Honor Choice Watch Review: An affordable fitness watch with GPS and Bluetooth calling

Pros:
– Sturdy build with 5ATM water resistance
– Lightweight and comfortable around the wrist
– Large, high-res AMOLED display
– Good battery backup
– Reliable health and fitness tracking
– Built-in GPS, Bluetooth calling
– Snappy and lag-free UI

Cons:
– Distance and step count can be erratic
– Workout data cannot be exported to fitness apps like Google Fit
– AOD is a battery hog

Rating: 4/5
Price: Rs 6,499

Honor officially resumed their operations in India last year after a 3-year hiatus and has launched a couple of smartphones and a pair of earbuds since then. The company has also ventured into the fitness wearables segment with the Honor Choice Watch that we will be reviewing today. At a quick glance, it looks like any other fitness watch in the market currently but is packed with just the right kind of features to make it stand out from the crowd while keeping the price competitive. Let’s take it for a run.

Generic design, but sturdy build and comfortable to wear
The Honor Choice Watch design is pretty standard with a rectangular dial and a circular crown (button) along the edge. However, the build quality is good and so is the finish with no rough edges or unevenness. The physical button allows you to access different functions of this watch in conjunction with the touchscreen display. The display curves towards the edges and blends seamlessly into the matte frame. It makes the watch look elegant and largely stay smudge-free.

Though the exact weight hasn’t been specified, the watch is fairly light and is comfortable to wear for long hours, and the silicone straps don’t cause sweating or skin irritation; just make sure you don’t wear it too tight. That’s because the locking mechanism is slightly different from the standard buckle and hoop option, and the strap goes under the other strap. If you don’t like it, you can replace the default straps with any third-party 22 mm straps.

Large and sharp AMOLED display with slots for multiple watch faces
This Honor watch has a sizable and lively 1.95-inch AMOLED display with a resolution of 410 x 502 pixels. That translates into a 332 ppi pixel density, making the display sharp enough to read content clearly on it. It supports 16.7 million colours and can get up to 550 nits bright, which makes it perfectly legible under bright sunlight too. You get a fluid manual brightness slider, which at 50 per cent is good enough when not under the sun. There is no auto brightness adjustment though due to the lack of an ambient light sensor.

There is no mention of any scratch-resistant glass or oleophobic coating in the spec sheet, but the screen remains scratch-free after a few weeks of use. Also, I didn’t have to wipe it frequently during testing as it doesn’t attract too many fingerprints or smudge marks. You can flick your wrist to turn the screen on or press the physical button; both work well. Covering the screen with your palm turns it off. You can turn off the flick gesture during your sleep hours or when in a dark room like a theatre.

The watch comes bundled with a handful of watch faces and you get access to a lot more through the Honor Health companion app that you need to install and sync this watch with before using it. The transfer process isn’t the fastest but not too slow either. You get a generous number of slots on the watch to store watch faces of your choosing and change them as per your mood or need. Some of the faces can be customised to display information of your choice like step count, calories burned, heart rate and more.

Snappy user interface and a decent companion app that can use a few tweaks
To begin with, you need to download the Honor Health app and sync your device with it over Bluetooth. The setup can take a few minutes but it is generally smooth. While the app gives you access to watch faces and further breakdown/reports of the health metrics and workout data, you can access a lot of it on the watch itself. For instance, you can view the details of your workouts or breakup of sleep data on the watch screen without having to open the app.

The UI is simple, fluid, lag-free and quite peppy with nice use of coloured icons without overdoing it. It is easy to use even for a novice. You can swipe down on the home screen for quick settings, swipe up for notifications, swipe right for quick access to commonly used functions and swipe left to browse through various widgets like daily goals progress, heart rate, sleep or stress data and more. The physical button acts as a shortcut for all the watch functions and also doubles up as a home button on any screen.

You can change the presentation style of the watch functions from a simple list to text-free icons to an Apple-esque honeycomb style from the watch settings. The Honor Health app isn’t complex either and has a clean interface, but can do with a few minor tweaks and a dash of colour. All the fitness cards are listed one below the other on the home screen in a fixed order. I did not find an option to shuffle them around and bring up those that I access more frequently.

They display your heart rate, stress and blood oxygen levels, sleep data, steps count, workout details and more. It also suggests a tentative recovery time after a workout. However, Honor does not allow you to export the captured data to popular fitness apps like Google Fit or Strava.

Reliable health and fitness tracking, barring steps and distance
The Honor Choice Watch has multiple sensors that can monitor various health parameters like heart rate, blood oxygen, stress levels and sleep, and some of them round the clock if you wish to. The speed of SpO2 measurements is pretty brisk. If you wear the watch right and keep your hand steady, you get a near-accurate score in about 15 seconds. The SpO2 reading is generally a point below a clinical oximeter, which is par for the course.

You also get one tap measurement for three health parameters in 30 to 45 seconds. It measures your heart rate, oxygen level and stress level at one go. All-day oxygen and stress measurements are also available but they put a dent in the battery backup. But if it is important for you, turn them on from the app by all means. Sleep tracking works well here. The overall sleep duration from the time I fell asleep till I was up seemed correct. It tracks the quantum of light sleep, deep sleep, REM periods and awake time.

This Honor watch can track 120 different workout modes that include your usual indoor and outdoor walking, running, cycling, swimming, free training and their variations. It has a built-in GPS module that is compliant with 5 popular systems – GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO, BDS and QZSS to track your outdoor activities. It takes about a minute to get a GPS lock and post that the link stays strong as long as you stay outdoors. It tends to under-report the distance by about 5 per cent; so for every kilometre you walk or run, the watch shows 50 metres less.

At least the margin of error was consistent throughout the test period. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about the pedometer that keeps track of the step count. It tends to err on both sides, at times showing a lower step count and on some occasions adding false steps. The company needs to look into this, though the margin of error isn’t massive. Another thing I noticed was the watch keeps adding to the step count significantly even while doing fairly static weight training in the gym after choosing a Free Training workout mode on the watch.

The watch is 5ATM water resistant and can be worn for a swim without worry. Some of the fitness data can be checked on the watch screen and the rest is available in the Honor Health app with a daily, weekly and monthly breakdown of various activities you indulged in. You also get some basic guided breathing exercises on the watch itself, which can help you calm down and lower your stress level. Menstrual tracking is also available and so are sedentary and water intake reminders.

And there’s some more beyond fitness

The Honor Choice Watch also supports a Bluetooth calling function, wherein you can make and receive calls from the watch itself as long as it is synced with a smartphone with an active connection. The built-in speaker and mic do a surprisingly good job when indoors, but the speaker isn’t loud enough when outdoors or in noisy areas. There’s a very handy security feature here that lets you dial the preset SOS number by triple clicking the physical button on the watch without having to reach for the phone.

You can also choose to receive notifications and messages from various apps installed on your phone on the watch screen. You can read the messages but cannot reply from the watch. In addition, there are a bunch of utility apps preloaded on the watch like a calculator, compass, voice notes, stopwatch, weather updates, music control and a few more.

Good battery life as long as you keep AOD off
The Honor Choice Watch has a more than decent battery backup under normal load as long as you do not turn on the Always-on Display (AOD) feature. The company claims a battery life of 12 days on a single charge under a typical usage scenario, and less than half of that with AOD switched on. The battery life can vary depending on your usage pattern and the features you turn on. With AOD on, it barely lasted for 4 days, and double that without it. Might as well keep AOD off and flick your wrist to view stuff. Don’t be that lazy.

During our test run simulating a real-world usage scenario with continuous heart rate monitoring turned on, 2 hours of total GPS usage, live tracking of three hour-long indoor workouts, four SpO2 and manual stress readings each daily, sleep tracking for four nights and under 10 minutes of daily calling, the watch’s 300 mAh battery lasted a little over 8 days, which is not bad at all. Without GPS usage it can easily go past 10 days. The watch takes less than 90 minutes to charge fully with the bundled magnetic pin charger.

Price and verdict
The Honor Choice Watch is priced at Rs 6,499 in India with a one-year warranty and can often be spotted for Rs 500 less, which was its introductory price. A price tag of around 6K is not bad for a swim-proof fitness watch with a large and sharp AMOLED display, built-in GPS, reliable health tracking, useful companion app, Bluetooth calling, some handy utilities and good battery backup. On the flip side, you will have to put up with slightly inaccurate steps and distance tracking.

As for competition, there are two that are quite similar to this Honor watch – CMF (by Nothing) Watch Pro and Amazfit Bip 5. All three watches have very similar feature sets including large AMOLED displays and built-in GPS, and the same goes for their performance. While the Nothing watch can be purchased for just Rs 4,999, Amazfit generally sells for 7K or more but can be purchased closer to the Honor watch’s price during sales. All of them offer great value, with the final choice boiling down to your brand and aesthetic preference.