After a China-only launch in November 2020, the Honor Band 6 has finally been confirmed for the global market, as one of the tech company’s products at annual tech show CES 2021.
This is a new affordable fitness tracker that succeeds the feature-packed Honor Band 5 from 2019, but the new band makes a big jump over its predecessor in a few key ways.
Below, you can find everything you need to know about the Honor Band 6, including its price, what it looks like, and what features it has. When we get our hands on the fitness tracker, we’ll conduct a full review so you know what it’s like to use, and if it’s worth buying.
We’ve listed everything you need to know about the Honor Band 6 below, including how it looks and what you’ll be able to do on it that you couldn’t on the Band 5. The biggest change though is in terms of design, and many of the changes beyond that are optimizations to features that were present in older devices.
Cut to the chase
- What is it? The next cheap fitness band from Honor
- When is it out? ‘Soon’ according to Honor
- How much will it cost? Roughly $35 (about £26, AU$45)
Honor Band 6 release date and price
After a China launch event on November 3 2020, the Honor Band 6 got a global unveiling at CES in early January 2021. We still don’t know when it’ll go on sale – Honor has simply said ‘soon’ when it was speaking on January 10.
With regards to price, we’ve got a rough price of $35, but Honor doesn’t typically sell its products easily in the US, so this is likely just a guide for conversions. It’s roughly £25 / AU$45, so expect a price around that.
The Honor Band 5 was available through multiple resellers in the US, but it wasn’t sold directly by Honor in the country.
For a price comparison, the Honor Band 5 launched for $36.99 / £29.99 (roughly AU$55), so we could see the new version retail for that or just a touch more. The Honor Band 5’s price has gone down slightly since launch though, as have the prices of its predecessors – check them out below.
Honor Band 6 design and display
The Honor Band 6 doesn’t wildly shake up the formula of ‘fitness tracker’, most of which are thin bands with small screens, but it does bring a few improvements to the formula compared to its predecessors and rivals.
The display, for example, takes up the entirety of the band body, rather than being a smaller square with a button below like on the Band 5. It looks a lot like the Honor Watch ES in this regard, even down to the power button on the right edge.
There’s no physical navigation button on the Band 6 – instead you can control it just by swiping or tapping on the display. This means the screen itself can be way bigger than before.
This display is 1.47 inches across and uses AMOLED tech, so colors should be punchy.
The bands are replaceable and you’ll likely be able to buy replacement bands of different materials and colors, if you like.
Like many of the best fitness trackers, the Honor Band 6 straps look long with plenty of holes, which should make them great for a variety of wrist sizes, and they should also be more breathable as a result.
We don’t know the actual dimensions of the Honor Band 6 yet, or its straps, but it doesn’t look too heavy – it’s likely about 20g – though it seems a little thick compared to its predecessor.
Honor Band 6 fitness and features
The Honor Band 6 has lots of the basic features you’d expect from such a fitness tracker – there’s step, sleep and heart rate monitoring. With every new Honor wearable we see improvements to these, especially sleep tracking, so we’d expect improvements in these departments.
There is also a range of workouts tracked, including running, cycling and walking. There are ten different modes, and though not all have been named, they’re likely to be the usual suspects we see on most trackers like the above named, along probably with things like swimming and free workout.
The heart rate tracking is constant, so you can always check what your main internal organ is doing; Honor’s watches generally have that feature, and another returner is Apple Watch-style activity rings which count your steps, active hours, and more in easy-to-follow colorful circles.
There’s also weather tracking, music control, and of course time-telling.
As with most Honor wearables, the Band 6 pairs with the Huawei Health app on your smartphone so you can see in-depth collected stats, including historic data on a range of things like steps and sleep.
Battery life clocks in at 14 days according to Honor, but we’ll need to test that for our full review.
Honor has confirmed there’s fast magnetic charging, and states that using this for five minutes the band should last for two days of use.