Review: OnePlus Watch

When a fitness tracker shows a huge discrepancy in your data, it's hard to believe it ever again. That happened early on with the OnePlus Watch—yes, the same company that makes Android smartphones is now diversifying into the health and fitness wearable space.

The OnePlus Watch is a $159 tracker that can measure your steps, heart rate, blood oxygen saturation (SpO2), and sleep. You can use the watch to see your phone notifications, control music playback, and take calls. It's safe to wear in the shower. But while the hardware is solid, OnePlus' wearable is impeded by software quirks, tracking inconsistency, and features that just don't work. 

If you're in the market for an affordable fitness tracker, your options are plenty. There's nothing the OnePlus Watch does better than its peers, so stick to the Garmins and Fitbits for now, and let OnePlus go back to the drawing board.

The OnePlus Watch comes in one size: 46 millimeters wide. That's comfortable for my large hands (I'm 6'4"). But it's a bulky and too-darn-big watch for anyone else, as my more petite partner can attest. There's a reason why wearables usually come in various sizes. If it's any consolation, the company says anyone needing a smaller strap can … “contact customer service.” Great.

Comfort is one thing, but design also plays a huge role in something you're supposed to wear all the time. OnePlus goes into great detail about the watch's elegant and dazzling looks, but the styling does zilch for me. It's the standard round design in black we've seen so many times. Booooring!  At least you can swap the 22-mm-wide straps for something more stylish. 

There are two low-profile buttons on the right side. The top one is a back button (swiping right on the 1.39-inch AMOLED touchscreen also lets you step backwards through menus), but it also doubles as the app launcher. The bottom button is customizable, and by default, it launches the Workout app.  

The watch is IP68 water-resistant, and I've worn it while showering with no problems whatsoever. It also has a 5 ATM rating, so you can take it down to 50 meters underwater. But perhaps the watch's best feature is its long battery life. OnePlus claims the 402-mAh cell can last around two weeks between charges, and a little less if you have SpO2 tracking turned on while you sleep. I toggled on the latter and found I only needed to recharge the watch after six or seven days. 

The long battery life is mostly thanks to the fact that the OnePlus Watch prioritizes power-sipping fitness-tracking features over the typical battery-intensive smartwatch features. Unlike most wearable makers that also manufacture Android phones, OnePlus has chosen to forego Google's WearOS smartwatch platform in favor of an RTOS (real-time operating system) experience that handles health tracking but fails at the more useful smartwatchy stuff.

For example, you can see phone notifications (from texts or third-party messaging apps) on the watch screen, but you can't reply to them with anything other than preset messages that cannot be changed. Think: “In a meeting, call you later!” Sure, you can make and take phone calls on the watch, but there's no app store for adding functionality. So you can't make contactless payments, snag a Lyft ride from your wrist, or stream music—though you can manually upload up to 4 GB of MP3 files to the watch. 

Then there are the peculiarities. So, so many of them. With some apps—like Telegram, for example—the same notification bizarrely appeared multiple times on the watch. I also had to manually toggle on notifications for almost every important app, even for the phone dialer and text messaging. You'd think some of these would be on by default.

It's difficult to quickly identify which app is sending a particular notification because OnePlus uses a universal color and icon for every app. It all looks the same! (The watch does display the app name on the right side, but it still takes me a second to recognize what app the notification is from.) And if you swipe away a notification on the watch, it disappointingly doesn't also disappear from your phone. Worse yet, if I clear notifications from my phone, they don't immediately disappear from the watch. That's annoying.

All the digital watch faces are stuck on 24-hour time, and while there's a solid list of watch faces to choose from (many are hidden in the app), only a handful are customizable. You can't place complications (subdial widgets, like the current temperature) on many faces.

The raise-to-wake function—which turns the screen on when you lift your arm to look at the watch—frustratingly only works around 60 percent of the time. This wouldn't be a big deal if there was an always-on screen or if you could just tap the screen to wake it, but neither of those features are present. 

Two things I like are sleep tracking and the built-in GPS, and I've found both to be pretty accurate. But like many other features on this watch, they're somewhat buggy. Sleep tracking accurately identifies when I fall asleep and when I wake up, even breaking it down to deep and light sleep, but none of this data syncs to the app. I can't even see my overall sleep score. 

GPS is more effective. You have to start a trackable activity for it to work, and when you dive into the data, you can see the exact route you walked, biked, jogged. But the main “Fitness” section of the app is wonky because it looks like you're supposed to see your location on a map, but all I see is a black screen with a red dot in the center. It looks like a bug. 

Finally, animations throughout the watch are pretty lackluster. Swipe away a notification and it doesn't slide away, but instantly disappears into a void. The user interface doesn't look polished, and it makes interacting with the watch a little unsatisfying.

The first time I noticed issues with the watch's tracking abilities was when I donned it on a beautiful Saturday morning as I walked from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to a little further than Times Square in Manhattan. It's a long walk! Well, not according to the OnePlus Watch.

For most of the trip, it was accurately counting my steps. Halfway through, the watch … reset. What was originally more than 15,000 steps on the watch turned into around 7,000. I checked the companion OnePlus Health app on my phone and it was showing me accurate numbers that matched data from the Google Fit app. By the end of the day, the step count displayed on the Watch was wildly lower than what was shown in the two mobile apps. It never synced properly. 

When comparing the activity tracking features to those on the Apple Watch Series 5, I found the OnePlus' step counts to be imprecise to a significant degree. On another long walk with a watch on each wrist and a phone in my pocket, the Apple Watch counted 8,735 steps and my phone's Google Fit app displayed 9,248, whereas the OnePlus Watch had me at a paltry 4,340.

I had issues with the watch auto-detecting my walks too (it's supposed to auto-detect walks or runs). Initially, it never detected anything. After I switched from a Nokia phone to the OnePlus 9, it … still didn't detect anything. It wasn't until this past weekend that it correctly auto-started an “Outdoor Walk” activity, though it only began more than 15 minutes after I left my house. At least it did a solid job of pausing when I stopped to grab a coffee.

The same thing happened with movement reminders. The watch is supposed to remind me to get up and move every so often, yet it only started working this past weekend. (And yes, I am pretty sedentary, so I should have seen an alert before then.) 

Heart rate tracking is generally accurate until you start an activity. I regularly found the OnePlus Watch recorded a higher beats-per-minute rate than the Apple Watch (and a manual test). It also always said I burned more calories and traveled further, and SpO2 data was always a percentage lower than my trusty fingertip pulse oximeter. Given the inaccurate step counts and auto-detection issues, I just had a hard time trusting any of this data. 

There are only 14 activities you can manually track at the moment (and it only auto-detects walking and running), but OnePlus says an over-the-air update in May will deliver more than 110 workout types. 

That's good to hear, but considering all the problems I've had, you're just better off buying the similarly-priced Fitbit Charge 4 or Garmin Venu Sq from reliable brands that have had years to refine and perfect tracking data. That's what's most important in a fitness tracker, and the OnePlus Watch lags far behind. 

Over-the-air updates could fix many of these issues. In fact, OnePlus issued an update on Monday of this week—while I was writing this review, in fact—that adds more watch faces and claims to fix some bugs, such as the notifications not disappearing on the phone, along with improved auto-detect. I paused my work and went on another long walk, which it did not auto-detect, and notifications I swiped away on the watch are still on my phone. I'm not optimistic. OnePlus also says other issues I ran into will be fixed in another update coming this month, but I can only test what I have in front of me.

Die-hard OnePlus fan? I still say wait for the OnePlus Watch 2. Hopefully, it can regain my trust.