fitness tracker

Huawei Band 6 smart health bracelet Review with fitness and sleep tracking that enters the top 10 2024.

Huawei Band 6 smart health bracelet Review with fitness tracking

Price: €47.99 | Huawei | smart health connected bracelets comparison

After the announcement of the Fitbit Charge 5I come back to the smart health connected bracelet Huawei Band 6 which also reduces the border between smart health connected watch and bracelet.

Huawei Band 6 review

Design and comfort of use of the Huawei Band 6

The new Band 6 with its rectangular look is very similar to the Honor Band 6, Huawei’s former sub-brand until it was sold for 2025. However, there are some differences.

The Huawei Tracker has a 43mm polymer case that measures 10.9mm thick and is available in a choice of colors from black, pink, amber and green bracelet. There are also dark and gold case colors.

The screen is a 1.47-inch AMOLED with a resolution of 194 x 368, matching what you get on the Honor Band 6. It’s bright, vibrant, colorful and responsive to the touch. Although it doesn’t offer an always-on mode like it does on the new Fitbit Charge 5, and wake-up isn’t always as responsive as we’d like.

To complete the look of the Band, there is a pretty standard silicone strap which uses a traditional watch-style buckle, which provides good support and a comfortable fit for exercise and sleep tracking.

Finally, Huawei offers a nice mix of watch faces which make the most of the bright and vibrant AMOLED display and you can quickly sync them to the Band 6.

The Band 6 features a 5 ATM water resistance, which allows it to be submerged in water up to 50 meters deep. This means that it is also suitable for swimming in the pool and tracking time spent in water.

Intuitive and comfortable use

You can adjust screen brightness and control screen display time if you want it to stay on longer. You will have no readability problems. Although like Honor’s strap, it can struggle a bit with bright light outdoors. But, I would tell you that it is the same with all the bracelets with AMOLED screen that I tested.

There is onlyonly one physical button to turn on the screen and can be tapped twice to go directly to the main menu screens. Using the touchscreen is your primary means of getting around the software. This is quite simple and based on the usual screen swiping gestures. Scroll right and left to find widgets for heart rate, stress tracking, or weather forecasts. Swipe down from the main watch screen to show quick settings and swipe up from the same spot to show notifications.

Personal assistant functions (your smartphone on your wrist)

In terms of smartwatch functionality, you get a strap that works with the Android smartphones and iPhones. No difficulty setting it up, pairing it and synchronizing it with the free Huawei Health app available on Google Play and the Apple Store.

You will receive notifications Nicely optimized for the screen, but you can’t interact or respond to notifications.
You can consult the weather reportuse it as camera shutter from your smartphone. And there are music controlsalthough these only work when paired with an Android phone.

There is no payment, music player or app store. But that’s not surprising given its price. What’s here works well and that’s largely down to the presence of that nice-sized screen. Notification support and music controls work well.

A bracelet for your health monitoring

The Huawei Band 6 offers the basics of tracking, like step counting and sleep tracking, but it’s capable of so much more than that.

It has motion sensors (accelerometer and gyroscope) to track movements and the optical monitoring of cardiac frequency TruSeen 4.0 from Huawei which allows you to continuously track your heart rate and unlock stress tracking. This sensor is also used to monitoring the SpO2which can also be measured continuously.

For those basics, there’s a dedicated activity tracking screen that lets you see daily steps, active minutes, and active hours. You will also be notified with inactivity alerts if you have been standing still for too long. When it comes to accuracy, we found that step counts were typically 500-800x lower than Garmin’s fitness tracker.

You can also track your stress level (the new trend) thanks to heart rate variability measurements, which tells you on the bracelet when stress has been high, low and the current stress level. There are also breathing exercises to “refocus on yourself and reduce your state of stress”. Me these breathing exercises tend to annoy me, including on Apple smartwatch. Fortunately, Huuel had the good idea to allow us to adjust the rhythm and the duration, which can last up to 3 minutes.

If you want to measure the blood oxygen levels, you can do that here too, although doing it 24/7 has an obvious impact on battery life. In the Huawei Health app, you can see trends over the day, week, month, and year, giving you the latest readings and the day’s lows and highs. . As with stress monitoring, it would be good to have more concrete information to put this data to good use.

Quality sleep tracking

When it’s time to go to bed, you can see your last night’s sleep on the band, and then you’ll need to head over to the Huawei Health app to dig deeper into those stats. This is where you will see the statistics of your nights. As well as your sleep scores and additional data on sleep continuity and breathing quality. You can stick to the top part of the screen for the usual stats and scroll down for the more advanced stats.

Compared to the Fitbit Luxe bracelet, it gives fairly similar results, which is a guarantee of reliability (or at least consistency between measurements and analysis). He recorded similar sleep duration and sleep stages, although he generally recorded a shorter amount of deep sleep.

Features for 96 physical activities: the record!

The Band 6 keeps track of sports activities and generously offers 96 exercise modes, with main modes that inevitably offer more metrics and data during and after training.

On the Band, go to theworkout app and you’ll see modes covered for outdoor and treadmill running, pool swimming, and indoor rowing. (rower). You can add additional modes from the Huawei Health app.

You get Huawei’s TruSeen 4.0 optical heart rate monitoring, which is present on the Huawei smartwatch Fit, to measure exertion levels during workouts. This gives very reliable results, even in comparison with a Garmin HRM-Pro heart rate belt.

For outdoor runs using accelerometer-based tracking, it lacks precision. In fact, we arrive at a difference of 10% compared to measurements made with a Garmin Forerunner. When using your phone’s GPS, you must first start tracking in the app before the measurements will show on the band. Things are looking up on this front, but it’s still best suited for short 20-30 minute runs and the distance feels slightly understated.

There’s no built-in GPS, so you’ll have to use your smartphone’s for more accurate outdoor exercise tracking.

Autonomy and charging

As for charging, there’s a magnetic pod that attaches to the back of the tracker. It’s not the most secure connection, and it’s easy to knock it off if you’re not careful where you place it when it’s charging. But at this price everything is fine.

Huawei says the Band 6 is capable of operating for up to 14 days in typical use, but doesn’t specify which features are enabled for that result. For me, with varied activities we arrive rather around 10 dayswhich is a very good result and places it in the average of its Xiaomi or Amazfit competitors.

Band 6 Pricing and Availability

The price of Huawei Band 6 is only €47.99. Given the current situation between Huawei and the United States, it is a little more difficult to get it in the United States, but no problem in France.

This price puts it directly opposite theAmazfit Band 5. I admit to having a hard time deciding between them, except to think that if you have a Huawei smartphone, prefer the Band 6. On the other hand, the last Xiaomi Mi Band 6 is still less expensive and remains my current favorite choice. Finally, if you have the budget the current top of the range is the Fitbit Charge 5 (we will have to wait until this fall to receive it).

The best smart health connected bracelets September 2024

1. The best value for money with the Xiaomi Band 6 can be found from 33 €. It offers a sensor SpO2 (measures blood oxygen saturation)bright and readable 1.56” color AMOLED display.
   An alternative is the previous version, the Xiaomi Mi Band 5which is regularly found within 30 €. This is the model I take on “sporting” vacations.
   
2. I’Amazfit Band 5 at €49.99one of the most complete smart health connected bracelets (without subscription) or Huawei Band 6.
3. the Fitbit Charge 5 for those with a higher budget offers excellent hardware performance (SpO2, GPS, ECG, AED, NFC) and software. It offers the functionality of a smart health connected watch in the format of a bracelet.
4. the Redmi Band with its minimum price at 15 € at GearBest the specialty of Chinese imports. 1.08″ color TFT screen.
5. The Fitbit Inspire 2 which slightly improves the Inspire HR on sale at €99.99 (but takes full power with the Fitbit Premium subscription at €8.99/month).

Subscribe Newsletter Stylistme.com