In the vast sea of budget smartwatches, the new Honor Choice smartwatch has come sailing along. Does it get the blend of functionality and style right?  Design and display

At first sight, the watch looks simple — maybe a little too simple in its all-black design. What I do appreciate is how lightweight it is! It sports a 1.95-inch display, which offers up to 550 nits of peak brightness. The display felt smooth to swipe on, but the animations weren’t always the smoothest. Swiping up or away from the edges didn’t always result in the most seamless animations and looked a bit jerky visually.  There’s only one physical button — the digital crown — on the smartwatch, which doubles up as a launcher for workout tracking on a double press. 

Quick access

I got access to most of the features quite quickly from the home screen itself. A quick swipe down from the top would take me to shortcuts, which included features such as always on display, alarms, brightness, water drain, flashlight, and so on. Swiping up from the bottom would pop up my notifications. 

Swiping left to right would help me glance and control any music I was streaming, take me to workout shortcuts, and help me with a quick heart rate measure, voice recorder, phone calls, and contacts. Swiping right to left would take me to Apple’s lookalike ‘Activity Record’ concentric rings that I could close every day. These rings on the Honor Choice smartwatch track my steps, calories burnt, and intensity of any physical activity I do throughout the day. 

App experience 

I needed to download the Honor Health app to set the smartwatch up completely.  There were lots of cute watch face options and personal data I could enter for more tailored fitness and health tracking and feedback from the smartwatch. While there were a lot of customisations possible through the app, the app itself was glitchy. Even simple actions such as swiping from one screen to another took more time than I’d like to spare on a smartwatch. 

Health and fitness

I had the Honor Choice smartwatch on during my functional strength classes, and it did a good job of accurately recording my activity. The device offers blood oxygen saturation levels as well as continuous heart rate measurement, but it’s a feature that needs to be manually turned on first. 

There are more than a hundred outdoor and fitness activity tracking modes on the watch. More than anyone will ever try, for real. The smartwatch has built-in GPS, which is fairly accurate and a definite bonus at this price range. 

 There’s also a stress monitoring function that works by tracking my heart rate. I could also manually set a number for tracking heart rate and Spo2, above or below which the watch would ring a health alert

Extra functions

I also tried out the voice recorder on the device. However, even in a quiet environment, the audio recorded was neither loud nor clear. 

The smartwatch is capable of placing phone calls via Bluetooth. There’s also a special one-touch emergency call function, which I’m sure will serve many users well if they ever need it. The watch runs on a 300 mAh battery, and I had it on for almost a week before I had to plug it in to charge again. The smartwatch is 5 ATM water-resistant, which means it’s built to withstand pressures equivalent to a depth of 50 metres. It should also easily survive splashes, rain or snow, showering, swimming, diving, and snorkelling. So water babies can add this to their shortlist.

Verdict

Some features worthy of praise on the Honor Choice smartwatch are its vivid display, tons of features to track health and fitness, lightweight design, and decent battery life. The experiences I didn’t enjoy were stutters on the display, a glitchy app, and a design that didn’t stand out. Available in two colour variants, black and white, the Honor Choice smartwatch makes its debut in a market where the likes of Amazfit and even OnePlus have already carved out a place for themselves in the user’s minds and hearts.

Price - ₹6,499

Pros - Variety of health and fitness features, bright display, lightweight body

Cons -  Glitchy UI,  lack of design aesthetics