OnePlus Watch
The OnePlus Watch is almost impossibly beautiful for the money, but it doesn’t do enough
OnePlus’ reputation for making top-quality hardware at reasonable prices means that it’s always a red-letter day when the company launches into an entirely new product category. And so it is with the OnePlus Watch, one of the most attractive and well-made smartwatches we’ve seen.
With a sharp, 1.39in, 454 x 454 AMOLED touch display, the OnePlus Watch comes in black, silver or limited-edition “Cobalt”. Made from polished stainless steel (or cobalt alloy), it’s topped with hard, scratchresistant, sapphire crystal glass and ships with a, pin-and-tuck siliconerubber strap. It’s 5ATM waterproof (50m) and IP68-rated as well.
The result is one of the most luxurious and attractive smartwatches I’ve tested, which makes its £149 price all the more remarkable. My only twinge of disappointment is that there’s no smaller version: at 46mm across, the OnePlus Watch’s body won’t suit those with slimmer wrists.
It has all of the hardware a smartwatch needs too, with plenty of sensors and radios packed in. There’s a combined optical heart rate and blood oxygen monitor on the rear, GPS for positioning (with support for GLONASS, Galileo and Beidou), an accelerometer, a gyroscope and a barometer.
Perhaps most impressive, though, is the battery life, which extends to a claimed 14 days for “typical use” and 25 hours of continuous exercise with GPS. Quite what “typical” means is always difficult to say when talking about smartwatches, but in the space of four days – including almost four hours of continuous GPS use – it dropped from 100% to 36%. With battery life like that, it won’t surprise you that the OnePlus Watch doesn’t use Android Wear. Instead, the software is of OnePlus’ own design.
So, what can you do with it? It makes a good start with plenty of watch face choices, with an emphasis on battery-friendly black backgrounds. OnePlus promises 50-plus watch faces to choose from, although you can only store 14 on the watch at once.
You get notifications from any apps on your phone, music controls for Spotify et al, plus the ability to transfer playlists and MP3 files for playing locally on the watch (there’s 4GB of storage). You can even make and receive phone calls using the built-in mic and speaker.
This being OnePlus’ first attempt at smartwatch software, there are some gaps, with the main one being how notifications are handled. The system is rudimentary with only the subject line displayed and no means of expanding the full message or responding on the watch itself.
There’s also currently no means of adding to the watch’s capabilities via installable apps, which puts the OnePlus Watch at a disadvantage to Android Wear devices and the Apple Watch. In this respect, its natural competitors are smartwatches such as the Huawei Watch GT 2 ( see issue
303, p74), which also employs proprietary software.
The rest of the watch’s features focus on health and fitness and there’s plenty here to like: the watch tracks steps, calorie burn and sleep automatically, and there are plenty of activities you can track manually too.
There are profiles for all the core activities you’d expect, including running, hiking, cycling and indoor swimming, plus gym-based activities such as indoor cycling, elliptical trainer and rowing machine sessions, yoga and freestyle. OnePlus promised there will be over 100 activity profiles at launch, but my review unit only showed 14 at the time of writing.
It will track your position via GPS, which means you can leave your phone at home when you go for a run. You get an impressive amount of information displayed while you exercise, including heart rate, heartrate zone, pace and calories burned. It even displays more advanced stats when you pause workouts, including VO2 max and how much time you’ve spent in the various heart-rate zones.
Elsewhere, you get the chance to measure your blood oxygen level and stress levels. There are guided breathing, barometer and compass apps too, as well as a remote control app for the OnePlus TV.
And it’s all easy to use and responsive. On the Watch, you use swipes and button presses to navigate around, which is simple to get to grips with. The Watch syncs reliably with the all-new OnePlus Health app, too, where you can view your stats in more depth, share your workouts and sync data to Google Fit.
It’s at this point that the OnePlus Watch begins to fall short, however. There’s currently no means of analysing your long-term trends so you can see your progress. There’s no way of implementing a training plan or creating structured workouts.
What’s more, although the GPS tracking and heart-rate monitor are largely accurate, the VO2 max calculation is completely off. Most fitness devices estimate my VO2 max at between 50 and 55; the OnePlus Watch estimated it at 21. I’m sure an update will repair this, but it’s a disappointing start. And to emphasise how new OnePlus is to this, halfway through testing a software update mucked up the watch’s heart-rate tracking skills.
Then there are the finicky things that put me off the watch: small text on in-workout screens, which makes it tough to keep track of your stats while you exercise; no always onscreen option – just tap to wake or raise to wake; no external fitness sensor support; no third-party app support, and no iOS app at all.
The OnePlus Watch is a greatlooking smartwatch. I’ve come across nothing like it in terms of pure hardware appeal for this sort of money – it’s absolutely gorgeous. Couple that with long battery life and decent ease of use, and you have something that will almost certainly appeal to staunch OnePlus fans. For anyone whose priority is fitness tracking, however, and those who want their smartwatch to do a little more, the OnePlus Watch currently disappoints.
“In the space of four days – including almost four hours of continuous GPS use – the battery dropped from 100% to 36%”