The OnePlus Watch delivers truly awesome battery life and good hardware, but its software is sloppy and nowhere near ready for users.
Smartwatches for Android are a tough subject. Wear OS works, but it has a lot of flaws. Samsung’s Tizen-based smartwatches are great, but they’re also pretty expensive and work best on Samsung’s own smartphones. Fitbit smartwatches are excellent for fitness, but not so amazing for smart features. That’s why there was a lot of excitement for OnePlus to debut its own smartwatch, the OnePlus Watch. The final product, though, isn’t what most people wanted, and after using it for nearly two weeks, it’s hard to express just how disappointed I am in the OnePlus Watch. Alright, so let’s not start on a downer. The hardware of the first OnePlus smartwatch is by far the biggest highlight. Aside from one potential deal breaker, it really nails the basics. The chassis itself is made from stainless steel, a premium material that you absolutely will not find on any other smartwatch even close to this price range. The original Galaxy Watch Active is the closest comparison and, at $199, it’s aluminum. The craftsmanship of the OnePlus Watch is genuinely nice with its slim body and tactile buttons. That’s taken down a bit by the plastic belly, but that’s far from a problem in my eyes. Good news on the hardware front doesn’t stop there, either. The included silicone band is very comfortable, and thanks to the use of 22mm spring pins, you can easily swap for a different strap if you want something else. The display is also a win with a bright panel and excellent 2.5D glass that feels really smooth to the touch. The display’s bezels aren’t super small, but there’s a neat CD-like pattern to add a bit of flare. It’s a really nice and well-executed design overall. The only big flaw of the design is just that this watch is pretty big. At 46mm it’s hitting the top end of most other wearables out there, which is a disservice to anyone with less than a large wrist. I like to think that my wrist isn’t small, but isn’t huge either. I’ve generally fallen into the camp of wanting a wearable around 44mm, give or take. For me, that means the Watch feels comfortable on my wrist, but it’s far too big for, say, my wife to wear. This is an issue OnePlus can fix in future iterations, and it’s a problem that other first-generation smartwatches were plagued with too. However, the OnePlus Watch is coming out at a time where it could benefit from the better part of a decade of other companies making mistakes and figuring out what works in modern smartwatches, so the excuse of this being first-generation hardware feels a bit hollow. That flaw extends to the band as well. It’s comfortable as mentioned, but if you want a shorter strap you need to ask OnePlus to send you one in a separate shipment. Another arguably minor point I took issue with is the vibration motor. It’s very weak and really easy to miss. Often it’ll buzz and I won’t even notice. One morning, the OnePlus 9 Pro that the OnePlus Watch was paired to finished up a system update and proceeded to sync an entire night’s worth of notifications at once. It took a couple of seconds for me to recognize that the watch was buzzing to tell me about those notifications arriving. As it stands today, there’s no way to boost the strength of haptic feedback. From the time the brand debuted in 2013 until the past couple of years, OnePlus was widely regarded as among the best when it came to software on smartphones. OxygenOS was always clean and fast, quick to updates, and made sensible choices when it came to custom apps and features. Boy, times have changed. The first thing that comes to mind with the software on the OnePlus Watch is unfinished, closely followed by sloppy. Let’s start with the design. As we detailed earlier this month, OnePlus opted to essentially clone the design of Google’s Wear OS, just stripping that design of a lot of animations and small perks. On the bright side, that means navigation is easy to understand, as regardless of how you feel about Wear OS, navigation is one thing Google absolutely got right with the platform.
