The Honor Watch 5 Ultra looks amazing—but there’s a catch

Honor made quite a number of announcements at MWC 2025. This includes the company’s plans to spend $10 billion to develop an AI phone and promising 7 years of software updates for its Magic series of phones. The company also took the opportunity to unveil a new smartwatch—the Honor Watch 5 Ultra.

To call this a variant of the Honor Watch 5 that was announced last year doesn’t feel quite right. This is because the Ultra looks and feels so different it’s almost as if it should be in its own lineup.

Unlike the Honor Watch 5 which features a square-ish shape, the Ultra model has a circular watch face. It also boasts a body made out of titanium. This seems to be par for the course for these Ultra-type smartwatches in recent years, much like the Apple Watch Ultra and the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra.

The watch features a 1.5-inch LTPO AMOLED display with a 60Hz refresh rate. It comes with a 480mAh battery that Honor says is good for up to 15 days on a full charge. That’s quite long for a smartwatch. But that’s also partly due to the fact that it doesn’t run on Wear OS. Instead, it runs on Honor’s MagicOS. This means that you won’t have access to Google’s vast ecosystem.

However, if you’re looking for a smartwatch for its basic capabilities like health and fitness tracking, notifications, and so on, the Honor Watch 5 Ultra gets the job done. The smartwatch is priced at €279 which is cheaper than some of its Ultra competitors.