Honor Band 7 review

We used the Honor Band 7 over a period of a few weeks, wearing it all day and night and during exercise, to put features like daily activity and sleep tracking, and monitoring heart rate to the test.

The tracker was set up to receive phone notifications and weather updates, with the display set at different levels of brightness to see how that would impact on battery performance.

Alongside the fitness tracker, we used the Honor Health companion phone app to monitor fitness tracker and health data trends, and to adjust settings like adding watch faces and enabling phone notifications.

We were able to compare the fitness tracker data to a Garmin fitness tracker and the Oura Ring Generation 3, to also see how sleep tracking accuracy performed. We also used a Garmin running watch to compare the accuracy of the exercise data.

The Honor Band 7 is relatively straightforward to set up, but you’ll need to have your phone nearby. And while the tracker already has some battery when you take it out of the box, it’s a wise move to plug it into the charger that’s also provided.

Your next step is to download the Honor Health app on your phone, from the Apple App Store if you have an iPhone, or the Google Play Store for Android users. 

You’ll need to create an Honor Health account first, which will require information like your name, and to create a login and password, adding an email address where you’ll also be sent a verification code during this setup process to complete creating your account.

Once you’ve completed the app setup and made an account, you’ll then need to go into the app and look for the Device section. Here, you can add your device by letting the app scan and search for the tracker, if it’s close by and you have Bluetooth turned on on your phone.

You can also choose to scan a QR code that appears on the tracker when you first turn it on, using your phone’s camera (when prompted). If these steps don’t work, you can manually add the device from the Honor Health app, where it will list your device to add. 

So there’s multiple ways to pair the Band 7 to your phone, you just need to do a little bit of work to get to that point first.

The tracker is extremely light, making it ideal to wear all the time and is something you can generally forget about when you’re not peering at it.

That’s partly down to the use of a polymer case, which is basically plastic and feels not too dissimilar to the build of other cheap fitness trackers and pricier ones, too.

The plastic case is matched up with a slim, silicone rubber strap that uses a pretty traditional watch buckle clasp, making it nice and easy to put on and take off.

You can’t remove the strap, however, but as a package it’s waterproof up to 50 metres (around 100ft). That means you can keep it on in the shower and you can wear it for swimming as well.

There’s three colours to pick from – emerald green, coral pink and meteorite black – and that change in colour covers the case and the strap.

We tested the meteorite black version, which is clearly the more understated option available, and had no issues with discomfort or any real need to take the band off at any time.

It’s comfortable to wear to bed as well, which is helped by its far from bulky design. It handles some sweatier exercise time without issue too.

Honor includes a lovely, vibrant and colourful screen, which measures 3.7cm (1.47in), with a resolution of 194 x 368 pixels. It’s an AMOLED display, which means it offers rich colours and good screen brightness, even when you don’t set it to the maximum screen brightness.

It’s not a struggle to view indoors and outdoors in bright sunlight, and the touchscreen is nicely responsive when you need to interact with it as well.

There’s also a solitary physical button on the side of the case, which you use to wake up the display, which can be tapped twice to quickly get you into the main menu screen.

The Honor Band 7 is best described as a fitness tracker that also offers some features you’d find on sports watches and smartwatches to make it useful during exercise and when you just want to use it as a watch.

It’s not going to match what an Apple Watch or a Garmin running watch can offer you, but it aims to be useful outside of fitness tracker basics, like counting daily step counts and monitoring sleep.

As an activity tracker, it lets you see your daily step counts on the watch, and step count data over longer periods in the Honor Health app. This isn’t a tracker that can track your elevation, however, which is useful if you tend to climb a lot of stairs during the day.

You’ll also be able to see your previous night’s sleep from the band, and see sleep data over a longer period in the phone app. From there you’ll be able to see a breakdown of sleep in stages to see how much deep, light and REM sleep you achieve each night. It also provides a sleep score to give you a quick indicator of how well you slept.

Honor includes some additional features around monitoring your general wellbeing, too. It uses the onboard optical sensors to track stress through heart rate variability measurements to let you see where you’ve experienced your most and least stressful moments in the day, and offers some guided breathing exercises to help get you back to a much calmer state.

With those more sports watch-like features, Honor promises the ability to track up to 96 workouts, with 11 of those workouts available offering more activity-specific information. So, if you use it for running, it’ll track your pace and distance.

To get the most accurate outdoor distance tracking you’ll need to run with your phone as well, as the tracker uses your phone’s GPS to more accurately track your movements. That’s because Honor doesn’t include its own GPS sensor, like the Fitbit Charge 5, or most dedicated sports watches, will.

While the Band 7 isn’t a medical device, it does use optical sensors to generate heart rate data and blood oxygen throughout the day and night, and can send out alerts if heart rate is abnormally high or low. As mentioned, these aren’t medical-grade readings, so they should act more as guidance or potential indicators about your general health and wellbeing.

When you’re not tracking your heart rate, workouts or steps, the Band 7 does also have its uses. As a watch, you can view some of your metrics straight from the display and you can change watch faces simply by pressing down on the Band’s display.

You can view notifications from your wrist from apps like WhatsApp once you’ve enabled it in the Honor Health app first. You’ll also need your phone and tracker paired to be able to see additional data, like weather forecasts and use the Find Phone feature, which lets you ring your phone from your tracker to help locate it if you’ve forgotten where you left it. There’s also the ability to set an alarm, create a timer or use the stopwatch mode.

Basically, there’s a lot here and if you look at fitness trackers around the same price from popular tracker makers like Samsung, Huawei and Xiaomi, the Honor Band 7 is a pretty good match.

It even offers a lot of what you’ll get from Fitbit’s more entry level fitness tracker, which costs considerably more than the Band 7.

We’ll start with the bread and butter of a device like this – how well it can do the basics of a fitness tracker. When we’re talking basics, we’re looking at how accurately it tracks your steps, and sleep, how it presents that data on the band and off it, and how well it motivates you to keep active each day.

For daily activity, there’s a dedicated screen on the tracker that displays in ring form your progress with steps, estimated calorie burned, and the amount of more active time you spent that day. We used the Band 7 alongside a Garmin fitness tracker and the Oura Ring Gen 3 smart ring, which offers to deliver the same type of data. 

All of these devices work with similar motion sensors to capture this data but use their own software to interpret that data. So while we wouldn’t expect them to deliver identical numbers, we’d expect them to be roughly around the same numbers. 

Thankfully, we found that the Band 7 on most days was around 400-500 steps off the step tracking on those other devices, which to us feels like useful data. Calorie burn estimates were a little more varied, but the Band 7 never felt wildly high or low with its estimates in comparison. 

As far as motivating you to move more, the Band 7 will send a vibrating buzz when you’ve not moved for long periods, but beyond that there’s not much else to look to to make sure you stay active throughout the day.

When you take the tracker to sleep it aims to track when you go to sleep, when you get up, and tell you how much time you spent in deep, light and REM sleep stages. REM sleep is related to learning and memory, so it can be useful to have a sense of whether you’re getting a good amount of it, for example. 

Taking it to bed with the Oura Ring and Garmin tracker, it did a very good job of detecting the time we fell asleep and woke up. It offered similar sleep scores as well, which is the simplest way to understand whether you had a good or bad night’s sleep.

You can also see some additional data on how your sleep compares to users of a similar age to you, with some information provided via the NHS about how to help fall asleep.

If you like the idea of the Band 7 tracking your heart rate and even blood oxygen levels, it does a good job in some scenarios and not so good in others. If you’re relying on it to tell you your resting heart rate, which is a useful indicator of overall fitness, then we found that readings could be quite a bit higher than the similar and more reliable tracking from our Garmin fitness tracker. 

It fared better on telling us how heart rate ranges over a day and night, but the data wasn’t always spotless. Honor uses that heart rate sensor to generate stress readings as well, clearly presenting the data so you’ll know if you’ve been unusually stressful during the day and seeing if you’ve spent most of your day in a more relaxed manner. 

Monitoring your blood oxygen can be another useful indicator of your general wellbeing, and the Band 7 will record your ranges and latest readings, with an explainer taken from Wikipedia to explain what represents a good reading or something to keep an eye on.

We compared readings to a dedicated pulse oximeter you wear on your finger and its readings felt in line, though it’s not a feature that really goes deep into analysing your data.

When it’s time to turn to it to track your exercise, the Band 7 feels a bit more out of its depth but it does still manage to deliver some good tracking for some activities.

When using it for outdoor running, you’ll need to connect it to your phone before you head outside otherwise the tracking accuracy without doing that, particularly for distance tracking, isn’t very good. 

The screen size makes it a better fit for viewing data during a run compared to other slimmer fitness trackers and when you connect phone and Band together it’s a good fit to track shorter 20-30 minute runs as opposed to something you’d use to train for a marathon.

It does produce surprisingly good heart rate data accuracy during exercise, if you’re keeping your pace very steady, and part of that is down to this tracker’s good fit, which makes sure the sensors are in close contact with your skin.

We also tested other workout modes, like treadmill running, pool swimming, and indoor rowing, and it fared well on most of those fronts. For indoor rows, it tracked stroke counts reliably while keeping swims to shorter 20 minute stints produced the most accurate data for distance covered in the pool and average stroke counts.

The Band 7 also works well as a smartwatch and that’s partly down to having a bigger, more vibrant display than most trackers at this price. You get a nice array of watch faces to pick from and you have the option to transfer over additional ones from the Honor Health app.

Weather updates are nicely presented and easy to understand and if you want to control music playing on your phone from your wrist, the controls are a good size to use and interact with. 

Notifications from your phone will still feel a bit more cramped than looking at them on your phone, but you can scroll through portions of messages and emails that help to give you a flavour of whether you need to reach for your phone to deal with them or just leave them for later.

The Honor Health phone app aims to keep the experience nice and simple, and it largely achieves that. From the main screen you can see your latest fitness, health and exercise data, and then further sections to track exercise from your phone with additional workout programs on offer, and the ability to adjust settings on your tracker. 

It pays off to spend some time in the app when you first start using the tracker, especially in the device settings. This will help you better understand what this tracker is actually capable of and whether you can turn off features you’re not using or care about, which in turn can help improve battery life.

The battery performance on the Honor Band 7 is very good and if you like the idea of a fitness tracker you won’t have to charge for over a week, even if with its biggest features in use, then that’s what it can deliver.

Honor claims you can enjoy up to 14 days’ battery life with typical use, and that drops to 10 days with heavy usage. What defines heavy usage is choosing to use features like tracking heart rate and blood oxygen levels throughout the day and night.

Using these optical sensors continuously does have a notable drain on battery just as it does on other trackers and watches that use them.

We found in typical use with features like using exercise tracking every couple of days, receiving notifications from our phone and keeping that screen at moderate brightness, the daily battery drop-off was well below 10%.

With those more battery sapping features in use, it was on average 10% or more, depending on whether we’d also tracked exercise that day. Bottom line, this is a fitness tracker that’s more than capable of going over a week without charging.

When you do need to charge it, you need to use the proprietary charging cable included, which means keeping hold of that charger as you won’t be able to use another one to charge it up instead. The good news is that even if it hits 0% battery, it takes less than an hour to get back up to 100%.

The Honor Band 7 is extremely good value when you break down exactly what you’re getting in terms of design, features and performance. 

Typically, fitness trackers at this price point have meant making huge compromises, and while the Band 7 isn’t the complete package, it does deliver similar to what you’ll see from the likes of the Xiaomi Mi Band 7, Huawei Band 7, and Samsung Galaxy Fit 2, and even holds up well against the pricier Fitbit Inspire 3, which arguably gives you a more intuitive companion app and some additional health insights and sensors.

It’s always a good sign that it’s available outside of going directly through Honor’s own website to buy it, with it also appearing on retailers like Currys and Amazon. It’s also dropped below its RRP launch price of £49.99, making it even better value than it already is at its regular price.

Alongside the Honor Band 7 are some alternatives that you might want to think about…

The Huawei Band 7 is a very similar-looking tracker to the Honor Band 7, and has the same RRP of £49.99 but has often dropped to £39.99, putting it in the same price bracket as the Honor Band 7.

It offers basically the very same features, including a large AMOLED touchscreen display, compatibility with iPhones and Android phones, and the ability to track heart rate, blood oxygen,and up to 96 exercises, and promises up to two weeks’ battery life.

The biggest difference between the two is that the Huawei Band 7 has a slightly larger case and thinner design, but the feature sets are identical.

Xiaomi’s Mi Band 7 has a cheaper RRP of £39.99 compared to the Honor Band 7, but generally doesn’t drop below that. It offers a slimmer design and screen, which might make it better suited to someone who wants a tracker that takes up less wrist space.

It does let you swap out the straps and also has a colourful AMOLED display with a range of watch faces to choose from.

Tracking features-wise, it takes things a step further on the sports training and analysis front, offering recovery recommendations and support for over 110 workout modes. It can also track heart rate and blood oxygen levels day and night and can last up to two weeks on a single charge.

Honor promises that the Band 7 is a fitness tracker that can do a lot for not a lot of money, and in most instances it delivers. It performs well as an activity tracker, and offers some useful smartwatch and sports tracking features here as well. 

Add in a great colour display and good battery performance and there’s a lot to like here, making it a fitness tracker that offers great value for money.

When you compare it to the competition, it doesn’t necessarily offer better performance, but it holds well in those key accuracy, design and battery departments. If you want a fitness tracker with a nice screen that you won’t have to charge all the time and that offers a strong core fitness tracking experience, then the Band 7 is a good fit. 

If you’re looking for something with arguably a more intuitive app experience and slightly sleeker look, there’s better options out there. There’s certainly more good than not so good here, which makes the Band 7 an attractive buy.