- [Reviewer] Today the new Huawei Honor Band 5.
A smartwatch and fitness tracker
offering big value at a budget price.
Five best features to follow,
and a couple of not so good things.
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Unboxing your Honor Band 5 reveals
of course your fitness tracker,
a charging device, warranty card and quick guide.
Download the impressive Huawei Heath app
and install the firmware update,
and you’re ready to go.
It looks smart,
the design will appeal to both men or women.
It comes with a charge cable,
and purpose fit adaptor
which seats perfectly to the case back,
and takes 1.5 hours for a full charge.
The strap has multiple perforations,
so everyone can find a perfect fit.
The loop has a pin that will drive you crazy.
It helps locate the loop to prevent it sliding,
a bit like a self driving car,
an invention nobody asked for,
and nobody wants.
It makes it hard work to fasten
or undo the watch strap.
If you squeeze the loop the strap will slide,
but you can’t do that with one hand,
so that’s only helpful if you wear it on your foot!
You can outsmart the loop,
by rotating it 180 degrees to face the other way, see?
My first of the five best features
is the multiple activity sports monitoring.
Supporting up to 10 activities,
that’s 3 more than the old Honor Band 4,
and five more than a Mi Band 4.
Your Honor Band 5 supports outdoors
and indoors running, outdoors and indoor walking,
outdoors and indoors cycling,
cross trainer, rowing, free training, and swimming.
A built in six-axis sensor provides
swim stroke recognition,
and the watch is water resistant up to 50 meters.
I don’t know If I’m waterproof to 50 meters,
so I dunked mine in a stream.
We’ll call that a pass.
Your location piggy backs GPS
from your smartphone.
The watch provides live data during your activity,
your distance covered, beats per minutes,
time elapsed, and more.
Synched data on the Huawei app
lets you study exhaustive detailed information,
as well a track map feature which is pretty cool.
I timed one firmware update at 37 minutes,
so don’t be tempted to update immediately
before you go for a run or a hike like I did,
as you might miss your gap in the good weather.
My next best feature is the raise to wake screen.
It’s not something I imagined I’d like,
but I was wrong.
It’s responsive, works great,
and helps you get up to 14 days
on one battery charge.
It times out quite fast,
but there’s an option to give you temporarily
extended display of five minutes.
The smart use of battery resource,
means you can enable the always-on
heart rate monitor,
this is another of my favourite features.
Some fitness trackers only give you live heart rate
monitoring during a tracked activity.
The Honor Band 5 allows you to enable
continuous heart rate monitoring,
either in detailed 24 hour real-time,
or by a power saving
smart continuous monitoring option.
With continuous heart rate monitoring turned off,
you can still call up a live reading
from the watch menu at any time.
Attempting to cancel this operation
apparently raises my heart rate to nearly double.
A big new headline feature promoted online
by the manufacturer, and retailers,
is a blood oxygen monitor,
available for this new Honor Band 5.
I learn there’s some disappointment expressed
by consumers, hitting the online forums.
They say this feature is not enabled on their device,
and nor is mine, so I can’t show you.
Rumour is this function will be enabled
around October 2019, with a firmware update.
Leave a comment if you have something new
to share on that matter.
The battery life mentioned briefly already,
is another great reason to buy.
It’s only 100 milliamp hour,
but that’s what gives you the fast charging time.
I’ve been using the watch a lot for testing,
with the screen on maximum brightness,
to capture better video footage,
and with continuous heart rate monitoring,
including night time use of the sleep tracker,
and I’m confident the battery life will impress you.
On the watch face main display you have the time,
your footstep count, calories burnt,
and miles covered, and the date!
The touch screen full color display is 0.9 inch,
and with up to 282 PPI pixel density,
and with tempered glass.
Your Honor Band 5 is customizable
with a selection of installed watch faces,
and you can download more.
You can accept or reject a call from the watch face,
and see notification of missed calls.
Various other alerts come through,
including text message alerts.
I recommend you enable everything,
and then disable any features you don’t care for.
There’s even remote picture taking,
and a find your phone feature.
There’s really too much to show you,
but that’s a credit to the product
at its budget price point,
which brings me to the final reason
to consider the Honor Band 5.
At around $35 you get something that feels
it should have cost a lot more.
The one I have was sent to me from Geekbuying
for an unbiased review.
I dropped a link in the description for you.
They ship to pretty much anywhere in the world,
and you can use PayPal,
for the best buyer protection,
so check that out.
If you use the link to buy an item,
I may get a small kick back from that,
which helps support the channel.
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