Tech Corner: A budget friendly fitness tracker

Welcome to the party, pals.

You're reading another edition of Tech Corner and it's very good to have you here. In 2021, the wearables market is a tough nut to crack. While you have your traditional powerhouses like Apple and Fitbit, you’ll see that most smartphone companies are releasing their own fitness wearables as well making the market rather crowded. One company who have consistently produced on this stage, and often at affordable prices has been Huawei. While it has let go of much of its smartphone dominance due to the US ban, its latest budget fitness tracker, the Huawei Band 6, has all the tools necessary to make a sizeable impact on the public. The lowdown Basically, the Band 6 is rather like the younger brother of the Huawei Watch Fit, they’re similar in a lot of ways, but at the same time they go their own paths. There’s no built-in GPS which means it relies on your phone for it, but it has a versatile suite of fitness and health tracking (90+ of them) that’s the norm with Huawei fitness trackers these days. It’s also got the useful automatic workout detection which did work well for me and was better than some of the other budget trackers I’ve used. I did think the heart rate monitor did slightly oversell me at times compared to some of the others and sometimes there was a slight delay in the tracker connecting with the GPS on my phone after I started a run. Should you buy? The biggest draw to the Huawei Band 6 for me is the petite design which fits comfortably on your wrist and really isn't cumbersome at all. It's easy to use and you'll get a 10 days of battery life out of it with regular use and could stretch it to two weeks if lightly worked. The 1.47-inch AMOLED display is beautiful and the extra size on the previous iterations makes it far more user-friendly. If you're on the lookout for an affordable fitness tracker which will do basically everything you need it to, look good, and fit well, you could do a lot worse than the Huawei Band 6 at €59.99.