Huawei Band 6 and Honor Band 6 in review: Honor loses out once again in the last joint fitness tracker

In order to pair the Band 6 with an Android smartphone or iPhone, you need the Huawei Health app. According to Honor, the company is already working on its own app. Regardless of its design, this is advantageous in the sense that the Huawei app in Google's Play Store has not been updated since the conflict with the US. As long as this doesn't change, the latest version is only available via the Huawei App Gallery. On the other hand, the Health app is easy to install on the iPhone.

You can configure notifications and health monitoring in the app as well as download additional watch faces to the bands from the Watch Face Store.

The tracker screenshots in our review are mostly from the Huawei Band 6; while the latter received two updates during the test period, the German language option was still missing on Honor's review sample until the end of our review. Naturally, the language pack is expected to be installed on Honor's device before its market launch.

The display is activated when the user raises the arm or presses the button on the side - but unlike the Huawei Watch Fit, it can't be activated by tapping the touchscreen, although it's fully touch-sensitive.

As with other popular wearables, vertical gestures open the list of notifications and a quick panel with access to brightness control and Do Not Disturb mode. Horizontal gestures let you scroll through up to 5 widgets with information on your heart rate, stress levels, the weather, and activity and sleep data. Huawei offers another widget for SpO2 measurement. However, this doesn't alter the limit of 5 widgets, and you have to replace another one in this case.

Some apps are simpler in the two fitness trackers than in the aforementioned Huawei Watch Fit and Honor Watch ES smartwatches. The timer, for example, lacks the attractive virtual buttons. The times for the rising and setting of the sun and moon, which Huawei added to the Watch Fit via an update, are also missing on the bands.

In principle, both remote controls are part of the app portfolio; however, the remote control for the smartphone's music player doesn't appear when the respective Band 6 is connected to an iPhone. The camera controls work with Huawei's EMUI 8.1 and Honor's MagicUI 2.0 or higher.

The Band 6 notifies of incoming phone calls, which can be rejected via the Band. The smart tracker does not display emojis.

Both bands help track activity goals and document progress in a daily log that also shows the collected health data. Synchronization with Google Fit or Apple Health is still not possible.

A sleep log tracks sleep phases and rates sleep quality. Huawei's Health app was prone to errors when switching to Daylight Saving Time: The sleep data for the night from March 27 to March 28 was only displayed on the watch. It adjusted the time of falling asleep by 1 hour, so that the sleep duration was correct in the end. However, it did not send anything to the app. Even days later, the app jumped straight into March 29 when scrolling from March 27.

The main difference for athletes is already visible on the packaging: Huawei advertises its fitness tracker with 96 workout modes, while Honor only offers 10. When opening the workout app, the selection of walking, running, cycling, both indoors and outdoors, cross-training, rowing machine, swimming, and freestyle workout seems to be identical at first. The difference is the plus button at the end of Huawei's list, which can be used to add more sports.

When it comes to the Honor tracker in particular, it's annoying that 3 out of the total of 10 sports without their own GPS can only be tracked reasonably in conjunction with the smartphone. The Band 6 estimates kilometers even without a smartphone, and at least not that inaccurately in the test. However, the route is not logged.

Both trackers automatically recognize running, brisk walks, and training with the elliptical or rowing machines, and they also remind the user to log the workout session. When swimming and working out with the rowing machine, they count the number of strokes. In the sample workout log included here, the Huawei Band 6 tracked one round of rope skipping. According to our count, there were 217 skips and 11 errors where the rope got caught on the shoe. Presumably, the Band 6 considers the interruptions as mistakes in the end and consequently provides a pretty accurate overall count.

We did, however, miss the option to configure an interval training. Only Huawei offers that anyway, but you can't specify the interval, a pause duration, or the number of sets like in the Garmin Lily fitness watch.