Honor Band 5: the full Review

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In the category of "wearables", there are two types of products. On the one hand, there are smart health connected watches, whose market is dominated by the Apple Watch, and on the other, activity tracking bracelets. The latter have the advantage of being cheaper (less than 50 euros for the most affordable of them). They generally appeal to people who want to take care of themselves, but are ready to skip some advanced features to reduce the bill.

Sold at a price of 29 euros, the Honor Band 5 is one of the cheapest smart health connected bracelets on the market. Its mission is to face the Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 4, one of the big references in this category despite its low price of 39 euros.

A bracelet compatible with Android and iOS

To configure your Honor Band 5, you must install the application Huawei Health on his smartphone. It is available on Android and iOS, which makes the bracelet compatible with all recent mobile phones. During the first configuration, the time nevertheless seemed very long since we had to wait twenty minutes to be able to use the bracelet, update included.

Although classic, the Huawei Health app interface is quite effective. You can view your physical activity in one tab, launch a sports activity in another or access the settings of your bracelet a little further. Many elements are configurable such as the dial that displays the time or the notifications you want to receive on your wrist. You can also activate or deactivate certain functions such as continuous heart rate monitoring (in order to prolong autonomy).

Sports follow-up that leaves you hungry

On paper, the Honor Band 5 is perfect for the casual sportsman. Unfortunately, our tests prove that everything is not perfect. Honor’s proposal is even disappointing.

Among the ten activities offered, we were disappointed each time with the reliability of the results. The walk deliver completely false results (the number of steps is more important than the reality), the running activity failed to start several times but we only knew it at the end of the course while that free training seems to rely on chance for calorie counting. Worse, we noticed a gap of up to 40 beats per minute between the Honor Band 5 and an Apple Watch, which has a reputation for being reliable. In the middle of the race, the Honor 5 thus indicates 180 bpm while it is 140 on the Apple watch. At such a level of imprecision, there is no need to tell you that you should not trust the Honor Band 5 for relevant health monitoring. It's fun, but it doesn't reflect reality.

Even more astonishing, some activities like cycling outdoors require having an Honor smartphone or an iPhone. On other mobiles (like the Xiaomi mobile with which we have associated it), the option is simply not offered. There is a reason for this constraint. The bracelet does not carry GPS, which requires it to use the location of your smartphone. The problem is that this mode requires an Honor or an iPhone … We do not quite understand why, but that is the sad reality.

Sleep tracking works well

Fortunately, the Honor Band 5 has at least one quality health function: sleep monitoring. If you sleep with your bracelet, it automatically detects your phases of light sleep, deep sleep and wakefulness. In the morning, by synchronizing it to your smartphone (which can take a good minute), you will have access to a detailed graph. This function works particularly well and we appreciate the fact that we do not have to launch it manually before going to sleep.

A simple interface, not always convincing

Now let's talk about the Honor Band 5 as a smart health connected bracelet rather than an activity tracker. If its design is nothing revolutionary, it has at least the advantage of going everywhere. We have here a black bracelet could not be more classic, even a little too "rubber".

The Honor Band 5 has a 0.95-inch OLED touch screen that takes an oval format and is read vertically. To navigate from one menu to another, you swipe, with your fingertip, from top to bottom or from bottom to top. You can access the heart rate app, for example, but also music control or notifications. Just touch the touch button, located at the bottom of the slab to return to the health home screen or end a race.

If all this is ergonomic enough to be understood by all, we criticize Honor for some design errors. For example, the writing of notifications is unfortunately too small, which makes it difficult to read from the bracelet. The font chosen by Honor is actually quite old-fashioned and does not help reading. We also deplore the lack of tactile sensitivity of the screen which does not always understand our gestures. Most of the functions fortunately offer correct functioning.

Excellent autonomy

On its website, Honor highlights the 14-day battery life of the Honor Band 5. According to our measurements, the bracelet can last 6 days, which is already excellent for an accessory of this kind. Charging it only once a week is clearly a big advantage, especially if you keep it on your wrist overnight.

To charge the Band 5, Honor delivers a small magnetic accessory that can be hung on the bracelet. It has a Micro USB port (and not USB-C, unfortunately) which will be used for charging. This compact accessory is quite practical to use. It can be accommodated in a corner of the bag, without having to carry a long proprietary cable.

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