The wearable market in India has gotten extremely competitive with almost every other smartphone brand launching its own companion smartwatch. Honor, which made its renewed entry into India, has no intentions of being left behind. With the launch of Honor Choice Watch, the company wants to show it means serious business.
HTech sent us the smartwatch for review and having tested it as a daily driver paired with Samsung S24 and iPhone 15 Pro Max (latter mostly), here are our findings, which can help prospective buyers of smartwatches make a final decision.
Note: The smartwatch received one update during the time of this review, and was running version8.1.0.19.
Design and build
Honor Choice Watch features a generous display, measuring 1.95 inches with visible bezels around its square dial. Despite boasting 49.7 × 39.9 × 10.2 mm dimension, it has a feather-light weight of just 45 grams. It wraps around the wrist comfortably, adding almost no weight.
It is meticulously crafted with a metallic texture, which adds a touch of premium aura. It doesn't fall close to the Apple Watch; rather, it may be compared to FitBit offerings on a budget.
The watch also comes equipped with essential sensors, including a 6-axis IMU sensor, an optical heart rate sensor, a PPG heart rate sensor, and a SpO2 sensor, but it also gets 5ATM water resistance, making it suitable for swimming and showers. This is ideal for those who work out and hit the shower right after. Even if the water gets in, there's a convenient vibration drainage feature for quick drying.
The skin-friendly strap with a metal buckle offers both comfort and latches on securely, which ensures a snug fit. There's a button for app navigation on the right side, the microphone and speakers are positioned on the left and right sides, respectively. On the back, you find the heart rate and SpO2 sensors, along with charging pins. The polycarbonate construction at the back doesn't feel premium, but it's rarely seen or felt.
Display and UI
Diving a bit deeper into the display, the HONOR Choice Watch's 1.95-inch AMOLED screen is vibrant and delivers crisp visuals with good clarity. Yes, the bezels around the display are really hard to ignore but a big let down for me is the lack of adaptive brightness. But with manual adjustments, you can get optimal visibility under various lighting conditions. Navigation is intuitive, with quick settings toggles and customizable widgets for seamless access to essential functions right at the fingertips. It's even got Always on display, which only shows essential info sans the watch-face. The watch's battery is so good, you can use the AOD without worrying.
Performance and usability
Setting up the Honor smartwatch involves downloading the Honor Health app (available for both Android and iPhones). The process, however, is not seamless and requires some patience having to go through various steps and errors. But once the setup is complete, the app and watch function smoothly. We did notice some issues while syncing, but it wasn't a regular issue and a software bug may easily fix that.
The smartwatch has a powerful vibrating motor. There are only three modes: strong, standard, and none. Even with Standard, you will not miss a notification, but that vibrating sound can be heard in quiet rooms. Bluetooth calling is one feature that is good, as it delivers clear audio and reliable connectivity.
I'm a fan of good watch faces, and the Honor Choice Watch has no shortage at all. I love that Classic watch face you see in the photos, mimicking that Casio-look, but there are plenty of free watch faces to suit your taste.
Regular apps like compass, calculator, voice notes, stopwatch, alarm, timer, weather, phone, torch do come in handy, though I used only half of those. But it's better to have them than not.
The raise to wake works accurately, but when Always-on Display is enabled, it wasn't effective. So you need to trade the AOD for raise to wake or vice versa.
All that's good, but Honor Choice Watch doesn't have tap to wake, which would've been a real convenience. Second one is the crown does nothing when you rotate, not even to scroll the menus up and down. Honor really missed on two major convenience factors here.
Health and fitness tracking
The HONOR Choice Watch can be a reliable health and fitness tracking partner, offering over 120 exercise modes, including automatic tracking for walking, running, cycling, elliptical machine, and rowing machine. What's interesting is an expansive library of free videos to help you with exercises and routines. This is great for someone who's just starting out and need guidance with the right kind of workouts. Normally, this would be behind a paywall, but HTech has made it freely available to the users.
There's also built-in GPS, which can capture workout metrics with accuracy. The standard sensors like the heart rate and SpO2 worked as intended, providing near-accurate readings. There's also a stress monitor, which works by tracking the heart rate, and it seems to provide a normal reading all the time. Guess, life really is that stress-free. Or is it?
I loved how Honor Choice Watch made it super convenient to check the vitals, heart rate, SpO2 and stress, with a single tap. Yes, there's a one tap measure, which simultaneously tracks all three metrics and displays them together. You need to keep your hand still for one minute. But my problem wasn't even that. The icon needs a makeover. At first, I thought it was the Contacts app. But when you know, you remember it well.
The watch measures steps and sleep pretty good. There were some additional steps added even when I wasn't moving around much, but you can always set the target higher.
For those who don't drink their liquids, Honor Choice Watch has water intake feature to help you track it.
As far as tracking is concerned, Honor Choice Watch is a beast. It has crazy features, and the deep fitness integration is unlike what I've seen in watches in this price range.
Battery life
In terms of battery life, the HONOR Choice Watch is strong contender in the smartwatch space. The watch gets its full charge in 1.5 hours. With typical usage, the company promises up to 12 days of battery life. With heavy usage, staying connected 24/7, with tracking activities, continuous heart rate and SpO2 monitoring, stress tracking, sleep analysis, GPS and the phone notifications, you can easily go on for a week on a single charge. That's more than we can say for any other watch.
The smartwatch has a 300mAh battery and even with AOD, it lasted about 5 days, which is a respectable output.
Verdict
In conclusion, the HONOR Choice Watch is a compelling blend of style, functionality, and affordability. The smartwatch isn't devoid of flaws as there are minor drawbacks like some syncing issues and limited notification functionality, but it watch delivers good performance across fitness tracking, health monitoring, and other basic smartwatch functionalities. The watch has a decent build, plethora of features, and an impressive battery life. So yes, it offers excellent value for Rs 5,999.
There's already some tough competition in the smartwatch market in India, making the Honor Choice Watch a hard reach for many. This is exactly where the outweighing pros work in Honor's favor.
