HTech launched the HONOR Choice Watch in India last month alongside the HONOR X9b smartphone. This has an AMOLED screen, comes with GPS, has Bluetooth calling and promises up to 12 days of battery life. Is it worth the price? Let us dive into the review to find out.
Box contents
- HONOR Choice Watch in White colour
- Charging connector
- Quick start guide
Design and Build
Starting with the design, the HONOR Choice Watch has a large 1.95″ square design. You can see bezels around the screen. This measures 49.7 × 39.9 × 10.2 mm and weighs just 45 grams. The body has a metallic texture that looks premium. It has 5ATM water resistance, so you can even wear when swimming. There is 6-axis IMU sensor (Accelerometer sensor, Gyroscope sensor), Optical heart rate sensor as well as PPG heart rate sensor and also comes with a SpO₂ sensor. It uses Bluetooth 5.3 for connectivity and calling.
The strap is made of skin-friendly material and has a metal buckle. It is super-light and is tight, so it doesn’t slip out easily.
There is a button on the right side to launch apps menu or go home. You can see the microphone on the left side and the speakers are present on the right side.
On the back, you can see the heart rate sensor that has glowing green LED lights when you are using it to measure heart rate. The SpO2 sensor glows in red colour when you measure blood oxygen saturation. You can also see the charging pins on the back. Overall, the build quality is good.
Display and features
Coming to the display, the HONOR CHOICE Watch has a large 1.95-inch (410 × 502 pixels) 332 PPI AMOLED color touch screen 2.5D cured glass display that is bright, thanks to 550 nits peak brightness.
You can set it to turn on when you lift your hand, and the screen turns off in a few seconds to save power. It still attracts fingerprints and is not completely scratch resistant. The touch screen is smooth to use.
The screen is bright, and there is no outdoor visibility issue. You can adjust the brightness from Settings→Display→Brightness Settings. You can adjust it from level 1 till level 5. Level 2 or 3 is enough for indoor, but you need to bump up the brightness to 4 or 5 to view the screen when you are in bright outdoors. In fact, I found the screen bright even in Level 1 at night. There is no ambient light sensor for auto brightness adjustment.
When you swipe from the top, you get the quick settings toggle that has shortcuts for search, DND, Keep screen on for 5 minutes, Alarm, brightness adjustment, water drain, torch, mute and settings.
You can swipe from left to view widget that has weather, music control, workout, favorite contacts, phone, contact, compass, and customize. You can just swipe from left or right on the touch screen to view activity record, heart rate, SpO2, stress, and sleep.
Music control panel lets you play, pause, skip tracks and also adjust volume when you play any music or any kind of content like videos or music when the watch is connected to the phone. You can read or clear the notification you receive from the smartphone, but you can’t reply to them directly from the watch.
Pressing the hardware button lets you launch exercise, view exercise record, activity record, heart rate, SpO2, Sleep, Stress, one tap measurement, contacts, call history, weather, breathing exercise, music control, water intake, alarm, stopwatch, timer, calculator, voice memo, compass, flash light, find phone and settings.
Advanced option under it, there are options to Set screen timeout period (10, 15, 20 or auto). You can also choose the vibration strength (Strong, Soft or off), DND schedule, Enable option to auto-detect workouts, and finally System menu to Update, Restart, Power off, Disconnect or Reset the watch.
Bluetooth Calling
The watch has a built-in calling feature, since it has a microphone and a speaker. It shows call log, and there is even a dial pad, in addition to contacts option which you can add from the app.
Calling experience is good indoors, and the microphone is able to pick up the voice well. The speaker output is decent enough for indoors, but not the best outdoors in traffic.
Software
The watch uses HONOR health app for Android and iPhone. The Health section shows Steps, workout time, distance and calories burnt on the top. You can see other sections below. You can also customize them by adding Cycle calendar for mensural cycle tracking, but other features such as skin temperature monitoring and weight are not supported by the watch.
Next up is the exercise tab, which we will check out later in the fitness section, and the devices section shows the devices added. The device tab offers further customization options and there are a lot of watch faces.
Next up, you have the health monitoring, notification, alarm, weather reports, troubleshooting and help. For notification, you can choose which app should show you notifications. Device settings have more option including option to disable music playback control and raise to wake.
Fitness tracking
The HONOR Choice Watch has 120 Different Exercise Modes including automatic tracking of 5 workout modes: walking, running, cycling, elliptical machine and rowing machine.
For outdoor workouts like running, you get route map, distance, calories burnt, steps, average speed, cadence, stride, average heart rate, heart rate zones and even recovery time right from the watch. Steps tracking is almost accurate compared to Strava on phone. Since it has built-in GPS, the lock was good and takes a few seconds, and GPS works fine most of the time with occasional no signal issue at places. Since there is a button in the watch, you can double press to launch workouts, press it once to pause or long press to stop the workout.
I like the workout setting that lets you enable audio reminders such as distance, pace for last KM and average heart rate. There is also training reminder to motivate you. Another thing I like in the app are the running courses and running plans. This is definitely a useful feature.
You can share the workout data as an image with a custom photo such as a selfie. However, there is no data sharing option in the settings. HUAWEI Band 6 which I had reviewed 3 years back at least had Google Fit sync. But this doesn’t have any such option.
Sleep tracking
Sleep tracking is accurate when compared to the Amazfit BIP 5. It shows light, deep and REM sleep as well as awake time as usual. It can also track daytime naps, which was also accurate. Enabling SpO2 tracking during sleep can drain the battery.
Heart rate, SpO2 and Stress monitoring
The watch uses LED lights and photo-diodes to illuminate the blood vessel for a while and monitors the heart rate via the change of green light absorbed. You can’t say this is 100% accurate, but heart rate recordings — both resting and active, are almost accurate compared to Blood oximeter device. It shows a graph for heart rate and SpO2 throughout the day in the watch itself. SpO2 or blood oxygen monitoring is almost accurate compared to oximeter. The app also has stress level monitoring throughout the day.
Battery life
It has a 300mAh battery, and the company promises 12 days of battery life with typical usage and 9 days with heavy use. With AOD turned on, it promises 5 days of battery life. I have been using it for a week now, and charged the watch for the first time after a week. This includes initial setup, daily workouts for half an hour, 24×7 heart rate and SpO2 monitoring, stress monitoring, sleep analysis, few call and few message notifications.
With outdoor activity of 30 minutes, it only drained 2 to 3% battery. Battery life might vary depending on frequent use of the display with increased brightness, use of heart rate monitor during workouts and all the notifications turned on. It takes about one and half hour to charge the watch from 0 to 100%.
Conclusion
Overall, the HONOR Choice Watch is a decent smartwatch for the price with has a large AMOLED screen, a lot of workout modes, and the battery life is also good. Hope GPS disconnected gets fixed with updates.
Priced at Rs. 5999 (offer price compared to standard Rs. 6499 price tag), it is available from Amazon.in, offline stores and explore HONOR website. It is priced on the higher side, and could get cheaper during sale, making it a better deal since there is a huge competition from others such as the CMF Watch Pro that is available for as low as Rs. 3,499.
Pros
- Large, Bright AMOLED display
- Bluetooth calling
- All-day heart rate, SpO2 and stress Monitoring
- Water resistant (5ATM)
- Good battery life
Cons
- GPS is not consistent
- No option to export workout data or sync to Strava or Google Fit
- Priced slightly on the higher side