Huawei’s first foray into the US smartphone market was with the Honor 5X, a lower-cost device with a well-balanced design. Encouraged by its initial reception, Huawei is back with a new device for the US—the Honor 8. While the Honor 5X hit…
Huawei’s first foray into the US smartphone market was with the Honor 5X, a lower-cost device with a well-balanced design. Encouraged by its initial reception, Huawei is back with a new device for the US—the Honor 8. While the Honor 5X hit…
I think I’m getting the reason why smartwatches exist now – or at least watches in general. When I was younger, before smartphones, I wore a simple cheap watch to tell the time. When smartphones came along, I ditched the watch as it was just ‘another thing to carry’, and its utility was superseded by the mobile phone. Having worn the TalkBand B2, and that space now being filled by the updated B3, I’m starting to get it. I think.
When I tested the TalkBand B2, a number of its features irritated me, such as the limited two-day battery life or the fact that the screen was incredibly bright at night, waking me up every time I turned over and the screen activated. The additional step counter, calorie burner and sleep monitor were interesting add-ons that provided a tale of being glued to my desk, or walking marathons during tech industry events, but these features have regressed in their utility over the initial fascination period. Now that I’m testing the B3, it’s clear that there are some useful features for a watch that doesn’t quite match the email facilities of a full Android Wear/Tizen device or an Apple equivalent, but it certainly gives more than a simple time telling mechanism.
Smartwatches (or semi-smart watches like the B3) are still new enough that I am continually asked what it is like, or how I feel it compares. There’s a list of pros and cons, but I find that above basic clock face, it currently augments my life in two very specific ways.
Firstly, as an early morning alarm clock. On my wrist is a device on which you can set a time (via the app) and it will detect when I am sleeping in a low REM/light sleep up to 30 minutes before that set time and wake me by vibrating. This has a twofold advantage: I don’t wake up from a deep sleep which would make me feel groggy due to the REM detection, and as a vibration rather than audio, my partner next to me is not woken up by any noise (unless I accidentally step on a cat / Lego making my way to the bathroom and produce four letter expletives). This benefit of a device like the B3 sounds like a minor plus, but it works wonders if the user has a set time to wake or has an early appointment to make. Unfortunately the Huawei app only has a limitation – it only lets the user set one such alarm time for that 30-minute wake-window, meaning that subsequent alarms are fixed at specific times in case you really want to snooze. It shouldn’t be too hard for the software developers to add in at least one more, for those that don’t have a regular sleep schedule.
Second, the TalkBand B3 augments my life as a Bluetooth headset. To clarify, with this watch you can take out the module with all the electronics (you need to do this to charge) while still leaving the strap on your wrist. As a Bluetooth headset, I can listen to music in one ear while keeping the other open for other noises (door bell, cat yowl, pasta boiling over) without the need for a wire or a dangling ear piece. While under the noise of cooking, I can listen to a YouTube clip, or take a meeting as the headset is very clear and easy to speak through. Perhaps this is just the utility of having a Bluetooth earpiece, as I lose the ability to tell the time when it’s in use, but as part of my smartwatch I’m finding I use it almost every day in that headphone role. It also acts as a quick response if you are getting a call and your phone is in a bag/under some papers/under the cat. (Admittedly the B2 had a similar feature but I immediately disposed of the silicone insert for my ear within minutes of taking it out of the box, thinking it was just to protect the watch during shipping, but with the B3 I have found a large number of uses.) Using the B3 as an earpiece does drain the battery quicker, but only noticeably if it is constantly in use for several hours a day, and the heavier the music the more battery it consumes.
For users moving from the B2 to the B3, there are a few upsides and downsides with the transition. The big upside is battery life – I’m getting 3-4 days from the TalkBand B3, rather than the 18-24hr battery anxiety from the B2. With a longer battery life and my anecdotally good charge profile with a solid bump in charge with a quick ten minutes, I never feel that worried about the battery like I did with the previous generation. It sounds weird, but the joy of not worrying about charging the device is a positive and I’m sure that 3-4 days is well on its way to not having to worry about it in general. I don’t think I could manage an every-day charging watch, especially one that I can’t charge at night for the sleep monitoring/alarm.
One of the downsides is the evolution of the interface. Previously on the B2, some functionality was reserved for long-hold button presses, but now this has been moved to menus or options within menus. So what previously used to be a carousel of four five screens (time, steps, calories, sleep, workout) becomes several more (options, contacts) and if the user is relying on a wrist flick to activate the watch, the flick will iterate through them – but if the B3 decides to quickly skip the time (thinking it’s a double flick), it’s a much longer process to get back to the time if the other hand isn’t free (or you forget to swipe the other way). This could be mitigated by having the steps, calories and sleep data all up on display at once – there’s a lot of wasted space having these three as separate items which could all be condensed into one screen.
Another downside, which has hit me later in testing the device, depends on how often the user wants to use the app. So, my anecdotal use case is that I rarely use the app anymore – the novelty of making sure I’ve slept enough and seeing the daily progression has lost its charm. But the other night, as I was getting into bed, I wanted to change the alarms on the watch. To do this it requires loading the app and making the adjustments. However, the Huawei Wear app has its own internal update system for software/firmware. It will not let you adjust anything without updating first, which is a slow five-minute process between the watch and the phone with two bright displays – when the immediate goal is just to go to sleep. Huawei needs to do one of a few things here – have a schedule to auto-update the firmware in the background after loading the app, and ensure the reboot the update requires doesn’t cause the smart watch to vibrate. Or, auto-update the device after 5 minutes of charging. It’s a small inconvenience, but when you really just want to go to sleep and change an alarm, it sticks out like a sore thumb.
The software still remains a neutral point in the Huawei Wear ecosystem – it has gone through a few updates since our B2 experiential review, but it remains similar with steps and sleep with monthly or daily reports for viewing. Up until fairly recently, the software introduced a bug where daily step count profiles would not show for some reason, even though the data was there. That seems to be fixed now (sometimes it requires waiting 60 seconds), but ultimately Huawei does need to step up (pun intended) the potential data offering here. Being able to see per-day sleep cycles in a text format would be easier than the image below:
Also, some of Huawei’s devices come with their own Health app which tracks steps for the user that carries the smartphone on them. The health app at least gives some indication that my 6867 steps so far today constitutes 374.2 kcal, equivalent to ~2.5 bowls of ice cream. That’s the sort of tangential information which makes data gathering like this interesting, but here Huawei has two apps that don’t talk to each other, with different features. I’d hazard a guess that this is a function of two separate software teams internally in different business units with little crossover.
The final point to discuss is the look. While the B3 looks refined, compared to the B2 it feels like a slight regression. The black plastic module is clearly a separate part of the housing, and creates a mismatch of aluminum and plastic with a large bezel on the screen. This is in contrast to the B2, which has a full unified metal body implementation, and blends seamlessly with the rest of the device. There are advantages to doing it the B3 way one would assume (cost comes to mind), but as an aesthetic package, I’d have to give the nod to the B2. I can confirm however that the B3 can take a trip through tomato sauce and still work after cleaning (it fell out of my ear at a hotel breakfast one morning). There’s also a small minor thing of the strap that came with this unit: it’s starting to already break away from the main metal housing:
Despite the issues, I’m finding myself using the B3 more and more as a personal alarm clock, a Bluetooth headset for meetings, and even as a one-eared headphone for music when I need to keep the other ear unobstructed. I’d love to see a light sensor and brightness toggle, preferably as a physical button, and a base camera that detects a face in front of it and turns on automatically. Whether these are possible with the same or better battery life would be interesting to see. The battery life is the biggest upgrade, and another successive jump in the same direction would be icing on the cake. The interface, while improved, still has issues and Huawei needs to integrate the various parts of the business in order to provide a unified user experience, especially if a user goes all-in with the brand. But I’m sitting here, writing this on an airplane, with music playing in one ear on a device that’s easy to put away when needed. I’m certainly seeing the appeal of this sort of smartwatch.
The Huawei TalkBand B3 is currently listed over at Newegg, starting at $286 going up to $520. Compared to the Samsung Gear S2, which starts at $269, it’s clear that Huawei is aiming for the same market but without the full-color display and an integrated experience, and instead is going for the Bluetooth headset angle for a similar price range.
I think I’m getting the reason why smartwatches exist now – or at least watches in general. When I was younger, before smartphones, I wore a simple cheap watch to tell the time. When smartphones came along, I ditched the watch as it was just ‘another thing to carry’, and its utility was superseded by the mobile phone. Having worn the TalkBand B2, and that space now being filled by the updated B3, I’m starting to get it. I think.
When I tested the TalkBand B2, a number of its features irritated me, such as the limited two-day battery life or the fact that the screen was incredibly bright at night, waking me up every time I turned over and the screen activated. The additional step counter, calorie burner and sleep monitor were interesting add-ons that provided a tale of being glued to my desk, or walking marathons during tech industry events, but these features have regressed in their utility over the initial fascination period. Now that I’m testing the B3, it’s clear that there are some useful features for a watch that doesn’t quite match the email facilities of a full Android Wear/Tizen device or an Apple equivalent, but it certainly gives more than a simple time telling mechanism.
Smartwatches (or semi-smart watches like the B3) are still new enough that I am continually asked what it is like, or how I feel it compares. There’s a list of pros and cons, but I find that above basic clock face, it currently augments my life in two very specific ways.
Firstly, as an early morning alarm clock. On my wrist is a device on which you can set a time (via the app) and it will detect when I am sleeping in a low REM/light sleep up to 30 minutes before that set time and wake me by vibrating. This has a twofold advantage: I don’t wake up from a deep sleep which would make me feel groggy due to the REM detection, and as a vibration rather than audio, my partner next to me is not woken up by any noise (unless I accidentally step on a cat / Lego making my way to the bathroom and produce four letter expletives). This benefit of a device like the B3 sounds like a minor plus, but it works wonders if the user has a set time to wake or has an early appointment to make. Unfortunately the Huawei app only has a limitation – it only lets the user set one such alarm time for that 30-minute wake-window, meaning that subsequent alarms are fixed at specific times in case you really want to snooze. It shouldn’t be too hard for the software developers to add in at least one more, for those that don’t have a regular sleep schedule.
Second, the TalkBand B3 augments my life as a Bluetooth headset. To clarify, with this watch you can take out the module with all the electronics (you need to do this to charge) while still leaving the strap on your wrist. As a Bluetooth headset, I can listen to music in one ear while keeping the other open for other noises (door bell, cat yowl, pasta boiling over) without the need for a wire or a dangling ear piece. While under the noise of cooking, I can listen to a YouTube clip, or take a meeting as the headset is very clear and easy to speak through. Perhaps this is just the utility of having a Bluetooth earpiece, as I lose the ability to tell the time when it’s in use, but as part of my smartwatch I’m finding I use it almost every day in that headphone role. It also acts as a quick response if you are getting a call and your phone is in a bag/under some papers/under the cat. (Admittedly the B2 had a similar feature but I immediately disposed of the silicone insert for my ear within minutes of taking it out of the box, thinking it was just to protect the watch during shipping, but with the B3 I have found a large number of uses.) Using the B3 as an earpiece does drain the battery quicker, but only noticeably if it is constantly in use for several hours a day, and the heavier the music the more battery it consumes.
For users moving from the B2 to the B3, there are a few upsides and downsides with the transition. The big upside is battery life – I’m getting 3-4 days from the TalkBand B3, rather than the 18-24hr battery anxiety from the B2. With a longer battery life and my anecdotally good charge profile with a solid bump in charge with a quick ten minutes, I never feel that worried about the battery like I did with the previous generation. It sounds weird, but the joy of not worrying about charging the device is a positive and I’m sure that 3-4 days is well on its way to not having to worry about it in general. I don’t think I could manage an every-day charging watch, especially one that I can’t charge at night for the sleep monitoring/alarm.
One of the downsides is the evolution of the interface. Previously on the B2, some functionality was reserved for long-hold button presses, but now this has been moved to menus or options within menus. So what previously used to be a carousel of four five screens (time, steps, calories, sleep, workout) becomes several more (options, contacts) and if the user is relying on a wrist flick to activate the watch, the flick will iterate through them – but if the B3 decides to quickly skip the time (thinking it’s a double flick), it’s a much longer process to get back to the time if the other hand isn’t free (or you forget to swipe the other way). This could be mitigated by having the steps, calories and sleep data all up on display at once – there’s a lot of wasted space having these three as separate items which could all be condensed into one screen.
Another downside, which has hit me later in testing the device, depends on how often the user wants to use the app. So, my anecdotal use case is that I rarely use the app anymore – the novelty of making sure I’ve slept enough and seeing the daily progression has lost its charm. But the other night, as I was getting into bed, I wanted to change the alarms on the watch. To do this it requires loading the app and making the adjustments. However, the Huawei Wear app has its own internal update system for software/firmware. It will not let you adjust anything without updating first, which is a slow five-minute process between the watch and the phone with two bright displays – when the immediate goal is just to go to sleep. Huawei needs to do one of a few things here – have a schedule to auto-update the firmware in the background after loading the app, and ensure the reboot the update requires doesn’t cause the smart watch to vibrate. Or, auto-update the device after 5 minutes of charging. It’s a small inconvenience, but when you really just want to go to sleep and change an alarm, it sticks out like a sore thumb.
The software still remains a neutral point in the Huawei Wear ecosystem – it has gone through a few updates since our B2 experiential review, but it remains similar with steps and sleep with monthly or daily reports for viewing. Up until fairly recently, the software introduced a bug where daily step count profiles would not show for some reason, even though the data was there. That seems to be fixed now (sometimes it requires waiting 60 seconds), but ultimately Huawei does need to step up (pun intended) the potential data offering here. Being able to see per-day sleep cycles in a text format would be easier than the image below:
Also, some of Huawei’s devices come with their own Health app which tracks steps for the user that carries the smartphone on them. The health app at least gives some indication that my 6867 steps so far today constitutes 374.2 kcal, equivalent to ~2.5 bowls of ice cream. That’s the sort of tangential information which makes data gathering like this interesting, but here Huawei has two apps that don’t talk to each other, with different features. I’d hazard a guess that this is a function of two separate software teams internally in different business units with little crossover.
The final point to discuss is the look. While the B3 looks refined, compared to the B2 it feels like a slight regression. The black plastic module is clearly a separate part of the housing, and creates a mismatch of aluminum and plastic with a large bezel on the screen. This is in contrast to the B2, which has a full unified metal body implementation, and blends seamlessly with the rest of the device. There are advantages to doing it the B3 way one would assume (cost comes to mind), but as an aesthetic package, I’d have to give the nod to the B2. I can confirm however that the B3 can take a trip through tomato sauce and still work after cleaning (it fell out of my ear at a hotel breakfast one morning). There’s also a small minor thing of the strap that came with this unit: it’s starting to already break away from the main metal housing:
Despite the issues, I’m finding myself using the B3 more and more as a personal alarm clock, a Bluetooth headset for meetings, and even as a one-eared headphone for music when I need to keep the other ear unobstructed. I’d love to see a light sensor and brightness toggle, preferably as a physical button, and a base camera that detects a face in front of it and turns on automatically. Whether these are possible with the same or better battery life would be interesting to see. The battery life is the biggest upgrade, and another successive jump in the same direction would be icing on the cake. The interface, while improved, still has issues and Huawei needs to integrate the various parts of the business in order to provide a unified user experience, especially if a user goes all-in with the brand. But I’m sitting here, writing this on an airplane, with music playing in one ear on a device that’s easy to put away when needed. I’m certainly seeing the appeal of this sort of smartwatch.
The Huawei TalkBand B3 is currently listed over at Newegg, starting at $286 going up to $520. Compared to the Samsung Gear S2, which starts at $269, it’s clear that Huawei is aiming for the same market but without the full-color display and an integrated experience, and instead is going for the Bluetooth headset angle for a similar price range.
As part of the test with the Huawei Mate S, I also decided to use Huawei’s TalkBand B2 wearable which I got at the end of a press event. I have been using it for a good couple of months or more, from just before MWC. Along with the smartwatch, there is the Huawei Fit app required to digest the data it tracks.
Having never used a smartwatch-like device before, and not being enthusiastic about wearing one, I bit the bullet to at least experience it. I’ve come out the other end not completely changed, and the TalkBand B2 has a list of issues that need solving, but I have softened my opinion to smartwatches as a result.
So, the TalkBand B2: it shows the time/date, steps, calories, time slept, time biked and you can start then stop a ‘run-mode’ with it.
The display is a basic black and white affair, but sharp enough for almost all the detail you need to see on it. It’s called a TalkBand, and this means that via Bluetooth you can receive calls and minor notifications on it. The notification pop-up is not as advanced as you might think – merely showing what app or name is causing the notification, rather than any details. This is useful if the user wants to keep an eye on a certain app (I tend to keep it linked to WhatsApp and Twitter which I use several times a day, but not Skype because that is always going off).
Taking calls on the TalkBand B2 is a little odd, and I have not had much success with it. The band will vibrate as someone calls (useful when the phone needs to be silent), but then I will go find my phone to answer it forgetting that I can answer and talk on the watch. So I answer the phone, but the setup is such that it will only accept voice from the band and not the smartphone, meaning I sound muffled as I do not realize that I’m supposed to talk into the watch. Even then, because audio going in and coming out of the smartwatch is usually loud, you can’t really have a private conversation. I don’t think I’m sold on taking calls on a watch just yet.
The screen has a feature that turns itself on when it detects movement that mimics looking at a watch on your wrist. Do the motion repeatedly and it will go through the different screens on the display. However, it has a few flaws. Firstly, the flick wrist motion to see the time only seems to work about 40% of the time. Then, in broad daylight, the display is nowhere near bright enough to even see anything. But, at night, when you want the device to monitor sleep patterns, any time you turn over it turns on the display which is way too bright, either blinding yourself or a significant other at 3am. It’s not great.
On the monitoring aspects of the device, I feel that the step counter is not that great. It recorded over 66000 steps and 45 km during Mobile World Congress, but it also detected 500 steps when I was packing my suitcase the day we left. This makes me think that a step counter is better suited for the ankle perhaps. An interesting thing is the cycling detection: while at the gym on the treadmill, I will sometimes rest my hands in front of me on the heart-rate monitors while jogging/walking in a down period, but then my steps do not count and because of the arm position. As a result, the TalkBand thinks I’m cycling. So in a 45-minute run, it will detect running for 25-30 minutes and cycling for 10-15, which isn’t true, and messes up the calorie calculations. A better way perhaps to do this is via the user indicating a cycle time, similar to enabling the start of a run.
The sleep monitor works when the watch is worn in bed. The thing is, if the feature that shows the display when you rotate your wrist is enabled, the screen is far too bright at night. When not being blinded by the light, the TalkBand has a feature where during a 30-minute ‘alarm’ period set by the user (say 6:00-6:30am). If it detects the user in a light sleep mode it will vibrate to wake the person without the need for an alarm. This means that the user won’t wake from a heavy sleep, feel fresher, and it won’t wake their significant other. The downside of this is that if you are never in a light sleep during that period, the smartwatch won’t go off. That’s assuming the TalkBand has any battery left (see later). But a final word on the sleep monitor: sometimes when you take the watch off (either for comfort or to charge), it sometimes detects the lack of movement as a sleep pattern. So despite wearing it all day, if I’ve taken the watch off at some point to do the washing up, it might tell me that I slept for a couple of hours in the afternoon (which I definitely did not do).
The TalkBand B2 is a detachable module from the wristband, allowing for configurable straps. In this instance, I used the one supplied – a leather band in a silver backing. The device is easy enough to remove, and small enough to lose if you aren’t too careful. On the rear is the charging port and what looks like the speaker which uses the internal open space in the wristband as an echo chamber to amplify the sound.
On the battery, this is going to be a pain point for anyone using the TalkBand B2. In order to charge it, the unit has to be removed from the clasp and the micro-USB port on the bottom used, meaning that the device cannot be used while charging (which takes around 30 mins for a full charge). For the most part, it lasts two days on a full charge. It uses more when you are exercising, up to 10% per hour, but the two days per charge means that I was always destined to either go to bed, or to the gym, on 2% battery. Even a small 15-minute window to charge it can give it enough juice for most of the day. During some of the time that I tested the device, I remembered to charge it while I was in the shower. But to put this into real world context, in March, I forgot to charge it about 20% of the time meaning it lacked sleep data collection, or for several days during April I forgot to charge it and wear it overnight.
On the data collection, the screen shots here pretty much sums it all up, telling the user how much sleep and how many steps. It is up to the user to decide what to do with the data, and I’m not sure how much might be being uploaded to a personal account. If you are trying to maintain a regular exercise and sleep schedule, it gives rough metrics that can be interpreted on whatever side your confirmation bias ends up on, but at the end of the day the only thing that makes this data collection useful is if it provides recommendations, and the TalkBand and Huawei Wear app currently do not do that. Actually, I’ll adjust that statement: if it detects you are sitting down for more than an hour, it will vibrate to tell you to stand up. Somewhat annoying when watching a film or on a long haul flight, and the time gap is not adjustable.
At the end of the day, I am glad I’ve tried the TalkBand B2. It’s not the best device for me, because of the brightness (especially at night-time) and the battery life really puts a dampener on the user experience, but it comes in a lot cheaper than the Android, watchOS or Tizen-based devices if you absolutely need a screen. If another smartwatch ever floats my way, I’ll see how that compares to this one.
