicOS operating system. That’s a software where the companion app is available on both Android and iOS devices. 

Honor doesn’t reveal what’s powering the Watch 6. We do know that there’s 4GB of RAM helping on that performance front. Bar a few bugs that I put down to an early review device and being regularly prompted to update the software, the watch software generally runs pretty smoothly. It’s not necessarily the slickest smartwatch I’ve used, but it didn’t raise anything to be massively concerned about.

For core smartwatch features like viewing notifications, using music controls, viewing weather reports, or syncing calendar schedules, the Watch 6 does the job. The notification support isn’t the richest you’ll find on a smartwatch. Music controls work with third-party music streaming apps, and you can also sync audio to the watch.

If you want to make calls, I’d say the experience is good enough to want to do that. There’s plenty of volume during calls, and the call clarity, while not top-notch, is absolutely fine. Honor brings NFC payments to the Watch 6, though I was unable to test that feature as it’s not live yet.

If you switch between two phones, the Watch 6 lets you pair both to sync data, such as notifications, so you don’t miss anything. There’s also an AI-powered voice recorder that’s designed to take your voice notes or recordings and summarise what you decided to ramble into your watch during your early-morning walks.

I do need to talk about watch faces. There’s a handful preloaded on the watch with more available to download from the Honor Health app. Honor has even included support for video watch faces to liven up that glance down to check the time, yet I struggled to find a face that really stood out. Having Honor branding plastered across many of the faces felt a bit tacky as well.

Tracking and features

• Dual-band GPS for improved outdoor tracking
• Dedicated football and badminton modes
• Dynamic blood pressure monitoring not available

Like most smartwatches these days, Honor tries to cater for everyone. Whether you like to go for long hikes, prefer a more detailed record of your favourite team sports, or only really care about checking in on vitals like heart rate.

As a sports watch, you’ve got pretty much all of the features you’d hope to see and more. For outdoor workouts, you’ll find the latest dual-band GPS technology. This means the Watch 6 is better equipped to track activities like trail runs or bike rides more accurately and to account for tall buildings and trees that block the GPS signal. 

Among the 120+ sports modes available, there are dedicated modes for badminton and football. That means you can capture strokes and power for badminton matches and see heat maps from your game of football. You can also see insights like training load and fatigue, along with metrics that assess your fitness age.

The core sports tracking is fine, but not outstanding. I tested the GPS against a watch with a non-dual-band GPS setup, and the Watch 6 tended to overreport distance and seemed a bit off on pacing as well.

Heart rate tracking during exercise across a variety of workouts actually performed pretty well, typically matching or producing similar heart rate graphs, as well as average and maximum readings, compared to a chest strap monitor.

Beyond sports, this watch can monitor heart rate, sleep, SpO2 levels, and stress. If you live in Europe and you were hoping to make use of a new blood pressure monitoring feature, you’re sadly out of luck. 

You can also perform a health scan to measure multiple metrics simultaneously. Like exercise heart rate, real-time daily readings looked pretty good and not wildly high. A look at heart rate ranges, though, and there were gaps in the data graphs shown in the Honor Health app.

Sleep tracking seems to be a strength for the Watch 6. At least from a reliability standpoint. I wore it alongside an Oura Ring 5, and for data like sleep duration, sleep scores, as well as deep and light sleep stages, the two devices told similar stories about my time in bed.

Battery life

• Up to 35 days of battery life
• Up to 17 days in smartwatch mode
• Slow to fully charge

Honor shouts most about getting the Watch 6 to last almost a month. In reality, it’s less, but still enough to make sure you’re not charging it every few days. Even with the screen set to always-on mode.

This is a watch that can last up to 35 days, but that’s when you’re using it in its power-saving mode. This restricts features like the always-on screen mode to push the battery further. If you’re not doing that, you can expect up to 17 days of battery life. The daily battery drop I experienced shows this is a smartwatch that can last weeks. Some days it would drop by 5%, other days the drop was smaller.

What isn’t as impressive is the charging rate. It’s pretty slow going and takes around 2 hours to get back up to full battery capacity. Honor uses a proprietary charger, which covers the entire rear of the watch case to help secure it in place.

Should you buy it?