Oppo Watch review and the problem with Wear OS By HardwareZone SG

Hey guys it's Zachary from hardware zone, and I'm back in office, well not office, because most of the places are still off limits to us, but this is our labs. This is usually where we do our testing for products. This is also where we store stuff. That's why there are shelves everywhere? I'm actually surprised that this whole place isn't covered in mold by now, because we haven't really been back here in about six months. It was okay shooting at home during the lockdown, because you know everything was closed. Nobody was going out, but now that Singapore is sort of in phase two of its reopening businesses are starting up.

You know, hawker centers are open, schools are open, and I have a school right next door to me, so it can get pretty loud and noisy and the window to shoot these reviews are getting smaller and smaller. So here I am anyway. The reason why I'm here, and you're here is for you to listen to me. Tell you what I think about the Opel watch, so this being OPPO's. First, smartwatch they've, unsurprisingly gone with a very familiar design right down to the box, art, and obviously I'm talking about the Apple Watch here once you pop it out.

You'll notice that even more, although the Apple Watch feels much larger, and it is that's because the one I have here is a 46 mm version. OPPO sells this uh in a smaller size as well for the 1?mm compared with the Apple Watch Series 5, which is 40 and 44 mm. So, whichever version of the Oppo watch, you get it's going to be larger, you know what actually come to think of it. They kind of even sound phonetically, similar Apple Watch, Apple Watch, Apple Watch, Oppo watch anyway, back to design and build um. The Opel watch actually doesn't feel like a cheap knockoff.

It is quite solid. There is some heft to it. The way the screen and the back connects to the frame you know looks pretty good according to opp, it has aluminum frame and that's that's just a bit on the sides, but the back feels plastic, and obviously you have a very large screen now. The screen on the 46?mm is a 1.91 inch, AMOLED display it is beautiful. It is large, it is bright.

It is sharp, it's actually so bright that there have been a couple of times I've nearly blinded myself at night, when I was sleeping because you know I would turn over and my wrist was at my face and the watch face just turns on I'm like whoa. The only problem I have with it is the straps. I don't have a problem wearing the straps on a day-to-day basis. I kind of have some problems putting them on because it has this like buckle system, but this bottom hole always gets in the way, and you need some finger gymnastics to keep one in place and try to pin the other on, but other than that, once it's on it's its pretty secure, uh! That's not my problem. My problem is that because the Oppo watch is such a new smartwatch for opp, it's not really that widespread, yet um you're not going to get a lot of straps for this, especially third-party straps.

That's because, although these are interchangeable, there 's are two buttons at the bottom, where you can just click and pop them out and replace them, but they are a proprietary sort of clip, so you're not going to find a lot of third-party straps for the Opel watch outside what Oppo themselves sell using the watch is pretty much going to be intuitive by now. I think everyone has gotten used to how touch screen works right, so you can swipe left. You can swipe right up and down to access all the different menus. You can tap double tap. There's a tab and hole function as well-to-do different selection functions.

There are two buttons on the Oppo watch. On the left hand, side, the top button opens up the app drawer or goes back out into the main screen as a back button, and you can scroll through all the apps that you've installed. The bottom button has accented in green and actually, I think, that's a pretty cool way to give the watch a little color pop, but anyway the bottom button is really just an app shortcut. So by default it opens up uh OPPO's health app, but you can customize it to open just about any app that you want. That's installed on the watch now in between these two buttons on um, you've got a microphone hole and on the left of the watch, you've got mic grilles, so you can use it as a speakerphone.

You there's Google Assistant in this, where you know you I can ask, like hey, google tell me about the weather today, right now, it's 88 degrees and mostly cloudy. There today, there'll be scattered showers with a forecasted high of 88 and a low of 79. Cool. So the Oppo watch runs on snapdragon, 3100, chipset and Wear OS and here's my biggest criticism about device. The construction is pretty solid.

It feels premium, it doesn't feel like a first generation device at all. Uh UI is smooth, animations and transitions are fluid, but google Wear OS feels like a project. That's been abandoned or just left languishing now, the last device I sort of reviewed that runs on Wear OS was almost two years ago that was um the Casio pro track f30 and two years later. Now that I'm playing with the Opel watch, it feels like nothing. Much has actually changed in two years.

Werewolf still feels like such a bare bones, uh sort of operating system for wearables. Now, if you go into the wearers app once you install the watch, you have a nice big picture of your watch. Yay, you can change some watch faces which are pre-loaded, but, as you can see, the list isn't that much and the thing is you can't I, or at least I don't know how to find more. That's just it. You can do some minor settings as well to notifications or even tiles.

You can change some default tiles on the watch face and you noticed that I only have four here, but maximum is five. Furthermore, you can't put more than five, but even if you go to add more tiles, and if you look at it, there isn't really that much to add and the thing is half of these tiles are all fitness related, they're, basically just different screens of the same fitness app other thing I have a problem with Wear OS is even after all this time the development or the growth of the app ecosystem is still pretty terrible. I mean yes, there are a lot of apps on the Wear OS play store. Either these apps don't really work very well in the first place, or they don't perform all the functionality is so limited that you kind of wonder why bother having these apps in the first place, and I'm not talking about small apps. You know even big time.

Apps Spotify, for example, I've been trying to get Spotify to work on the Oppo watch and it is doesn't really function that well, Spotify click it. It tries to turn on right. There you go, you can see my playlist, so it's connected to my account. What I'm going to do is I'm going to do one test, I'm just going to let the screen sort of fade out. Just wait: okay, screen's gone and if you pop up the screen again guess what the app closes automatically.

So, let's, let's turn on the app again wait for it to load up. Okay, that's my okay! It's gone again! Now I have to turn it on again. There we go. Okay, let's say I want to play. I click one of my playlists and what does it say? Please connect to a device.

Oh, it's gone again and when I open it up, oh the app's gone again. I don't have to press it again, and it keeps doing that this is googled. This is where OS and werewolves been around for a few years. Why do apps still function like this? Why are all the Wear OS apps still so buggy? Now the Oppo watch has a built-in memory, so you can actually download offline songs, but that is not an option. That's available on Spotify on the Oppo watch.

I think the only way you can download offline songs if you actually use Google music, but who really uses google music anyway, when you set up a watch right, the first thing you would notice, or the first screens that you see when you swipe, is OPPO's own sort of activity. Summary you get your steps, workout time, calories, burn, etc. , and if you tap the app shortcut button by default, it fires up oppose sort of workout tracking app where you can track fitness run, uh walks, cycling and swimming now. This is this feels like a very basic uh fitness tracking, app there's, not much customization. You can do there, but more on that later.

That's not the point. The point is that these are the defaults that come with the watch out of the box, so for anybody who sets it up and for me as well, I use that to track my workouts for the first couple of days and the workouts itself went well GPS, locked on pretty fast uh heart rate data seemed consistent enough. I didn't get any dropouts like I did with Samsung Galaxy watch 3, for example, and at the end of my runs, I got like my workout summary. I got my route, I got most of my basic health information cadence and all of those the thing is, I didn't know where the data went because after my workout was finished, I went to my phone, I checked out, google fit and nothing was there. Nothing was synced.

I thought I had to manually sync. It there's no option to do that. So I eventually found out there is a setting like hidden deep in the menus that allow you to link your health data to google fit you go into settings scroll down to personalization scroll, some more, and you'll find link workout and health data to google fit tap that, and then you have it either not linked you toggle it, and then it'll ask you for your account. It's mine accept yeah, allow health to link, set google fit physical activity; okay, okay, accept everything, and now you're linked okay, once you've got linking out of the way. If you go into google fit now, you realize that the data from the watch is finally available here.

So I've got two very quick test runs. If you notice one's called fitness run and one's called evening run, the one that's called fitness run is by OPPO's default workout app on the watch, so you can do like fitness run. A fat burn, run outdoor, walk outdoor, cycling and swimming. So it's kind of a simple app there's only these five workouts that you can do nothing much. You can configure.

You just start a workout, but you realize that as a Wear OS device, you also have Google fit on the watch, and you can actually start google fit workouts on the watch as well. Furthermore, you can start runs like here. I've got a run. I did a calisthenics session. So in that sense google fit has more workouts that you can do it's its a more advanced like fitness, app on the watch, but otherwise the data that you get in here is kind of basic right, a run whether it comes from Google fit or it comes from uh OPPO's workout app.

It's kind of similar you get a very simple uh map of your run. It's its not even a heat map. It's its! Furthermore, it's! Just like the GPS map. You have your heart rate, uh pace your elevation kind of data that comes through. None of them are clickable, though, so you can't go deeper into any analysis and yeah same thing with Google fits that tracking.

So now here's where it gets a bit dicey, because if you have OPO's own, like hey, tap health, app installed on your phone and then by default, all the workouts that you track with OPPO's own app will go also sync into hey: tap health. Now hate health, as you can see, I only have fitness runs in here, because it only tracks things that come from OPPO's own app right. So if you have the Oppo watch, and you are using OPO's workouts, it will be able to sync into hated health and google fit if you enable that link. But if you start workouts with Google fit on the Oppo watch, it will only sync into google fit, and you won't be able to see those in tap health. It all boils down to this.

To overwatch has potential to be a pretty good smartwatch, but it's bogged down by restrictive software. Now it has on-board storage. Why is it that I have to use Google music to manage my offline songs? It has NFC. Why is googled paid not available on Wear OS? I use Google Pay every day, it's on my phone, it's available in Singapore, but for some reason it's just not activated on Wear OS. You can't have it, and it's not opposed fault, but that effectively renders this function useless right.

Why is it that I have two competing and therefore redundant fitness apps in one device? So there's a lot of this kind of things that Oppo needs to work on, and the good thing is. This is their first smartwatch, so software problems can be fixed uh. Maybe where OS problems can't be fixed. I don't know it's been years, but at least Oppo has a good track record of creating a highly customized like sort of android experience on smartphones, and maybe they could do that with the next versions of Oppo watch as well- and you know I've completely forgotten about this, because I've spent so much time ranting about Wear OS but um the battery life right, Oppo watch battery life is about on par with the Apple Watch as well, so you're getting around one and a half days of battery life Oppo calls this all-day battery life. So definitely you will be able to wear it the entire day, but also definitely you will have to charge it every day and good news is.

It does have quick charge, so it charges up really fast, but yeah. If you want a fitness tracker that looks like an Apple Watch, and you've got 399 Singapore dollars to spend, then you could get an opal watch, hey guys before you go, don't forget to check out hardwarezone. com for more of our articles. Trend reviews follow us on Facebook and Twitter join in the conversation like and subscribe to our YouTube. If you want to see more of these videos, do it.

Source : HardwareZone SG