OnePlus Watch: What worked... and what didn't By Joshua Vergara

Okay, I'm doing something a little different for this video on the wearable. That's on my wrist, because I saw a lot of my colleagues and peers talking about it and not a lot of what they had to say was very positive. So that's why I'm not doing a full-on review of this, though it might seem like it uh, and what I want to do here is just sort of explore why I feel pretty conflicted about taking this watch off of my wrist. So let's go ahead and explore that it's Joshua verger, what's going on everybody, here's what I think worked and what didn't work with the OnePlus watch before I get started. I just want to remind all of you that I am running a giveaway right now. I asked for all of your help in a little competition that I'm in right now to hopefully win a grand prize, which is a trip to Japan, which I would obviously take with SSA, who I haven't seen in a long time uh.

The thing is, I saw some of the posts that are already up and wow, like some people already have a ton of votes. So if we're really going to pull this out, I really need all of your help. So please consider going into the description and into the pinned comment below and following the instructions to be part of the giveaway you'll, be able to help me out, and then I'll have a prize for a couple of lucky winners uh. So please consider doing that and helping me out all right, let's jump in with what worked on the OnePlus watch and I think the design is one of them, despite having just one colorway and the admittedly long diameter size. The thin profile of the watch is one of my favorite parts couple.

All of that with this really easy to use watch band which, let's face it draws a lot of inspiration from fitness bands and the Apple Watch, and what you have here is a watch that is as easy to put on as it is easy on the eyes now on the topic of fitness bands and other smartwatches. Here's a quick comparison, just a look at a couple of other wearables that I'm currently reviewing you can see that OnePlus did a pretty good job of distinguishing their watch from offerings that have similar non-wear OS feature sets. Now the display is fine enough, especially considering how spartan the OS is to begin with it gets the job done. Considering the software just doesn't ask a lot of the screen. Now I get that some of you out there really wish there wasn't always on display on here, but it's not something that I typically have on just to preserve battery life and I consider it still more of a luxury.

After all, if I'm going to bring my wrist up to look at the watch anyway, it's at that point that the screen should be on. That's just how I feel on the topic of battery life. That's another thing that really worked in the OnePlus watch. OnePlus claims two weeks of battery life and for a lot of people. That's all you have to say that kind of makes it worth the price of admission, but, of course, notifications and things like fitness tracking will make that target a little less.

Personally, I have not even had this watch for two full weeks, so I can't really tell you if it will hit that mark, at least in my experience. I have had it for just over a week, though, and if I check my battery level right now, I'm at 61 so, so far we're sitting pretty one other thing I love seeing is fast charging. If you're relying on the smart wearable for notifications or tracking or any of the included apps, then it's important to get juice back in a hurry when you're done around an hour on that proprietary charger gets back basically all the battery life, and then you can get up to another two weeks after that, it's pretty good stuff. The last thing I'll say really worked on here is keeping things simple, especially in the software. The idea of this watch being easy on the eyes also extends the software which, to me exudes the virtues of oxygen OS from OnePlus smartphones, it's light, but it has style it's minimal, but invites you to explore further now.

My daily experience when it comes to a smartwatch is pretty simple. I don't need that much. I have some notifications coming to the watch, certainly not emails, but definitely apps like telegram and messengers of the like sleep tracking is nice as long as the watch can actually wake me up in the morning and the simplest yet most important tool for me is the timer for when I'm steeping cups of tea, the timer does work pretty great, and I have it set to the shortcut button, which is the bottom of the two on the right side. So, yes, this watch is able to achieve some of the things that I just said, but everything else is kind of an exercise and massive inconsistency, because what didn't work on the OnePlus watch is almost everything else being fully vaccinated. I can finally go back to the gym, but I will say my workouts are not distance based.

I can't really talk about the accuracy of the step counter or the GPS mileage, because my workouts are basically just time based and use heart rate monitoring, but maybe I don't even have to talk about it personally, because I've heard everybody else. Virtually everybody else say that the step counting and their workout records are grossly inaccurate. That's not good, especially if you want this watch to have good fitness guts within all of that info supposed to come into the OnePlus health application, where you get a few metrics in the health area where maybe for me just the stress marker was accurate because it is consistently abnormal, and I barely ever get to see it low, but let's scroll through it a little. So I can talk about something I can actually test regularly and that's sleep, or I wish I could, because after at least three different nights, where I made sure to wear the watch, I have no sleep records to actually prove that I slept on those nights. I don't know if that's because I switched from the OnePlus 9 pro to my before 7 and maybe lost data in the process, but even then that's something that shouldn't happen either, but as we go through the app some more, you can do other things like changing up the watch face and transferring music files to the watch for Bluetooth, audio listening, which is all pretty standard stuff, and then we get to the inconsistent notification performance now.

This hasn't happened too often, but there are times when I would get one new notification and behind it, a flood of all the other emails or anything else that I left in my notification shade come along with it again. It hasn't happened too often, but it's just enough for me to say this might not be the best notification center that you would want on your wrist. But if you ask me, the worst part of my time with the watch so far is actually one of the simplest, and it's the vibration motor look. I don't need the haptics on here to be, as surprisingly pleasant as the Apple Watch or even as aggressive as like many Xiaomi mi smart bands, but I do need it to be just good enough that it can nudge me when one of those pushed notifications comes in the first time, and I would like it to be able to wake me up in the morning using a silent alarm, but unfortunately, on the OnePlus watch, it's just too subtle. I can barely feel it whenever anything comes through much less rely on it for me to wake up early in the morning, there is a sea of fitness wearables out there that range from generally passable to being actually quite good, and now the OnePlus watch is trying to jump in even without the complexities or the chunkiness of using an operating system like Wear OS, but unfortunately, it's just lacking in the optimizations that are needed for it to be as useful as its closest competitors.

So what really doesn't work on? The OnePlus watch is its ability to bridge certain gaps, because it is a trend putting what basically amounts to a fitness band into a watch-like body. You would think that OnePlus is up to the task, but because of the problems with the parts that make this more fitness band than smartwatch, the OnePlus watch barely manages to be a good example of either. As I said before, I don't require too much from my smart wearables. I don't even use too many apps a lot, so watches that don't have full Wear OS capabilities I can get down with and a lot of the things that I want. I now consider the basics of a good smart wearable.

It's just that with the OnePlus watch, it's not able to achieve all of those and if it did well, the 159 dollar price point would make it quite the bargain. Probably the worst part of this whole thing is that some of the problems that I have mentioned can't be fixed with just software updates. That being said, if, over the next few months, they can fix as much as they can, I'd be closer to recommending it as an affordable, yet capable good-looking wearable for anyone that is either OnePlus faithful or wants more smarts on their wrist. It's just hard for me to recommend right now. If what you're looking for is more than skin deep for more on the OnePlus watch and other smart wearables make sure you subscribe to my channel for now, I'm going to call it on this one.

Thank you so much for watching. Please consider entering in my giveaway, take care of yourselves and each other and enjoy your tea. Everybody.

Source : Joshua Vergara