Huawei Band 6

amazon Huawei Band 6 reviews

The Huawei Watch Fit is a hybrid of a fitness tracker and a smartwatch, designed to blur the lines between the two.

And the device that we evaluate in this article is similar to Huawei Watch Fit, has a cubic, rectangular appearance, and is quite similar to the Honor Band 6 – A sub-brand of Huawei and has been sold in 2020.

Huawei Band 6 is equipped with a large AMOLED screen and all kinds of features to help you track your steps, sleep, and exercise, and even smartwatch features such as viewing notifications and controlling music playback on your phone. There’s also the ability to measure blood oxygen levels, and you won’t need to charge for weeks instead of days.

Band 6 costs $ 89.99, but with the current “tense” situation between Huawei and the US market, buying and selling here will be a bit difficult. This price is on par with other trackers such as Oppo Band, Samsung Galaxy Fit 2, and Amazfit Band 5. And this price is also similar to Honor Band 6, while Xiaomi Mi Band 6 is still a tracking device’s most affordable price.

With the once-favorite look and feel of the Watch Fit and Honor Band 6, the Huawei Band 6 has all the hallmarks of being an excellent low-cost fitness tracker. So besides the beautiful interface and vivid screen of Huawei Band 6, what else is there? We have tested and here are comprehensive reviews of this product.

Design and display

As mentioned above, Huawei Band 6 looks a lot like Huawei Watch Fit and Honor Band 6, so is there any difference?

The Huawei tracker comes in a 43mm polymer case, 10.9mm thick, and comes in black, pink, amber, and green colors to choose from. Dark and yellow shell colors are also available. The Watch Fit has a 46mm case and a slightly larger screen. As for the Honor Band 6, although it is the same 43mm size, it has a slightly thicker 11mm case, and on the case, there is no rough finish like on the Huawei Band 6.

This is a very distinctive design, especially when you compare the Huawei Band 6 with the more expensive Inspire 2 tracker from Fitbit. You get a bigger screen than Samsung and Xiaomi trackers. That screen is a 1.47-inch AMOLED with a resolution of 194 x 368, similar to the screen on the Honor Band 6. Bright, colorful light is eye-catching, and the touch is very responsive. It’s a pity that it doesn’t have an always-on display mode, and lifting the wrist to open the screen is sometimes a bit flickering.

You can adjust the screen brightness and display time of the screen. You won’t have any problems watching indoors, but like Honor’s device, it can be a bit difficult to see in bright outdoor lighting conditions. This is a common problem with AMOLED screens.

There is only one physical button to turn on the screen, double-click to go directly to the main menu screen. You will use the touch screen with fairly simple operations to use the device software. Swipe right and left to find widgets for heart rate, stress tracking, or weather forecast. Swipe down from the home screen to see quick settings and swipe up to see notifications.

The standard silicone strap uses a traditional buckle, providing a secure and comfortable fit when worn for exercise and during sleep.

Band 6 has a water resistance rating of 5ATM, making it safe to be in water up to a depth of 50 meters. Suitable for swimming activities and tracking workout time in the water.

Charging the device we will have a magnetic charging port attached to the back of the device. This is not the most secure connection and it is easy to lose connection if you are not careful where you place the device when charging.

Fitness and health tracking features

The Huawei Band 6 is full of basic tracking features such as step counting and sleep tracking, among other features.

An accelerometer and directional gyroscope to track movement and Huawei’s TruSeen 4.0 optical heart rate monitor let you continuously monitor your heart rate and stress level. This sensor also enables continuous SpO2 monitoring.

For the basic features, there’s a dedicated activity monitor that measures daily steps, minutes, and hours of activity. You will also receive an inactivity notification if you are inactive for a long time. In terms of accuracy, we found a step difference of about 500-800 steps compared to Garmin trackers.

When it’s time to go to bed, you can view your most recent night’s sleep on your device, and then you need to access the Huawei Health app to dig deeper into those sleep statistics. You’ll see sleep duration, sleep scores, and additional data on deep sleep and breathing quality. You can also pin to the top of the screen for general stats, and scroll down to see more detailed stats.

We tested it alongside the Fitbit Luxe’s sleep tracking and the results showed it worked well. The two devices recorded similar sleep times and stages, while Band 6’s deep sleep was slightly shorter. One strange thing we discovered is that the sleep tracking feature seems to work only when the Band is worn on the left wrist, and not on the right wrist.

In addition to steps and sleep, you can also track stress levels through heart rate variability measurements, which show on the device when stress levels are high, low, and current. There are also breathing exercises to reduce stress, and you can also adjust the tempo and duration of the breathing exercises, which can last up to 3 minutes. While stress management is very useful, there are still a few details missing for this feature to be truly useful to users.

If you want to measure blood oxygen levels, Band 6 will help you do it, although doing it 24/7 will make an impact on battery life. In the Huawei Health app, you can view data by day, week, month, and year, providing you with the latest readings and the day’s lowest and highest readings. Like stress tracking, a few more details are needed to make this feature more useful.

where can you get a Huawei Band 6 online

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Sports tracking and heart rate accuracy

Band 6 features sports tracking and 96 rich workout modes, with detailed core modes providing more data during and after workouts.

On your device, head into the Workout app and you’ll see modes that include outdoor and treadmill running, swimming, and indoor rowing. You can add additional modes from the Huawei Health app as you like, but the above modes will have the most detailed specifications available.

What you don’t get like on the more expensive Huawei Watch Fit are animated workouts and features like fitness and running courses. There’s also no built-in GPS, so you’ll need to use the GPS-connected method for more accurate outdoor fitness tracking. You get Huawei’s TruSeen 4.0 optical heart rate monitor, the same as on the Huawei Watch Fit, to measure effort levels during exercise.

When running outdoors, the device will use the accelerometer to track with very high accuracy. It’s a distance of 4 km from the GPS tracking on the Garmin Forerunner watch. When you use your phone’s GPS, you need to start tracking in the app first before the stats are shown on Band 6. Things get better with that method, but it’s still more consistent with short distances of 20-30 minutes and that distance is still a bit short for us.

We also applied it to indoor rowing and found the total journey to be a bit short when compared to Garmin trackers and rowing machines. The average and best stroke rates give pretty reliable results.

The heart rate monitor’s performance is quite similar to what we’ve experienced with other Huawei devices with the TruSeen 4.0 optical sensor. Resting heart rate data typically fluctuates around 3-4 bpm against Garmin’s optical heart rate monitors and on the Garmin HRM-Pro chest strap.

During an indoor cycling session, the average heart rate measured was lower than with the chest strap, and there was a 5 bpm difference in the maximum heart rate readings.

When monitoring heart rate continuously, we noticed that the recorded resting heart rate was often 10 BPM higher than the results on the Garmin Enduro and the HRM-Pro chest strap. The maximum heart rate reading was higher and there was a spike in heart rate more often during the day, which brought more skepticism to the results.

Smartwatch features

In terms of smartwatch features, the device is compatible with both Android phones and iPhones. Through our testing in pairing with Android phones, there weren’t any issues setting up, pairing, and syncing the Band 6 with the Huawei Health affiliate app.

You have a wide range of on-demand features on this watch. Huawei offers a great combination of watch faces that make the most of the bright and vivid AMOLED display, and you can sync quickly on the Band 6. You’ll get notifications that are optimized nicely optimized on the screen, but you cannot interact with or respond to these messages.

You can see the weather forecast, use it as a remote to take photos on your smartphone, and have music controls, although they may only work when paired with an Android phone.

You won’t have payment widgets, music players, or any app stores on the front end. It’s no surprise with a product in this price range. What you get with this device though works well but largely depend on the screen size. The notification support and music editor work well, and if you like to change up your watch faces, Huawei has a wide range of watch faces to choose from.

Battery life

Huawei says Band 6 is capable of using up to 14 days in normal mode but does not specify what is the normal mode. According to our actual use test, agreeing on 14 days is possible, but the most accurate is about 10 days.

Each day of use takes about 10% of battery life with the screen at medium brightness, notifications, and features like continuous heart rate monitoring and stress tracking turned on. A 45-minute indoor cycling workout reduces the battery by 3% while connecting to GPS for an hour to track outdoor exercises saw a loss of nearly 6-7%.

So to be able to use it for 14 days, you must limit the use of continuous monitoring features such as monitoring blood oxygen levels all day, and you should not connect to GPS every day or often throughout the week. Keeping the screen on a lower brightness setting will also help improve battery life.

Compared to other fitness trackers in this price range, the Xiaomi Mi Band 6 promises 14 days, Oppo Band about 12 days, and Honor Band 6 from 10-14 days. It can be seen that Huawei Band 6 is also competing in terms of battery life.