Honor Watch 6 Plus Specs

A little context is required to avoid overvaluing the Honor Watch 6 Plus’s staying power, though. It does not have a full smartwatch-style operating system, like Google’s Wear OS, which would see the Honor Watch 6 Plus last nowhere near 35 days despite the 1,000mAh battery capacity. It runs MagicOS, a proprietary system with more of a fitness tracker flavor.

35 days also only stands for the Honor Watch 6 Plus’s lower-power mode, with the normal mode rated at around 17 days of use. Or around 42 hours of GPS tracking — enough for around 10 back-to-back marathons. It’s still an exceptionally long-lasting watch.

The Honor Watch 6 Plus has so far only been announced for the Chinese market, with a release date of May 29. But this still-remarkable device is expected to launch elsewhere in the coming months.

One obvious question: how has Honor squeezed such a high capacity battery into such a normal-sized watch?

This doesn’t appear to have been addressed directly during the Honor Watch 6 Plus’s launch, but the clues are clear in recent Honor phones. The brand has been one of the most aggressive in implementing Silicon-Carbon battery tech, which allows for higher milliampere-hour capacity per square inch of battery volume.

The Honor 600 Pro has a 7000mAh battery, for example, in a frame that might usually house a 5000mAh one.

Battery specs aside, the Honor Watch 6 Plus’s features and specs are largely familiar. It has a 1.46-inch OLED screen with 3,000-nit peak brightness. There’s a speaker and microphone, dual-band GPS and 5ATM water resistance.

There are 120 activity tracking profiles, and while there’s no ECG feature the optical heart rate reader is mined extensively to provide blood pressure warnings, sleep apnea risk notifications and alerts for signs of unusual heart behavior. The Heart Rate Reduction feature also appears to warn of signs of cardiac arrest. If any periphery parts are snipped out in releases outside of China, these somewhat more contentious health alerts are likely to be among them.

A Honor Watch 6 Plus release outside of China hasn’t been announced — and one in the U.S. is unlikely — but Honor does typically announce its wearables in China ahead of a wider western release. The watch starts at 1,199 Yuan, equivalent to around $176.