Hands-on Honor Watch 4 review: smartwatch style, fitness tracker features

Introduction

Honor is one of the finest purveyors of smartwatches that do what many people actually use an Apple Watch for, but for less money and with a battery that lasts weeks, not a day. 

The Honor Watch 4 is perhaps the slickest it has made in this mould to date. You’ll pay £130/€120 for a Watch 4, which is actually pretty pricey by the standard of Honor wearables. But given it can also make a serviceable replacement for a Garmin, it still represents a good deal at first glance. 

We took a closer look at IFA 2023.

Honor Watch 4 design and display: shades of smartwatch

The Honor Watch 4 is part of one of Honor’s more affordable wearables lines. It doesn’t have the fitness watch bombast of the GT models, and it is not a legit smartwatch. 

However, there’s a real charm to the Honor Watch 4’s first impression experience. It has an Apple Watch-style rounded-off rectangular face, with an aluminium mid-frame, not the plastic border you typically see in budget watches from the biggest brands. 

The screen is a real draw, though. Honor boasts about this being a “60Hz” display on its website, which sounds comical when most of us consider 60Hz the bottom-rung standard, but the smoothness of the scrolling in the Honor Watch 4 is the number one component of the considerable gloss on show here. 

This is primarily a touchscreen watch, and the speed, fluidity and bouncy physics with which you flick through menus should not go under-appreciated. Even today, some cheaper smartwatch-style wearables can feel leaden and clunky. Not this one. 

The Watch 4’s display is a super-colourful 1.75-inch OLED with resolution of 390 x 450 pixels, very similar to the resolution of the 45mm Apple Watch Series 8. Honor also attempts to make the most of this poppy, sharp screen with over 300 watch faces, apparently. 

Honor Watch 4 features:

It’s a smartwatch on the outside, but it’s much more sensible to think of the Honor Watch 4 as a general fitness wearable that provides a skin of smartwatch abilities. For example, it will receive notifications from your phone has 4GB storage for music or podcasts (this isn’t listed as a key feature, but battery claims suggest local music playback is available), and can take calls from a connected phone thanks to its combo of a speaker and microphone. 

This part is often missing from these low upkeep smartwatch-a-likes. 

The Honor Watch 4 is more than a basic fitness tracker too. It has full GPS, making it ideal for phone-free runs. There’s also a baked-in running coach of sorts. 

In the fitness tracking menu you’ll see options for all sorts of structured running sessions. This is much like what you get in a couch-to-5k programme, with blocks of walking, jogging, running and big efforts, but the Watch 4 has longer or high intensity sessions too, for those already pretty handy on the tarmac. 

The Honor Watch 4 will also spit out a “fitness age” score, which appears to be a more friendly alternative to athlete’s fourth the VO2 Max score. 

Much of the rest is the usual fitness tracker fodder. The Honor Watch 4 will measure your heart rate 24/7, track your sleep and can take blood oxygen readings. 

A glance at the heart rate reader suggests it’s not the most advanced around, though. It has a single LED section and two light sensors, where higher-end fitness watches typically use a bunch more to make their heart rate readings more robust. 

The Honor Watch 4 is ultimately fairly similar to bands like the Honor Watch GS 3, but with a style that emulates an Apple Watch more than a “real watch.” And just like those slightly more expensive bands, this watch doesn’t ask for much upkeep and attention either, with a battery that lasts up to two weeks between charges and 5ATM water resistance. 

However, the version sold in China is a bit more ambitious than the one we get in the UK. Over there the Honor Watch 4 has the option of an e-SIM, which would let it take calls on its own, phone-free. Do we actually want that? Not really, but it’s an added layer of dynamism not present in the UK/European release.

Early verdict

The Honor Watch 4 is nothing particularly new for a brand that has made many of these long-lasting fitness watches with an alluring smartwatch veneer over the years. 

This one shakes things up just slightly, with a microphone and speaker combo that lets the watch take calls from a phone connected over Bluetooth. 

For our money, though, the key appeal here is the lovely, sharp screen, the responsive software and that the fitness software goes at least a few steps further than some. 

---