Honor Watch 5 Ultra has great hardware that requires loading companies

Honor's New Watch 5 Ultra is a beautiful piece of hardware, but various problems with the software simply caused me to wear OS again.

At first glance, the Honor Watch 5 Ultra is only a wonderful watch. The titanium construction combines the round display with angular edges, with a nice mix of mats and shiny surfaces. This is connected to a 22 -mm watch band, either with a black fluorine -load strap or a dark brown leather strap.

The 1.5-inch amoled display is located in this 46 mm chassis with 5ATM/IP68 water resistance. There are two keys – a customizable link button and a rotating crown. The watch also supports the typical variety of health sensors and also offers wireless loads.

It is everything that runs out a good smartwatch, but the software leaves you off.

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The Honor Watch 5 Ultra uses a custom operating system that is quickly limited. It has a limited series of apps and no support for mobile payments. The integrated watch faces are rather limited, with minimal adaptation and a lot of focus on analog faces compared to digital. Downloading additional faces was also a pain. Honor has a “Watch Face Market” in his health app, but I couldn't get a single face for charging, let alone download, via the app on my Oppo Find N5. The health app seems to be okay for the persecution of health statistics, but otherwise it is somewhat messy.

In addition to the software frustrations, notifications are a pain at Honor Watch 5 Ultra.

When notifications are received, you will receive prerequisites, but no further interactions. Even worse, notification threads are an absolute chaos. When you get a chain of notifications from a group chat, the Watch 5 Ultra always shows the same first notifications until you wipe it away and take it effectively to keep up with a conversation without pulling out your phone. This is also incredibly inconsistent. While I tried to record an example of notifications on the clock, I first had the difficult dozens of time from another chat without a preview of this news, but after I knocked away this earlier news, she showed new ones when they came. It is a very frustrating experience!

What annoys me about all of this is that it just feels unnecessary.

One of the suspected reasons why honor uses his own operating system excellent. I no longer had to charge this watch since I started over a week ago, and that reduced it to just 50%. But is it worth it? I would argue no.

Honor's excellent hardware deserves better software here and Wear OS feels like the obvious candidate. Honor would be able to adapt it as the company looks at fit, and the headache with watch faces in the health app would be solved by adding Play Store integration. And the battery life? Advances in Wear OS itself and in the chips that are available for power supply, it has led to a point where it is very possible to get 1-3 days from a normal smartwatch. And the OnePlus Watch 3 shows that you can go much further.

The Honor Watch 5 Ultra is a beautiful watch, and it is also a smartwatch that is not particularly cheap. With € 279 I think that users earn more. You can get a much cheaper smartwatch with the same battery life and a similar experience in the software. Honor could and should do more, and wearing OS would give this opportunity.

What do you think?

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Note: Honor for trip and accommodation for 9to5google paid At MWC 2025, but had no entry into editorial content.