Honor has launched the Watch 5 Pro in China, bringing blood pressure and sleep apnea monitoring to a more approachable wearable.
This watch is part of a long-standing series with two key benefits compared to better-known models. They last around two weeks between charges and are fairly affordable.
The Honor Watch 5 Pro and its kind are not smartwatches to the same extent an Apple Watch is a smartwatch. But this wearable does have a couple of more interesting features that have dropped down from more expensive recent watches: blood pressure readings and sleep apnea monitoring. And even features not seen in the Honor Watch 5 Ultra.
Honor does not use bespoke, dedicated hardware for either, as Huawei does for blood pressure in the Huawei Watch D2. Instead, as seen throughout wearables at the moment, they represent a further mining of what can be eked out of an optical heart rate reader.
This raises questions of how accurate or useful blood pressure monitoring will be. Samsung offsets this by requiring regular calibrations with a cuff, while Apple only looks for blood pressure trends over a month’s readings, effectively acting as an early warning system for hypertension issues.
Similarly, sleep apnea recognition also relies on familiar sensors. While Honor has not dug into how this works in the Honor Watch 5 Pro, sleep apnea is detected by recognising when someone has stopped breathing during sleep. This in turn is estimated in other wearables using variations between your heart beats, again relying on the classic HR hardware.
Honor Watch 5 Pro Features
The Honor Watch 5 Pro isn’t entirely a case of simply hardware elevated through software, though. It also has ECG heart rate readings, which require extra hardware components.
Elsewhere, the Honor Watch 5 Pro has the screen upgrade seen in many watches this generation, with peak brightness of 3000 nits. In most smartwatches you’ll never see close to their peak brightness for any extended period due to battery life concerns. But in a watch that can last up to two weeks off a charge? There’s potential for Honor to push things further than some without killing battery life.
The display measures 1.5 inches across and has resolution of 466 x 466 pixels, and is as usual an AMOLED panel.
Honor has only announced the Watch 5 Pro for China so far, where it costs 1,599 Yuan for the Wi-Fi version, 1,699 for the watch with LTE.
This is equivalent to $224 and $238. The previous generatrion Honor Watch 4 Pro is only listed as officially available in China, Hong Kong, Latin America, UAE and Saudi Arabia. Hopefully this new watch will get wider distribution in the west.
