ONEPLUS WATCH
Crammed with fitness features and an epic battery, this offers an Apple Watch experience for half the price
Want an Apple Watch, but can’t quite stretch your finances? Then this smart-looking alternative from OnePlus should definitely be top of your wishlist. It’s affordable, feature packed and built to last.
The watch delivers a large 1.39-inch AMOLED display, which looks great but attracts finger smudges like bees to honey. The accompanying strap feels soft and smooth on your wrist, but very quickly attracts dust and detritus. This requires frequent wipe downs to keep it clean.
In terms of functional design, the watch has two buttons on its stainless steel casing – which feels reassuringly solid in the hand. One takes you into a menu for its various fitness modes, and the other into a menu that includes health tracking features, as well as music playback, weather and call making. In terms of aesthetic design the OnePlus is stylish but lacks a little in terms of personality and individuality.
To be a true Apple Watch alternative the OnePlus Watch needs to be an attractive option for users of the best smartphone brands. So, for this review we decided to pair it with the highly rated Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra.
When powering up the watch for the first time you’ll be told you need to download the OnePlus Health app to your phone. Note, the app is an essential part of the OnePlus Watch experience.
Setup is two-fold. Firstly you input all your own information for health tracking. Then you set up the app’s permissions to update the firmware. Annoyingly this took us over 30 minutes. Once ready to go, you can start to customise the smartwatch through the OnePlus Health app. One downside is the modest selection of watch faces to choose from. But, overall, the OnePlus Health app works well and allows you to control your watch as you see fit.
On the hardware front there is plenty on offer. You get the following sensors: acceleration, gyroscope, geomagnetic, optical heart rate and blood oxygen, ambient light, air pressure and a capacitance sensor. You also get GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and Beidou positioning units, which means there’s little the OnePlus can’t track.
Looking to fitness you get the usual stepcounting tech and a collection of tracking modes for running, fat-burning running, outdoor cycling, indoor cycling, outdoor walking, swimming, elliptical trainer, rowing machine, badminton, mountaineering, cross-country walking, cricket, yoga and freestyle training.
This is a really strong selection that covers the vast majority of usage scenarios of its owners, but how does this affect battery life? The 402 mAh battery is great: you’ll get two weeks of use on one charge (medium usage). And even with heavy usage, you won’t need to recharge it for a week.
If you want a Apple Watch alternative without the cost then the OnePlus Watch is the one for you. From a value proposition you will be hard pushed to find anything better. You get so much functionality for so little money in comparison to other smartwatches on the market today.