Honor Watch 5 Ultra Is A Beautiful Timepiece That Should Be Running Wear OS

Honor’s new Watch 5 Ultra is a gorgeous piece of hardware, but various issues with the software just left me wanting to go back to Wear OS.

The Honor Watch 5 Ultra is, at first glance, just a gorgeous timepiece. The titanium construction pairs the round display with angular edges, with a nice mix of matte and glossy finishes as well. That connects up to a 22mm watch band, either a black fluorelastomer strap or a dark brown leather band.

The 1.5-inch AMOLED display sits inside of that 46mm chassis with 5ATM/IP68 water resistance. There are two buttons – a customizable shortcut button and a rotating crown. The watch also supports the typical host of health sensors while offering wireless charging too.

It’s all the makings of a good smartwatch, but the software lets it down.

The Honor Watch 5 Ultra uses a custom OS which, while fast, is rather limited. It has a limited suite of apps and no support for mobile payments. The built-in watch faces are rather limited, with minimal customization and a lot of focus on analog faces over digital ones. Downloading additional faces has been a pain, too. Honor has a “Watch face market” in its Health app, but I couldn’t get a single face to load, much less download, through the app on my Oppo Find N5. The Health app seems fine for tracking health stats, but it’s a bit messy otherwise.

Adding to the software frustrations, notifications are a pain on the Honor Watch 5 Ultra.

When notifications come in, you’ll get previews, but no further interactions. Worse, threads of notifications are an absolute mess. If you get a chain of notifications from a group chat, the Watch 5 Ultra just shows the same first notifications over and over again until you swipe it away, making it effectively useless for keeping up with a conversation without pulling out your phone. This is incredibly inconsistent, too. While trying to capture an example of notifications on the watch, I first had the watch vibrant dozens of times from another chat without it ever showing a preview of those messages, but after I swiped away those previous messages, it started showing new ones as they came in. It’s a very frustrating experience!

*Notifications are inconsistent and lack functionality*

What annoys me about all of this is that it just feels unnecessary.

One of the presumed reasons that Honor is using its own OS is for the sake of battery life, which is admittedly excellent. I haven’t had to charge this watch a single time since I started using it over a week ago, and that took it down to just 50%. But is it worth it? I’d argue no.

Honor’s excellent hardware here deserves better software, and Wear OS feels like the obvious candidate. Honor would be able to customize it as the company sees fit, and the headaches with watch faces in the Health app would be solved by adding Play Store integration. And the battery life? Advancements in Wear OS itself and in the chips available to power it have led to a point where it’s very possible to get 1-3 days from a normal smartwatch. And the OnePlus Watch 3 shows you can go much further.

*Watch faces have limited customizability*

The Honor Watch 5 Ultra is a beautiful timepiece, and it’s also a smartwatch that’s not particularly cheap. At €279, I think users deserve more. You can get a much cheaper smartwatch with this same battery life and a similar experience in software. Honor could and should be doing more, and Wear OS would give that opportunity.

What do you think?