Review: Affordable Tech at Your Fingertips with the New Huawei Band 6

If you’re toying with the idea of investing in a fitness tracker or smartwatch, but are still not sure about making the investment, then Huawei’s latest offering may just be what you’ve been waiting for. The new Huawei Band 6 offers gadget-loving fitness enthusiasts an affordable way to dip their toe into the fitness tracker world without compromising on features or reliability.

Packed with tracking features, including a built-in heart-rate monitor, the Band 6 comes in at under R2,000, making it one of the most affordable options for a top tier smart wearable. With its chic design, this latest iteration of Huawei’s popular Band fitness tracker boasts a 1.47-inch AMOLED FullView Display Screen (offering a 148% larger viewable area than previous models), with a low-bezel 64% screen-to-body ratio. Many fitness trackers I’ve owned have either looked too bulky on my wrist or been too small to be effective on the go, but the Band 6 is the ideal size for me. It doesn’t over-power my delicate lady wrist and the soft silicone band makes it light and comfortable to wear all day long, especially in the gym.

Another bugbear for me with most fitness trackers is battery life. There’s nothing more annoying than a fitness tracker that needs constant charging. The Band 6 offers amazing battery life and promises 14 days’ battery life for typical use. I managed to get a full 2 weeks of use on a single charge. I wore my Band 6 every day and used it to track daily 45-minute workouts, and it endured like a champion. Huawei says you will get 10 days of battery for heavy use. Even better, if you do forget to charge your watch and need it to track a workout, you’ll get two days’ battery use from just five minutes of charging time with the Band 6’s magnetic charger.

One of the most useful features I found with the Band 6 is its wide selection of workout types to choose from. It supports a whopping 96 sports modes, including everyday sports such as running, walking, cycling and swimming, as well as the elliptical and rowing machine. There’s also a rope jumping mode that monitors the number of jumps you take and provides accurate exercise data such as consecutive jumps. I have mostly used it for things like HIIT training, running, yoga, as well as functional and strength training, and it tracked those brilliantly.

As far as heart-rate tracking goes, the Band 6 is quite impressive. I compared the Band 6’s real-time HR tracking to my chest-strap heart rate monitor, and it has been pretty accurate throughout my workouts. Chest strap heart-rate monitors are widely regarded as being the most accurate of heart rate-measuring devices, and the Band 6 was never off by more than a beat or two on a handful of occasions. I also enjoyed comparing the stats after my workouts and on most occasions, the average heart rate tracked by the Band 6 was spot on with my chest strap monitoring devices.

If you’re struggling to stay motivated to get moving, then you can also set daily activity goals (such as steps, hours active, etc) and the Band 6 will send reminders and updates throughout the day to help keep your goals top of mind.

While I found the fitness tracking features most useful on the Band 6, there were also a bunch of other tracking tools that have proved to be super valuable. These included the Menstrual Cycle Tracking (with an easy-to-navigate calendar), TruRealx Stress Monitoring feature, All-Day Blood Oxygen Saturation (Sp02) Monitoring, and Goal Tracking.

Another great feature of the Band 6 is TruSleep 2.0. While you snooze, the watch tracks your stage of sleep, real-time heart rate and breathing rate, and produces a comprehensive analysis of your sleep quality from this data. The watch automatically calculates the duration of sleep and can also identify moments when the user fell asleep and woke up and the proportion of light sleep to deep sleep and rapid eye movement (REM). This data can help you accurately identify any of six typical sleep issues like insomnia, shallow sleep, night-time awakenings, early morning awakenings, excessive dreams and an irregular sleep pattern.

Huawei TruSleep 2.0 offers users more than 100 kinds of personalised advice for sleep quality improvement. It provides eight sleeping metrics, including sleep duration, deep sleep ratio, wake up counter, breathing quality and sleep recommendations.

All the metrics measured from your workouts and daily life can be easily tracked and synced with the Huawei Health app, which offers an easy way to keep track of your health through easy-to-read graphs and summaries.

But, the Band 6 isn’t just a health and fitness tracker, it also offers a convenient way to interface with your phone. You can use the watch to view incoming calls and messages, get weather updates, control your music, and even take photos through your phone’s camera.

If you’re looking for a fairly affordable health tracker with accurate tracking and a comfortable fit, then the Huawei Band 6 won’t disappoint. The watch offers more than enough metrics to get stats lovers busy for hours and is a great little gadget to have on your wrist to help remind you to be conscious of your healthy lifestyle goals.

The Huawei Band 6 is now available in South Africa in 6 different colours at a recommended retail price of R1,699. Click here for more information on this new release from Huawei.