Great quality screen, slick watch UI, strong battery life

Bland design, sports tracking issues, better value watches for less

Let’s get one thing out of the way. The OnePlus Watch is no Apple Watch rival. For starters, it doesn’t even pair with iphonesss. This is a smartwatch that you need to accept is not going to let you download apps, pay for your weekly shop or tell you that you might have a serious heart condition.

That’s because it represents a different breed of connected watch. One that has a place among the Apple, Samsung and Fitbit smartwatches of this world. These watches will still dish out notifications and give you a kick up the backside to get up off the sofa. They just won’t appear as fully formed as they do on pricier smartwatches. The key thing here is that these affordable smartwatches aren’t bad at all, once you can accept the compromises you’ll have to make to live with them.

So, the OnePlus Watch is a £149 smartwatch with a feature set that puts it in with watches made by fellow Chinese brands such as Xiaomi, Huawei and Zepp Health’s Amazfit range. 

The first big problem with this watch is the hype generated by OnePlus that left us with the impression it was working on something groundbreaking. This is a smartwatch that’s been talked about for years. There were the sketches, the talk the project was canned and then was back on the agenda.

Does it live up to the hype? No. Can it live with the smartwatches that sit around it at that £149 price? It’s a no to that as well. So what has OnePlus got right, and should it have bothered making a smartwatch at all?

Things don’t start well when taking the watch out of its clearly Apple Watch-inspired red packaging. You quickly realise that the promise of stylish design and refined elegance isn’t what’s staring back at you.

Currently, the watch is available with a stainless steel case with an additional cobalt alloy version that OnePlus will be launching at a later date. The steel case is paired with a Fluoroelastomer watch strap, which is the same type used on Huawei’s sporty GT2 watches. 

There’s a button clasp instead of a traditional watch buckle and immediately that posed a problem. More holes were needed in that strap as it shifted out of place on the wrist during exercise, and particularly during pool time. Thankfully. It is the kind you can swiftly remove and replace it with something that will stay put.

The 46mm case gives it a similar kind of stature to Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 3, but it’s over 20g heavier. That doesn’t sound a lot, but on skinner wrists that extra heft is noticeable. 

Along with the two physical buttons flanking the side of the case there’s the highlight of the OnePlus Watch’s look. It’s got a really lovely, sharp, 1.39-inch, 454 x 454 resolution AMOLED display. It’s crisp, colourful and has those rich, deep blacks you associate with a good quality AMOLED display. 

What it doesn’t have right now is an always-on display mode, though OnePlus has since confirmed it will be adding one. The raise-to-wake gesture support is also not very responsive – another thing OnePlus is supposedly addressing. There’s a theme here.

It’s a shame that such a great screen is let down by the design-dominating bezel that surrounds it in a really unattractive way. Maybe OnePlus could have opted to offer a contrasting colour on that bezel that would at least give its smartwatch some much needed character, because it currently blends into a sea of bland-looking smartwatches.

Once you get swiping and tapping on that screen, it’s a good feeling overall. It’s a positive OnePlus didn’t go all in on the disaster show that is Google Wear OS and opted for a platform that’s built on the same RTOS platform used on Amazfit smartwatches. That means zippy performance, better battery life, but at the expense of more robust features like an app storefront and richer communication features. 

It’s a clean looking OS with elements of the UI clearly inspired by the software used on the Oppo Watch. That’s perhaps not surprising to hear when you realise that both brands sit under the same BBK Electronics firm along with Realme and Vivo. 

The OS is a simple gesture-based setup and means you’re one swipe away from your notifications feed, music controls or a button press away from accessing workout modes and the main menu screen. You can’t fault the OnePlus Watch for being easy to get around.

While you can’t respond to notifications, they appear promptly and are optimised for that AMOLED display. You can make clear calls if you are one of those people that really wants to make calls. There’s music controls to handle what’s playing on your phones, and there’s 4GB of storage to play music offline. That’s great until you realise it doesn’t work with a streaming service and you have to have that music stored on your phones.

One of the more interesting features that OnePlus announced for its Watch was TV Connect. A feature that turns the smartwatch into your TV remote and can use the onboard motion sensors to detect when you’ve fallen asleep and switch the TV off. 

It would’ve been a great feature to test out except for the fact you have to have a OnePlus TV to pair with the watch. It’s such a shame to make a fun and inventive feature exclusive to a single TV platform.

WIRED hoped the saviour for this watch would lie in its abilities to track your health and fitness. It has everything needed to do a good job. There’s built-in GPS to accurately track outdoor activities and swim tracking to make it useful in the pool. 

There’s a heart-rate monitor to measure effort levels during exercise, though it’s better suited for measuring resting heart rate and continuously measuring heart rate to offer a window into your general state of fitness. An on-trend blood oxygen sensor makes the cut here, too, and can monitor blood oxygen levels during sleep.

The experience of accessing those features on the watch is good, but sadly the same can’t be said about the accuracy. GPS tracking on outdoor runs came up significantly shorter against a Garmin sports watch. 

In the pool, tracking started well and matched the swim tracking on the very reliable Form smart swimming goggles. Up until the strap started to slip and the real-time stats onscreen was interrupted by prompts to end the workout, stopping the tracking in the process.

Things are better when you look to it for those core fitness tracking staples such as counting steps and tracking sleep. It largely matched up with Fitbit’s step and sleep data, with deeper data trends available in the OnePlus Health companion app, which is a plus for OnePlus. There’s serious Withings Health Mate app vibes here with the clean, white look. It’s not an overwhelming place to spend time, and elements like the calendar and trend screens are some of the nicest we’ve seen on a smartwatch companion app.

Another big plus for OnePlus is the battery life. There’s the promise of up to 14 days, and it can go over a week in heavier usage. If you use power-intensive features like measuring blood oxygen levels overnight, or use GPS for more than a couple of hours a week, then those will hurt the battery performance. The ability to get a week’s worth of power from 20 minutes of charging is a feature we’d dearly love to see turn up on an Apple Watch or Samsung Galaxy Watch.

The OnePlus Watch sadly doesn’t live up to the hype, nor does it better competitor smartwatches, and it lacks a killer feature to help it stand out from the similarly priced competition.

If you want an androids-friendly alternative, you could pick up a Fitbit Versa 2 and get a richer smartwatch experience with some of the best fitness tracking features available and week-long battery life. 

If you’re not sold on that square watch look, the likes of the Amazfit GTS 2 and the Huawei Watch GT 2 will give you a more attractive round design along with pretty much everything the OnePlus Watch can offer and more. 

While it might be unfair to talk about Apple when this is an androids-only affair, an Apple Watch Series 3 for an extra £20 will get you a better all-round performance, too. You just need to be on board with charging it every night.

It’s not a complete disaster, though. There are elements that do work well. It delivers strong big battery life, elegant looking software on and off the watch, and it’s easy to get to grips with out of the box. 

But for something that OnePlus has made us wait a long time to see, its Watch feels like one to avoid for now. The incoming Cobalt edition might change our opinion on the underwhelming look, but it needs to improve that tracking performance to make it a better workout companion. 

OnePlus has already responded to negative comments and pushed out an update that addresses some of our biggest grievances. These shouldn’t have been issues in the first place, though, and that’s the problem here. OnePlus had so much time to get this right, but ultimately it’s made a mess of things.

The OnePlus Watch is available now at £149 from Amazon.

• 📚 The future of medicine, AI and climate change: get WIRED books
• Canary Wharf is trying to reinvent itself
• The hunt for a drug that can stop Covid-19 infections
• How to get your new puppy ready for post-lockdown life
• Police unions on Facebook are harassing LGBTQ people
• Lewis Hamilton opens up about activism and life beyond F1
• 🔊 Subscribe to the WIRED Podcast. New episodes every Friday

This article was originally published by WIRED UK