So how does it deliver on its features? Music? If the 160 dollar price tag isn’t enough to pique your interest? Well, then, you add in blood oxygen monitoring, high heart rate alerts, a ridiculously long battery life and all in a very pretty package to tie it all together. It almost seems too good to be true and that’s, because in many ways it is but hey you can’t expect them to get everything right on the very first. Try first thing to note: if you are interested in buying this watch, is that it’s only compatible with android devices, although the company does say that ios compatibility is going to roll out eventually for the purposes of this review, i have paired it with my galaxy s20. Ultra, which is broken because we do reuse the phones that we break, but i suspect that you’d have a better experience staying within the oneplus ecosystem, meaning a oneplus phone. At first glance, the oneplus watch bears a striking resemblance to the galaxy watch. Active a round watch face amoled, touchscreen and stainless steel frame, but this one only comes in a 46 millimeter option which, as you can see, looks pretty overpowering on my wrist and i didn’t even think i had small wrists to begin with. So, just something to keep in mind, surprisingly enough, though it wasn’t too uncomfortable to wear even at night, so that has to do with the slim form factor. Most of the navigation happens on the touchscreen itself, although it does have two side buttons for back and select.
The watch bands are made of silicon and comfortable enough, but you can easily swap them out with others with a quick release in terms of functionality. The oneplus watch does everything you’d expect a smartwatch to do in 2021, it’s running its own os, similar to tizen’s operating system. So it can display notifications, make and answer phone calls and serve as a remote for both your phone camera and a oneplus tv which i don’t happen to have, but you won’t find nfc for payments now in theory it can play music, but you have to load It manually using the app as it has no spotify support or any third party music apps for that matter. The watch also does your basic fitness tracking, with over 110 different workout types to choose from so in theory. You could also leave your phone behind on a run because it does have built in gps, but i haven’t found it to be the most reliable. There were a few times where i took it out for a run and it didn’t connect and the distance was a bit off. I like that. It breaks out your heart rate zones by intensity, so you can see how hard you were working during an exercise, but i did notice some important inconsistencies when it comes to heart rate, so i did compare it with a chest strap and in the summary, my average Heart rate and my peak heart rate were accurate within reason, but while i was on my run, it lagged considerably.
So if you are looking for that minute by minute accuracy, this is not your watch. This also made me question other metrics on the watch. So this morning, for example, i got a high heart rate alert that my heart rate was above 120 beats per minute. While i was laying in bed – and it freaked me out, because i didn’t feel anything i strapped on the chest – strap and it was totally normal. So it might have been a fluke. The watch is water, resistant, meaning, it’s, safe for swim tracking as well, and it goes beyond the basic fitness tracking. While this is not a medical device, it can measure spo2 or blood oxygen levels, both on demand and at night. As well as sleep tracking and detect stress levels, now all this data is great and impressive, but the stress levels, for example, i don’t think matched my actual stress levels, which is kind of a flaw with the feature in general, especially with watches that rely on heart Rate to determine stress levels, so we can pardon that part, but i also noticed it wasn’t sinking my sleep data in the morning or the spo2 data at night, even though i had enabled it on the actual app and i was receiving my sleep summary on the Watch in the morning – and this is part of a larger issue which is sinking at many points during my review – it just lost connection to the phone, even when it was just a couple of feet away and during this period i would stop receiving notifications and the Data would stop syncing, which is a problem now.
It is important to note that i am running a test version of the app, so this problem may be solved by the time you get the watch, but i had to note it anyway. The other big selling point about this watch is battery life. The company claims two weeks for me: it’s, probably gon na end up being more like a week because things start to add up quickly. So the spo2 tracking at night, continuous heart rate, monitoring and even adding music to it, do decrease battery life. But one week is still great considering the competition you do sacrifice certain things, though, like the always on display and screen brightness, which is kind of hard to see in direct sunlight and the rays to wake isn’t as fast. But the watch also charges fast. You can get a full day of power from just five minutes on the charger or wait 20 minutes for a full week’s worth of charge. The oneplus watch seems to check all the boxes when it comes to battery life price and features, but it still has some issues to work out which the company might over time just know that you’re not getting a finished product right out of the gate, and i Still wouldn’t use it as a fitness watch, but at that price point it may not matter, especially if you have a oneplus phone because then you might not have the same compatibility issues that i did in my experience.
You can also read my full review on cnet.TANnATOPCIY
