Two sports modes that usually sit behind a paid app are the reason to look at HONOR's newest smartwatch. The HONOR Watch 6 is on sale in Malaysia now from RM699, and it ships with dedicated badminton and football tracking at no extra cost.
That framing matters more here than the spec sheet. Plenty of smartwatches will count your steps during a badminton session. Far fewer will tell you your forehand-to-backhand ratio, and the ones that do usually want a subscription for it.
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Kai T. chevron_right
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What the badminton and football modes actually track
The badminton mode does stroke analysis: swing speed, hitting power, how many swings you made and your longest run of consecutive hits. It also separates shot types, smashes and clears among them, and works out your forehand-to-backhand ratio and your overhand-to-underhand split.
Football mode is a post-match report rather than a live coach. You get heat maps and movement trajectory maps showing where you actually spent the game, which is the sort of thing that settles an argument about whether you really were tracking back.
Both sit inside a set of more than 120 sports modes, and HONOR is explicit that neither needs a third-party app or a subscription.
Battery is the headline number
A 980mAh cell gives a claimed 35 days on a charge, or 42 hours with GPS running. Those are the manufacturer's figures and we have not tested them, but even a conservative reading of that puts it in a different category from the mainstream flagships. For comparison, our Galaxy Watch9 review covers a watch most people charge every couple of days, at a considerably higher price.
Design, durability and the small conveniences
- Shadow Black: recyclable aluminium alloy, 41g, fluoroelastomer strap, RM699.
- Twilight Brown: stainless steel, 50g, leather strap, RM799.
- Durability: IP69 water and dust resistance.
- Display: up to 3,000 nits peak brightness, which is the spec that decides whether you can read it outdoors at noon.
- NFC Smart Access: tap the watch to get into an office, home or compatible facility instead of digging out an access card.
Health tracking runs continuously rather than on demand: heart rate, blood oxygen and sleep. There is also an AI recorder that turns voice notes into summaries and syncs them to HONOR Notes on a paired phone.
How it sits against the competition here
At RM699 it lands below the Samsung flagships and squarely against the mid-range Huawei wearables, where battery life has been the main battleground for a while. Our HUAWEI Watch Fit 5 Pro review is the closest reference point we have for what that money buys elsewhere.
The sport-specific angle is the genuinely unusual part. Badminton is not a niche in Malaysia, and a watch that treats it as a first-class sport rather than a generic cardio session is making a fairly targeted pitch. Whether the stroke analysis holds up against a coach's eye is the open question, and it is not one a press release can answer.
HONOR has been gaining ground locally on the phone side, where it now accounts for one in three foldables sold in Malaysia, so the wearable push is arriving with some momentum behind it.
Price and where to buy
The HONOR Watch 6 is available now: RM699 for Shadow Black, RM799 for Twilight Brown. It is sold at HONOR Experience Stores nationwide, the HONOR online store, and official HONOR stores on Shopee, Lazada and TikTok Shop.
