Welcome to our Honor Watch 6 review. I know, I know, we’re a little late with this one. Okay, maybe a lot late, but in our defense, some of that tardiness comes from battery testing a watch with more than a month’s worth of endurance .(or so Honor promised).
That may be the Honor Watch 6’s key selling point, and for good reason: charging your smartwatch once a month is about as close to having a regular watch as you can get. But I’m here to tell you that there’s more to the Honor Watch 6 than simply its huge battery.
It’s what a watch needs to be. Note that I didn’t say smartwatch there. A watch needs to be beautiful, functional, and reliable. And I’m of the strong mind that a watch needs to be affordable as well. To me, a watch is a tool to help me in my life, not a precious jewel to show off, or a status symbol.
With that said, I think the Honor Watch 6 is about as close to a perfect smartwatch as you can get. But first let’s unbox it.
It ships with a charging puck, which sadly is straight out of 2024 with a USB-A connection and two magnetic pins, which you need to align to the watch. Luckily, the watch won’t spend too much time on the charger.
Design, display
Honor went with a very classic design for the Watch 6. It comes in either Black or Brown – we have the black model, and it has a dark glossy aluminum casing with a stainless steel bezel. The brown model is all stainless steel and silver. It pairs nicely with the brown leather strap.
The classic design means separate lugs for the strap, a crown in the upper right corner, an outer bezel, and an inner, graduated bezel with markings on it.
The outer bezel on the silver (read brown) model draws inspiration from vintage racing cars, while the black model’s bezel is inspired by supercar air ducts.
I’d be happy with either model, but I’m a man. This bulky one-size 46mm watch may not be for a slender, feminine wrist.
Weight is a related consideration. At 41 grams without the strap, the Honor Watch 6 won’t go unnoticed. The brown model is 50 grams strapless.
The right side has two buttons: a rotating crown that doubles as a pusher, and a second shortcut button (oddly called the Down button). By default, it opens the workouts app, but you can change it to other apps or features.
Controls are logical
The Honor Watch 6 is big. It fits just fine on my regular wrist, and I didn’t have issues wearing it all day. I also wore it every night to track my sleep, and that wasn’t very comfortable. It’s right on the edge of uncomfortable.
The display is gorgeous. The glass on top is some form of scratch-resistant glass, but it’s not sapphire crystal like on more expensive watches. I wasn’t able to scratch it despite wearing it for two months. The bezel protrudes ever so slightly above the glass for protection.
The screen is rated at up to 3,000 nits in automatic bright mode, and I found it to be perfectly usable in even the brightest of summer sun. There’s an always-on mode for each watch face, and it’s also nicely bright (unless you’re in a very dark environment, where the display will match the light).
The Watch 6 takes standard 22mm straps, which is nice! There are plenty of those available on the market should you want to switch things up. The provided fluororubber one is very nice and feels better than a regular €10 option on Amazon.
There’s also a speaker on the Honor Watch 6 for taking calls from your phone over Bluetooth. You can even listen to music through the speaker. Quality is okay, as you’d expect from a watch speaker. It will do for the occasional situation when you can’t use your hands.
The watch case handled my daily use without fuss and it’s in pristine condition after two months of use. I wore the watch every day and night, did my workouts with it, and used it during a few of my weekly football matches. It gave me complete confidence during my testing period.
Interface, watch faces
The Watch 6 runs Honor’s proprietary MagicOS 10.0. It follows Honor smartphones’ aesthetic with large semi-transparent UI elements. You can change all of the settings on the watch itself or most of them through the Honor Health companion app. Honor Health is readily available in the Google Play Store.
Moving around the interface is pretty straightforward. Swipe down for the settings toggles; swipe from the bottom for notifications. Swipe left or right to move between widgets such as activity, heart rate, weather, and sleep. Press the crown to open the app grid (which can also be set to a list); rotate the crown to scroll through those apps/lists.
We already discussed the “down” button, which opens the workouts screen by default.
The watch supports NFC payments through Fidesmo Pay. It supports Visa and Mastercard, and it’s available in Europe, but it’s subject to your specific bank being supported.
There are also wrist gestures to control certain functions, like answering calls or controlling the music. You can either flip your wrist or turn it. It’s better than finger snapping and pinching, but it’s still not reliable enough to be used daily. I tried the gestures and can say they worked for me only half the time.
Any smartwatch is only as good as the faces it has. Yes, you can download third-party ones (in some cases thousands of them), but they’re not as thought out nor as functional as the official ones. I didn’t really find a watch face that I love on the Honor Watch 6. Most of the preloaded faces are digital, which (to me) don’t suit the watch as well as an analogue one does. After all, it’s a classic-styled watch, and it needs a classic watch face.
The official watch face was the best I could find. The Honor Health app has a section for third-party faces and you can filter them by free and paid ones. There are some really good-looking options and installing one is easy enough. But most aren’t very customizable – yes, you can change one or two complications to match a feature or app you want to have a shortcut to. But some third-party faces don’t give you the option to change complications nor the colors of the watch face.
Swapping watch faces
It’s a half-baked solution. And there doesn’t seem to be a good watch face editor to use to make your own watch faces (like Facer, Pujie, or Watch Face Studio).
Health and fitness tracking
The Honor Watch 6 comes with what Honor calls an upgraded Intelligent Sense System. The watch will track your heart rate, blood oxygen (SpO2), heart rate variability, stress, and sleep tracking, and it can even track your blood pressure trends using the optical sensors on its bottom (unlike the Huawei Watch D3, which uses pressure for a more accurate reading).
The Honor Watch 6 combines all of this data to give you a Body Energy assessment, similar to Garmin’s Body Battery.
Sleep tracking is pretty complete for a watch. You get readings on sleep stages (light, REM, and deep), whether you were awake, breathing quality, and of course, your overnight heart trends. Keep in mind that by default, the watch will use basic tracking, and you need to enable Healthy Sleep to add more in-depth analysis.
I used the watch to track my sleep during my testing period and can say that, trend-wise, it seems to be accurate for me. I’ve been tracking my sleep using my smartwatch of choice for years and found the Honor Watch 6’s readings to be consistent – around an hour and a half to two hours of deep sleep on most nights that aren’t Saturday-Sunday (when I can see 3 hours, sometimes).
Sleep tracking
The Honor Watch 6 premieres Pro Badminton and Football tracking, along with more than 120 other sports tracking modes. The watch has dual-band GPS, which, in conjunction with lactate-threshold heart-rate estimation, running posture analysis, and an AI running coach, makes this watch a top-tier running companion (if you’re okay with the size).
Football tracking is pretty fun if, again, you can bear the watch’s size on your wrist. It could be used as quite the weapon during tackle situations (though you shouldn’t). The watch uses both accelerometer and GPS data to size the football pitch you’re on, and later asks you to confirm it before getting your metrics. It can save a familiar pitch for next week’s game.
After you’re done, you can check out your total distance, maximum sprint speed, average speed, steps, and a fun heat map that tells you in which segment you played most – defensive, middle, or attacking third.
Football mode
It’s a strong addition for users who enjoy football every week, and it’s a genuine leg up on most other mainstream watches. You’ll also be hard-pressed to find a similar football-focused package on another watch: Garmin watches have a dedicated “soccer” mode, but it lacks some of the deep analysis, such as sprint trajectory and heat maps. The Apple Watch offers football tracking apps, though we can’t say whether they’re as good as the Honor Watch 6.
Football metrics
And most other smartwatches, including Garmin’s Venu line, can’t touch the kind of battery endurance the Honor Watch 6 can promise.
Battery life, charging
Which leads us neatly to battery life. The Honor Watch 6 packs an immense 980mAh battery, which is rated for 35 days of “long-endurance usage” and up to 17 days of “typical usage”. In my use, which is a mixture of three to five workouts per week (two of which are 1:30 hours of intense football), constant wearing during the day (with raise-to-wake enabled and always-on display disabled), and sleep tracking every night, the Honor Watch 6 lasted 23 days. That’s beyond impressive.
The watch took around an hour and a half to charge back up to 100%.
Verdict
What’s a perfect smartwatch? To this reviewer, it’s smart, it looks good, it’s well made, it’s affordable, and it gets out of the way. So, let’s summarize. The Honor Watch 6 ticks all of my boxes. It looks great, especially in brown. There’s something timeless in its classic design. It’s affordable – the black model is €170, while the brown is €190. It’s smart, with comprehensive fitness and health tracking and a solid list of abilities.
It’s very well made (once again, especially the brown model) with a mix of aluminum and stainless steel. And it feels robust. It also gets out of the way. You can use it any way you like, as intensely as you like, and it will just go for weeks and weeks. There are those high and mighty users that will try and convince you that you should justify a two-to-four day battery life on a wrist wearable for some perceived superiority and smarts on a Wear OS or WatchOS device, and that’s mostly rubbish.
The Honor Watch 6 will tell the time, track your sleep, wake you up in the morning, monitor your runs, workout sessions, football matches, badminton games, work day, and repeat, for weeks, while looking great and lasting all the while. For less than €200. What’s not to like?
Just one thing, really: it’s a big watch. There’s no getting around this. It’s not suited for every wrist, and it only comes in L.
Pros
- Classic design, feels very robust
- Immense battery life – more than 20 days with intense daily use
- Competitively priced
- Display is big, bright, and legible in sunny conditions
- Football tracking is a fun addition.
- Takes standard 22mm straps.
- The watch works with all phones, offers NFC payments (region and bank dependent).
Cons
- It’s a big watch.
- There’s no smaller model (yet).
- USB-A charging cable with a two-pin design is annoying in 2026.