The release is an interesting one — namely because the company launched the Honor Band A2 only around a month ago. The new band, however, represents a nice improvement over its predecessor. For starters, it’s quite a lot sleeker and more stylish, taking cues from the likes of Garmin and other major fitness band companies.
The band comes in at 16.5mm wide and 10.3mm thick, which isn’t bad at all. It will work with any device running Android 4.4 or later, or iOS 8.0 or later — so Android and iPhone users alike will be able to take advantage of its fitness-tracking capabilities. It will connect to those devices through Bluetooth 4.2, meaning you will get a Bluetooth range of around 10 meters, or 33 feet — depending on things like obstacles.
Despite the fact that it has a display, the band will run for up to a whopping 30 days without having to be recharged, and even then a full charge will only take around 1.5 hours of charging time. By way of contrast, the Honor Band A2 only supported up to 9 days of battery life, which could be doubled if the band was put into standby mode.
The tracking capabilities of the band are somewhat basic, but for many basic is enough. It’s able to track running, walking, and swimming, and to support swimming it’s waterproof to 5ATM, or around 50 meters in depth. In other words, unless you’re deep-sea diving, the band is fine in the water — which is pretty nice. That’s also a pretty serious improvement over the Honor Band A2, which had an IP67 rating, but wasn’t necessarily built to track swimming.
The band is available in three colors — “Dynamic Orange,” “Classic Navy Blue,” and “Carbon Black.” There’s no official word in pricing or availability just yet, but we’ll update this article when we have any updated information about that, and you can also keep an eye on the Honor website. Considering the fact that the Honor Band A2 came in at only CNY 200, which equated to around $30, we don’t expect the new Honor Band 3 to be very expensive at all.
