Honor Band Z1 review: Jack of some trades, master of none

Honor Band Z1 review: The Huawei Wear app

The Honor Band, along with most other fitness trackers, requires its own app on your phone. Slightly confusingly, the accompanying app here is the one Honor’s parent company, Huawei, used for its trackers.

It doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary. The homepage gives you an approximation of the time you’ve spent moving and the distance covered (there’s no GPS, meaning they really are just approximations) and, in a cute twist, it equates the calories burned to a food equivalent (“151kcal = Calories from 1 drumstick”).

Other than that, it’s business as usual. Once you’ve figured out how to access your recent stats, rather than just the day you’re on (it’s less intuitive than I’d like), you can see graphs of when you ran and walked, and how good your sleep was each night, broken down to deep and light sleep. It’s an entirely personal experience – there aren’t any friends to compare with – but what it does works fine and is neatly presented.  

Honor Band Z1 review: Battery life and charging

One area the Honor Band excels in is battery life: no mean feat for such a small device. The monochrome screen and lack of heart rate sensor clearly help here, but it pays off well, with the Band delivering a comfortable three-and-a-half days use during testing. More impressively, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything charge so fast.

The Band was on 10% just before I needed to head out to play football. After putting it in its bespoke magnetic charging cradle, the Honor Band had leapt to 70% charge in less than half an hour. That’s hard to argue with.

Honor Band Z1 review: Conclusion

So there we have it: the Honor Band is basically a Fitbit that tells the time, but in a fashion that’s considerably less discrete, in a package that isn’t stylish enough for that to be a positive. That would be fine and dandy if it offered something extra – as someone who used to wear a Pebble, I genuinely think smartwatches are worth wearing – but, alas, it doesn’t. That’s unless you count the ability to know when someone is phoning you as a killer feature, and I’m not convinced I do.

Okay, that’s broadly the same as the Asus VivoWatch, you could argue, which is a valid point. Somehow, though, the Asus seems more appealing because it embraces its limitations with a more angular design. The circular face makes this device look classier, but there’s no substance to back that up, and the lack of a physical button and its finicky touchscreen makes it worse.

It is, of course, a fair bit cheaper. Available for £60 direct from Honor’s vMall website, the Honor Band Z1 is around the same price as a Fitbit Flex, offering pretty much the same feature set. Maybe that seems like a good deal, but, for me, I’d either get something more discreet or something just as showy, but with better battery life. Or, if you want a real looker, pay double and get something with more style that offers smartwatch features such as the LG G Watch Urbane, which has had quite the price cut since launch.

It’s not that the Honor Band is bad – it’s just hard to find any area in which it excels. Even at its modest price point, the Honor Band misses the mark.