When I heard that OnePlus is going to be making a OnePlus Watch, we all thought, Oh, great, okay, that’ll probably be a pretty premium type of thing.
Maybe this is like the Apple Watch for Android type of thing that a lot of us are waiting for for a long time.
So there are other smartwatches.
For Android, there are the Galaxy Watches of the world, there are Moto 360.
There are even rumors of potentially a Pixel Watch upcoming.
But as of right now, there is no comparison to the Apple Watch.
If you don’t have an iPhone, if you are using an Android phone, you won’t have the same experience.
Now player four enters the game, OnePlus is in the picture, right?
Well, they’ve been doing the premium thing a lot.
Lately, they’ve been wanting to get into the upper echelon, their prices are going up.
So maybe they’re going to do the premium app watch competitor because hey, never settle, right.
But this OnePlus Watch.
This OnePlus Watch does settle. It’s all about settling.
It’s kind of the whole point, it costs less than half of what an Apple Watch Series Six does.
And so if you can settle for a not very premium overall OnePlus Watch, that only costs $159 and has a basic feature set and last week and a half.
That’s what you’re getting but has to be what you want.
So $159 that puts it in the mid-range smartwatch category that’s in line with the discounted Galaxy watch3 is cheaper than the Moto 360.
OnePlus Watch Display
And even cheaper than the Apple Watch SE right now, but the design is kind of, I’m gonna use the word peacocking, meaning it looks just as high end as all the premium smartwatches out right now OnePlus Watch got a big 1.4 inch AMOLED display 454 by 454 resolution pretty sharp.
OnePlus Watch Design
And it’s housed in the OnePlus Watch pretty modern clean version of the traditional circle watch shape.
As to dark polished stainless steel around.
It shows more fingerprints than straight-up aluminum.
But it’s not bad.
The OnePlus Watch has only two buttons, there’s no rotating bezel or digital crowns or anything like that, just the two buttons on the side, OnePlus Watch of which has only the OnePlus logo on the whole watch.
And inside the bezel, some nice little concentric rings only show when it just hits the light the right way. It’s just the thing is big.
Like OnePlus Watch is a 46-millimeter watch.
And if you’re like me, you’ve got smaller wrists or you just don’t want a huge circle on your wrist.
Consider yourself warrant.
OnePlus Watch is a big watch.
But yeah, I mean, aside from the kind of thick bezels this is a pretty premium build OnePlus Watch, stainless steel, IP 68 pretty high-resolution display, it’s chunky, maybe it’s a little generic, but I don’t think they’ve settled on the build of the OnePlus Watch.
It’s when you start to use the OnePlus Watch that the settling starts to become more obvious.
OnePlus Watch Long Lasting Battery
So let me just say the best part of using the OnePlus Watch is the battery life 100%.
It’s the battery life, it’s got a 402 mAh battery, and it lasts at least a solid week of regular use.
I’m not exaggerating at all, OnePlus Watch is great, you don’t have to worry about it for an entire week of battery.
I do know GPS-tracked workouts are about the fastest way to burn through the battery.
But this thing is still rated for 25 hours straight of GPS track exercise, so you literally can’t kill it in a day.
OnePlus says if you have light use, you can get up to two weeks.
And I don’t doubt that even with my fairly heavy use of getting all kinds of notifications and doing workouts with it keeping brightness high when outdoors.
I went a week using it every day and I still didn’t kill it.
One thing you’ll notice is it’s pretty snappy with the race to wake.
But it’s equally super fast to turn off the screen as soon as possible.
Like as soon as the thanks for not looking at it anymore screen is off.
And the max screen timeout you can set in the app is only eight seconds.
So it’s not trying to have the screen on for too long when you’re not using it.
But of course, that also means there’s no always-on display, which could be a deal-breaker for some people.
And one plus did say they’re going to add that in a later software update. But we’ll see what that does to the battery life.
OnePlus Watch Charging
But when it finally does get to be time to charge which I only have to do once at the end of my week of testing.
There are these two pins on the back and then there’s a plastic Pack with magnets in it that does an impressively good job of snapping into place just lining up the pins.
And then it charges up to full within half an hour. And you’re good to go for another week.
So premium builds, check, nice battery life check using the OnePlus Watch.
Disappointing and every turn. It’s honestly surprising how many features either lack compared to the competition or just don’t do well at all.
So the UI through this custom OS is simple to scroll down for quick settings.
Battery, swipe up for notifications, press the top button to go home, and swipe left to go back.
And there are some decent controls within the OnePlus Health app which works on all Android phones that will let you change watch faces or change your step count goal, preload music, simple things like that.
But the list of things OnePlus Watch doesn’t do yet, or just straight up can’t do it all is pretty long.
Okay, so there are no third-party watch faces at all.
The included watch faces have very minimal customization and rarely any complications.
There’s no assistant, no NFC payments, no always-on display as of right now, and bizarrely, no tap to wake.
I kept trying to tap to wake this watch because every other Watch has tapped awake.
This one doesn’t. The watch shows you notifications.
But you can’t do anything about them.
Like you can’t manage notifications by clearing them individually.
And only a handful of apps support any canned replies.
There are no third-party apps. there are only about 20 pre-installed ones, which seems like a lot.
But that includes apps like the flashlight, which just turned the screen white, better than nothing, I guess, or they breathe app, which uses haptics and a soothing animation to help you breathe deeply, kind of like apples, and then puts that data nowhere that I could find.
Then there’s the stress app, which just tells you if it thinks you’re stressed or not. you’re opening an app to have it tell you if you’re stressed or not.
You can connect headphones and listen to music from the watch, but only through the OnePlus music app.
If you go for a run OnePlus Watch with you’re watching out of range of your phone, there’s no streaming Spotify through the watch to your headphones only music you have stored locally on the watch through the OnePlus music app.
I’ve been hearing as I’m testing, I’m reading a lot of articles and seeing videos of people who are getting off step counts like the OnePlus Watch will count dramatically fewer steps than other smartwatches.
That’s something I kept an eye on.
And sure enough, at the end of my testing, I did have fewer steps counted not as dramatically less as some other people but I did have fewer steps counted.
On the one plus watch, I had a day with 4457 Apple Watch steps and the OnePlus Watch on the opposite wrist on the same day kind of 3987 steps.
I’m sure over longer workout periods that roughly 10% differences are going to start to add up.
Then the fitness tab in the OnePlus Health app, it’s supposed to show a map down here, you can tell because it says Google at the bottom for Google Maps.
But it’s not showing a map. Sleep tracking data doesn’t sync yet on the OnePlus Watch.
There is no parkour mode like there was in the launch video commercial that’s coming with a promise software update.
All those negatives in the OnePlus Watch
They’re settling, basically, right.
But technically, all of these things are also comparisons to other smartwatches.
Like their expectations, if I’m expecting this watch to behave like other smartwatches, because it kind of looks like the OnePlus Watch, then maybe I’d be disappointed.
So if all you expect from this OnePlus Watch, if all you need is just basics, show us the time give you notifications, and happens to have like two-week battery life and maybe as a couple of bonus features, then that’s fine.
That’s what it does. but if you have any other extra specific needs over that, then there are better options.
My overall theory with this OnePlus Watch is it was rushed, which I don’t, I don’t know why for some reason, like it’s April, it didn’t have to be out now or rushed.
But it’s missing so many things that could potentially be better or change the software.
And there are already a bunch of software updates either happening with the OnePlus Watch as an app or already planned and promised by OnePlus for this OnePlus Watch.
Here’s the thing. My golden rule in tech, as you might already know, is never buying a gadget or a piece of tech, based on the promise of future software updates, like you should buy it is happy with the way it is now with no updates.
And if it happens to get some updates, then that’s a bonus.
But yeah, a lot of the stuff about this OnePlus Watch is just software.
It’s running an STM 32 processor, and it has 4GB Internal storage & 1GB RAM.
But that’s a lot for watching 4GB Internal storage & 1GB RAM, but yet the performance is still choppy.
Maybe that can be fixed with a software update.
You know, that’s step counting difference, those workout-tracking deficiencies.
Maybe that can be fixed with a software update.
But that’s all big maybe right now. It’s also gotten a software update already. That’s improved GPS accuracy and improved notification sync, even though I still have a bug with it.
And some other promise software updates would enable always-on display and should add all 110 workout modes so you can finally track those parkour workouts.
But again, that’s just promised maybe someday there’ll be an update with third-party apps or third-party watch faces.
But that’s a maybe someday I wouldn’t count on it.
So the point is, it’s that’s just all very maybe and promised and future.
It’s just not, it’s not what you’re buying. So my job is to tell you what you’re buying, which is the OnePlus Watch.
It’s a big, basic, red kind of generic OnePlus Watch.
But that does its job of a couple of things, shows you the time, shows you notifications last a long time on battery.
And that’s about it. It’s just funny that they’ve packaged it in like OnePlus Watch is such a nice premium body.
If you were looking forward to like an Apple Watch for Android type of competitor, that’s not what this is.
I am still looking forward to maybe that Pixel Watch that’s coming out.
I’ve seen the rumors. Maybe that’ll be it.
But until then, it’s all maybe lots of maybes in this article.
Let me know what you think would you get would you be down with this type of settle for a OnePlus Watch that just does the basics?
Let me know. Either way, that’s been it.
Thanks for reading. see you guys later.
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