Huawei Band 3: a Smart Band That Cuts to the Chase
Exercise is necessary. For those who take this motto seriously, measuring physical activity can be a great way to stay firm on this mission. The Huawei Band 3 is a smart band that appears as an option for those who have this idea in mind but is not willing to pay a small fortune for a smartwatch. Of course, being cheap, this bracelet has a very limited amount of features. But the basics it promises to deliver, bluntly: heart rate measurement, sleep monitor, step count, and logs of common sports activities (such as running and swimming) are among the main features. The question is: does the Huawei Band 3 work well or is it the typical cheap one that goes expensive? I used the device for two weeks and I’ll tell you what I found in the next few minutes. Read the article for knowing about the huawei band 3 review guide below;
What’s Cool About Huawei Band 3?
As every smart band has to be, the Huawei Band 3 is light (weighs 24g) and compact. The direct effect of this is that the display ends up being tiny. Even so, it pleases: the panel is 0.95 inches, but has a resolution of 240×120 pixels that allows the information to be displayed very clearly.
- In addition, the display is of the AMOLED type, which ensures good visualization of the content even when there is direct sunlight on the panel. The only catch is that you need to adjust the brightness manually, when appropriate.
- The screen is touching sensitive, not least because there are no buttons or other ways to control the bracelet. Sometimes, the response to a given command delays a bit, but that doesn’t get in the way.
- You can “wake up” Band 3 by doing that typical movement of lifting your arm to check the time or simply swiping your finger over the sensor just below the display.
- The bracelet is compatible with Android and iPhone phones. All you need to do to start syncing with your smartphone is to look for the Huawei Health app in the Google Play Store or App Store and follow the device’s guidance to pair up — you’ll need to create a Huawei ID, but it’s quick.
- The process is simple and essential. Without syncing, you won’t have access to full statistics of your activities. In addition, it is through Huawei Health that any software updates are installed — it was thanks to an update that the Huawei Band 3 tested in the review started to work in Portuguese.
- The functions of the gadget are these: count daily steps, measure heart rate, monitor sleep, and measure workouts, which can be running outdoors, running indoors (treadmill), walking, exercise bike, swimming (the strap is water-resistant at depths of up to 50 m) and aerobic activity.
- The results of these measurements were undistorted. Band 3 detected with some accuracy the walking and running activities I performed, the estimates of the distance covered were accurate, the heart rate practically matched the manual measurements I took, and the sleep monitoring seemed coherent to me. Among the additional functions is messaging. In Huawei Health, you can configure Band 3 to emit notifications from virtually any app installed on your smartphone. In my tests, this function worked perfectly to alert you to new messages in Gmail (but you can’t reply to them there).
- A nice feature (or inconvenient, depending on how good your day is) is automatic notifications: after a while of no activity recording, the device vibrates to remind you to exercise.
- Complementary functions include a timer, stopwatch, and “phone find” which, as the name suggests, makes your smartphone ring so you can find it.
- You can also use Huawei Band 3 as an alarm clock (the gadget vibrates as it doesn’t emit any sound), but this function can only be configured via Huawei Health.
- Ah, the Chinese manufacturer talks about a battery with an autonomy of up to 12 days. It’s not an exaggeration. The duration will depend on the features activated (automatic heart rate monitoring will consume more energy, for example), but I only needed to recharge the bracelet around the tenth day of use. For those who use the gadget very often, you can expect no more than one recharge for a week.
And What’s Not Cool?
Curiously, the negative parts of Huawei Band 3 are more related to the Huawei Health app than the device itself. In this one, the only negative feature that bothered me is the availability of only three dials, but this is such a small detail that it is perhaps an exaggeration to pay attention to it. GPS is a feature that is also lacking, but this is a feature that Huawei includes in a more advanced bracelet, the Band 3 Pro. Even left for the app, in fact, Huawei Health is quite functional. It can provide easy-to-understand statistics about your physical activities, your heartbeat history, the quality of your sleep, and so on. But a few details cause a pang of disappointment. For starters, there are translation flaws few, but there are. The app displays the word “steps” in place of “steps” and, in the sleep report, shows warnings like “you only slept at 6:23 am last night” — what it means is that 6:23 was the time total in which I slept. Until then, you can reveal. What is unforgivable is data loss. On one of the days I slept with the bracelet, it duly recorded my sleep hours. But in the afternoon I took a nap. To my dismay, the data from that nap ended up either overwriting the sleep stats of the night before or somehow missing them.
