Honor Watch 6 review: Long battery life, plenty of data, and some question marks

Honor does not provide information on recycling rates or CO₂ emissions for the Watch 6. The packaging contains many plastic components and is entirely wrapped in plastic film.

The smartwatch is not designed for user repairs.

Setting up the Honor Watch 6 is straightforward. Pairing requires the Honor Health app, which is available for Android and iOS. After turning on the watch, you can scan the QR code on its display or let the app search for nearby devices. The app then guides you through the main settings and permissions. It also provides detailed health and workout data and lets you configure health monitoring, watch faces, and other settings.

You operate the watch mainly through its touchscreen and the two buttons on the right side of the case. The upper button doubles as a rotating crown for easy scrolling through menus and lists. By default, the lower button opens the workout functions. Wrist gestures also let you answer calls, dismiss alarms, and change tracks.

The interface is uncluttered, with large, easily recognizable elements. Swiping from the watch face provides access to notifications, widgets, and other features. You can wake the display by raising your wrist or tapping the screen. Honor says the touchscreen responds reliably even with wet or sweaty fingers, which we confirmed in our testing.

The Watch 6 is primarily designed for Android smartphones but also works with iPhones. Some features require an Honor smartphone, including using live photos or videos as watch faces, recording voice memos on the watch, and receiving notifications from two smartphones. There are further limitations on iOS: you cannot reply directly to messages, sync the calendar, or share collected data with Apple Health.

Despite its built-in microphone, the Honor Watch 6 lacks a full-featured voice assistant. You can use your voice to record memos and give instructions to the AI running coach, among other things.

Honor relies entirely on its own Honor Health app for health and fitness data. The app handles setup, configuration, and analysis of recorded data.

The watch tracks heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), blood oxygen saturation, stress, and sleep, among other metrics, and uses the data to produce various assessments. For example, the body energy feature combines several health metrics to estimate how much energy you have for exercise and daily activities. A health scan summarizes key readings, while the morning health report provides an overview of the previous day.

We compare the Honor Watch 6’s heart rate and blood oxygen readings with those from the Polar H10 and Braun Pulse Oximeter 1, respectively. We explain the considerations involved in these comparisons in this additional article.

At rest, the watch’s heart rate reading matches that of the chest strap. However, the watch takes noticeably longer to detect changes, making it less responsive than the H10. During cycling, the heart rate curves are very similar, although the Honor Watch 6 records slightly lower average and peak heart rates. The difference of two beats per minute is negligible.

Blood oxygen readings are also close to those from the reference device. Two of the three readings match exactly, while the third is two percentage points lower than the pulse oximeter’s reading.

The Honor Watch 6 continues collecting data at night. It automatically detects when you fall asleep and wake up, records sleep duration, and breaks your sleep down into different stages. It also tracks daytime naps. Detailed analyses are available in the Honor Health app.

Honor uses sleep data alongside heart rate, HRV, and stress levels to calculate body energy. The morning health report summarizes key information from the previous day or night.

In our testing, the recorded sleep and wake times generally seemed plausible. Deviations from the average are labeled "anomalies," a term that usually makes them sound more dramatic than they are.

The Honor Watch 6 offers a versatile range of sports features. More than 120 workout modes cover familiar activities such as running, cycling, swimming, and strength training, along with numerous more specialized activities. Depending on the sport, the watch records metrics such as duration, heart rate, calories burned, distance, and pace. Built-in dual-band GNSS enables outdoor tracking without a smartphone. Detailed workout records and longer-term trends are then available in Honor Health.

Running analysis goes considerably deeper. Alongside the usual data, the Watch 6 determines VO₂max and training load, among other metrics. The running coach provides spoken instructions during workouts, and you can set heart rate and pace goals. For trail running and other outdoor sports, 3D distance measurement also accounts for elevation changes.

Honor places particular emphasis on the new Pro modes for soccer and badminton. For soccer, the Watch 6 records distance, pace, sprint speed, and running paths. Honor Health uses this data to generate heat maps showing which areas of the field you covered. As interesting as this sounds, its practical usefulness is limited: safety concerns and rules restrict wearing a standard smartwatch during organized soccer matches. The mode is therefore best suited to training and recreational games.

The badminton Pro mode appears more practical. The watch counts strokes and analyzes metrics such as stroke speed and power, distinguishes between forehand and backhand strokes, and identifies shot types such as smashes and clears. However, which wrist you wear it on matters: if you normally wear the watch on your non-racket wrist, you may need to switch wrists for a meaningful analysis.

Both modes provide unusually detailed, sport-specific data. However, the accuracy of metrics such as sprint speed and stroke speed remains unclear. We would therefore treat these readings as points of comparison for your own training rather than precise measures of performance.

With dual-band GNSS, the Honor Watch 6 is well equipped on paper. Outdoors, it also gets a satellite fix fairly quickly.

We compared it with the Garmin Venu 2 on a bike ride. The plots clearly show that the Honor Watch 6 records its location less frequently, with the recorded route sometimes straying slightly from the actual path. It also traces a tighter loop by the lake, resulting in a shorter total recorded distance. Overall, its tracking performance is still good.