Huawei Band 7 Review: A Great First Fitness Tracker And Cheaper Than Fitbit

Coach first tried the Huawei Band line in 2018 and was bowled over by what it offered for the price. It was one of the best fitness trackers, let alone one of the best cheap fitness trackers. It’s continued to get better, although the Huawei Band 6 was a rare misstep, since the virtually identical Band 6 from sister company Honour was a chunk of change cheaper and a bug with Android phones meant you couldn’t start connected GPS on the watch.

Naturally, we were hoping for a return to form and that’s what we got.

Huawei Band 7: Price And Availability

The Huawei Band 7 is available from the Huawei website and various third-party retailers in the UK. It costs £49.99 and is one of the more affordable fitness trackers on the market. The device is not available in the US: since June 2020 the company has been deemed a national security threat, with President Biden signing legislation to ban Huawei from receiving Federal Communications Commission licences in November 2021.

Design

The Huawei Band 7 has a rectangular 1.47in (37mm) AMOLED screen with a resolution of 194 x 368 pixels, and a durable polymer watch case. It weighs 16g without the strap (28g including) and has a thickness of 10mm.

The touchscreen allows you to navigate through options using taps and swipes, along with one button on the side of the watch that lets you lock or unlock the screen and access the menu. There are nine watch faces that you can select from, with more than 4,000 available on the app (some paid for, others free). The display is lovely to look at – I chose a background of a starry sky and was impressed by the quality of the screen.

The touchscreen is responsive and intuitive to use. Notifications, alarms and activity reminders can be enabled or disabled in settings. As well as displaying the time and date, the watch shows local weather forecasts in just a few swipes, which is a useful at-a-glance addition.

The band is available in black, pink, green and red, while the strap comes in a flexible, soft silicone that’s easy to adjust and comfortable against the skin. It’s also resistant to scuffs, dirt and general grubbiness – after wearing it for a month (in the green colour), the band still looked new.

If you already own a Huawei Band 6, the Band 7 is almost identical, save for a few tweaks in the specifications. The Band 7 weighs a few grams less and benefits from a 1mm reduction in body thickness, but these stats probably aren’t enough to justify upgrading if you’re happy with your Band 6.

How I Tested This Device

I tested the band for a month, wearing it most of the time during the day and night. I recorded several runs and walks, some yoga and strength training sessions, and a few swims in a pool. I also used the app to track my menstrual cycle and weight.

Activity Tracking

The band tracks steps taken through the day, and accurately as far as I can tell, and displays these figures for the day, week, month or year. The app connects with the Apple Health app, drawing on mobile data during times that you’re not wearing the band. The tracker vibrates and alerts you if you’ve been sitting for too long, reminding you to get up and stretch.

Sports Tracking

The Huawei TruSport fitness system tracks a variety of workouts, from indoor and outdoor running and cycling, to skipping, indoor rowing and cross-training. There are 96 workout modes, including niche activities such as tug of war, dragon boating and parachuting (which unfortunately I didn’t have the opportunity to test). You can easily customise the workouts menu to show your most frequently selected workout modes first, as well as adding or removing other options. 

The Band 7 doesn’t have built-in GPS, though this isn’t unusual in trackers at this price. The tracker uses accelerometer and gyroscope sensors to measure your activity.

The Band 7 is water-resistant up to 50m, making it great for tracking workouts in the pool, although it shouldn’t be worn in saunas or steam rooms or for diving. I enjoyed seeing my stats add up during my swim, and found the watch accurate in tracking my lengths and total distance. The band has a six-axis motion sensor to identify the swimming stroke you’re using. 

The App

The app is intuitive and offers detail in each section: steps, exercise records, healthy living, heart, sleep, weight management, stress, SpO2 (blood oxygen saturation) and cycle calendar. There’s also a blood pressure section and it did log a reading, although that’s not a metric the Band 7 can measure. There’s no web version of the Huawei Health app, though, so you’ll need to view data on your smart device.

The Healthy Living Shamrock was the only feature on the app that I didn’t use that much because it was complicated to follow. After selecting a health plan to suit your goals (such as weight management or relaxation), you’re offered a list of tasks to complete each day. I found the diaphragmatic breathing exercises basic and not helpful (even the app told me that the effect afterwards was “average”). The Daily Smile task opens the front-facing camera for you to take a picture of yourself smiling – again, not something I would bother to do every day. However, the water intake tracker and medication reminders could be useful if these are tasks that you struggle to remember to do.

Sleep Tracking

I don’t always enjoy wearing smartwatches when I sleep and have an unfortunate habit of taking them off without waking up. However, with the Huawei Band 7 that only happened twice – which by my standards is a testament to how comfortable the tracker is to wear.

The sleep tracking shows your overall sleep time, split into percentages of deep sleep, light sleep and REM sleep, as well as indicating what a normal range looks like for reference. You can also see how many times you woke up and your breathing quality during sleep.

The app offers suggestions to improve your sleep quality. As a night owl, it would have been great to adjust the recommendations based on my body clock, although this is a small gripe considering how good the sleep tracking is on the whole.

Health Tracking

The tracker provides all-day heart rate and SpO2 tracking, which appeared to be consistent and accurate. The app also offers weight management tracking, allowing you to manually enter your weight, measurements and a target weight.

The menstrual cycle tracking on the app is detailed. At its most basic, you can use it to record and predict your cycle, but there are optional fields available to enter additional details such as physical symptoms, body temperature and mood.

Battery Life

The tracker is intended to run for up to two weeks of typical use, and up to 10 days in heavy use scenarios. There is a fast-charge option, giving you two days of use for every five minutes you charge it. I found the battery life excellent, requiring only infrequent top-ups, and it lasted me 12 days from the initial full charge before I needed to plug it back in.

Is The Huawei Band 7 Worth It?

Comfortable to wear, easy to use and attractively designed, the Huawei Band 7 is ideal for those looking for a good all-round affordable fitness tracker. While it lacks sophisticated functions found on pricier models, such as built-in GPS or ECG monitoring, it still delivers an impressive array of features, including sleep, stress, heart, blood pressure and blood oxygen monitoring. Overall, this band ticks a lot of boxes at a reasonable price.