OnePlus Watch review: boring looks, basic features By The Verge

(upbeat music) - All right. It's been a while, hasn't it. Let's do this. This is the OnePlus Watch. It's OnePlus' first smartwatch and it cost just $159. I've been wearing it for about a week or so, and it's got me asking a lot of questions.

But mostly, what makes a smartwatch smart? Let's get into it. A smartwatch's smarts are mostly defined by what it can do, but a wearable is defined by how it feels and how it looks. So let's cover the hardware first. The OnePlus Watch is kind of generic looking. It reminds me a lot of Samsung's Galaxy Watch Active line.

It's got a round face, there are two buttons on the side and the body is made out of polished stainless steel. OnePlus is only offering this thing in one size, 46 millimeters. And frankly, it's big. It's bigger than I like watches to be on my wrist. And if you have smaller wrists than me, you're not gonna have a fun time here On the plus side, it's not the thickest smartwatch I've ever worn.

It comes in silver, black or a fancy gold-colored Cobalt special edition. I've got the black here and frankly, it's a little boring to look at. Either way though the hardware is solid and well put together. It's not plasticky or creaky and there's no rough edges to worry about. The touchscreen is a 1.39 inch 454 by 454 pixel OLED, that's easy to see both indoors and out. It's bright and colorful like you'd expect an OLED screen to be, but there's no always-on display option which you also might expect from an OLED screen, and basically every other smartwatch does now.

It makes it that much more annoying to check the time, though the wrist-turn gesture does work fairly well to wake it up. On the underside are sensors for heart rate and blood oxygen. The OnePlus Watch also has accelerometers, gyroscopes, and GPS radios necessary to track your activity and workouts. What you won't find on the OnePlus Watch are any rotating crowns or bezels, the only way to interact with it is to tap or swipe on the screen itself or press the buttons on the side. Okay, So the hardware and the design check all the boxes you might expect.

How does the software perform? Well, this is where the OnePlus Watch really kind of falls behind basically every other smartwatch available now. The OnePlus Watch pairs with and is controlled by the OnePlus Health app for Android. There's no iPhone compatibility here but you don't need to have a OnePlus phone because it works with basically any modern Android device. The app is where you can see what health metrics the watch has recorded, adjust which apps send notification to your wrist and view the available watch faces. OnePlus has about 50 watch faces so far, and some of them you can customize a little bit like add information for weather or other widgets.

But there's no third-party watch faces like you can get on a Wear OS or Samsung Galaxy Watch. Even though the OnePlus Watch works with Android, that doesn't mean it's running Android. This isn't like a Wear OS watch, like you can get from Fossil, Motorola or TicWatch. Instead it's running a real-time OS, which is meant to be really low power and efficient. If you've ever used a watch from Amazfit, or Wyze, or other low cost brands, you've used a real-time OS before.

The OnePlus Watch is basically the same thing. The watch interface has a familiar layout. You swipe down for settings, swipe up to see your notifications, push the side button to see your apps, it all looks mostly fine, and there aren't any issues with stutters or lags. Performance is actually pretty good. I also have a few gripes with the interactions.

You can't clear notifications individually by just swiping them away. You have to tap into it, and then tap another button, and then it doesn't always work, it's kind of annoying. And it doesn't always mirror the notifications I've cleared on my phone already, so a lot of times I'm seeing the same thing twice. You can't do much with those notifications either, OnePlus only supports canned replies in five apps, WhatsApp, LINE, Discord, Telegram and Facebook Messenger, not standard SMS, and there's only four canned replies to choose from. I can't delete emails from my wrist, I can't use my voice to send a reply to my spouse and I can't even see previews of picture messages on the watch itself.

(upbeat music) The OnePlus comes with a basic set of apps, Weather, Timer, Stopwatch, Alarm, Sleep Tracking, Fitness Workouts, et cetera. But you can't add any apps to that list, it doesn't support third-party apps at all. Forget about streaming music from Spotify or playing podcasts in your favorite podcast app. The only thing you can do here is control what's playing on your phone, or use the OnePlus Health app to transfer MP3 files from your phone to the watch's four gigabytes of storage. Do you wanna use Strava to track your runs instead of OnePlus Health? Sorry, no dice here.

And if you're into using smartphone controls on your wrist, the OnePlus Watch doesn't do anything for you at all, unless you have a OnePlus TV which you probably don't have one of those. In fact, here's a list of things that you can get on other smartwatches but aren't available on the OnePlus at all. Mobile payments, an always-on screen, third-party apps and watch faces, a calendar app, a voice assistant, quick replies to any notification that comes in. It's just a lot of stuff missing. (upbeat music) The fitness tracking features are also quite basic.

Now look, I know I'm not a gym rat obviously, but I did wear the OnePlus Watch on my left wrist and a Fitbit Inspire HR on my right wrist, and the OnePlus would consistently count thousands fewer steps than the Fitbit. Now I know none of these are perfect with their step counting, but that kind of discrepancy makes it really hard when you wanna do more advanced tracking or more complex workouts. And just to clarify, I spoke to a lot of other reviewers I know who were also testing the OnePlus Watch and every single one of them had issues with step counting as well. It's not just because I barely move during the day. Like I mentioned, you can't use other fitness apps either.

And the only syncing that OnePlus Health app provides is with Google Fit. It's all fine for basic activity trends but any fitness enthusiasts will want something more capable and reliable. In typical OnePlus fashion the watch's software also feels unfinished and there's just a bunch of bugs. Sleep tracking data doesn't sync to the OnePlus Health app on the phone, maps almost never show up for tracked runs or activity, message notifications are often duplicated, and there's this bug where digital watch faces won't show 12 hour time, but are stuck in 24 hour format. OnePlus tells me that some of these bugs will be fixed sometime this month, maybe even by the time you watch this video, but they're just irritating to deal with.

(upbeat music) Okay, that's a lot of bad stuff. So what does the OnePlus Watch do well? It has incredible battery life, like so good that I haven't had to charge it a second time the entire review process. OnePlus says it will lasts up to 14 days between charges and I believe it. I'm at eight days of continuous wearing day and night and I still have 34% battery life left. It also charges really quickly.

Just 20 minutes on the charger gives you half battery life, which equates the days of usage. No Wear OS, Samsung or Apple smartwatch lasts nearly this long or charges that quickly. But at the same time, it feels like the OnePlus Watch lasts that long because it just does less than those other watches. You're making a big trade in functionality and customizability for that long battery life. And yeah, the OnePlus Watch is cheap.

It's half the price of the Galaxy Watch 3 and over a $100 less than the Galaxy Watch Active 2. But if you want a smartwatch it's not hard to find them on sale, frequently for less than the OnePlus Watch sells for. I bought this Moto 360 last year for 130 bucks, and while yeah, it's far from perfect, it still does all of those smartwatch things. I mentioned earlier that the OnePlus Watch doesn't do. So, is the OnePlus Watch a smart smartwatch? No, not really.

Sure, it'll do the basics. It'll give you notifications. It'll track your activity, kinda. It'll even give you a weather report. But at the same time, it doesn't do the basics that we expect from a lot of other smart watches.

that kind of makes it a clever watch, but not a smart watch. End card, alright. And what are we doing with on cards these days? It's been literally been like a year and a half since I've done that. Maybe that's our end card. So what do we do with with end cards these days? You wanna like and subscribe? Sure, go to the verge.

com for more stuff (laughs).

Source : The Verge