The $330 OnePlus Smartwatch: New Perspectives on Sleep Tracking and Wellness and the OnePlus360 Mind and Body Prototypes
The battery life has increased from 100 hours to 120 hours or five days with regular use, and the display is turned off. Roughly three days is how long it takes to turn on the AOD. That’s fairly typical for all flagship smartwatches these days. In a power-saving mode, you can get up to 16 days. The watch 3 has a bigger bicym battery than the 13 and the OnePlus 13 has a smaller bicym battery. That will add some battery mileage because it runs Wear OS 5. I haven’t been testing the watch long enough to definitively comment on battery life just yet, but I always appreciate faster charging. In about ten minutes, you can get a full day’s worth.
Yes, fitness trackers and some watches from brands like Garmin can last several weeks, but none of those have access to the wealth of apps and smart functions as an Apple Watch or Wear OS watch. That’s what makes this $330 OnePlus smartwatch exciting.
On the design front, the Watch 3 is quite similar to the OnePlus Watch 2, with a few key changes. The display is slightly bigger and brighter at 2,200 nits, but the resolution is smaller, and that is due to a slight design modification. The new video watchface and the spiffy screen make it easy to see what’s going on. (I, of course, have uploaded one of my cat asking for belly rubs.) The casing is still stainless steel, but there’s a new titanium physical bezel, too. It gives it a more classic analog look, but otherwise, this isn’t a dramatic change. My big design gripe is that the Watch 3 still only comes in a single 47mm size. It is not bad, but I have smaller wrists and there are gaps. Offering just one size excludes folks with smaller wrists from comfortably using the Watch 3, and that feels like a missed opportunity.
With the Watch 3, OnePlus is refocusing a bit on sleep tracking and wellness. The company says sleep tracking has been overhauled, and you’ll now be able to use the watch to track snoring patterns to assess your breathing disruptions. Stress tracking has also been rebranded as “360 Mind and Body,” and it uses heart rate variability, resting heart rate, and activity intensity to approximate how you’re doing… with emoji. You could get recommendations for guided breathing depending on how it evaluates your stress. I’ve been running a beta version of the OHealth app with these updates, and so far, I have received more insights into sleep tracking — though I’m not entirely sold on the emoji. So far, all I’ve been is roasted for my “moderate” wellness.
That is disappointing, considering some of the new health features. The big one is OnePlus’ 60S Health Check-In, where you touch the side button and get a quick scan of your heart rate, blood oxygen levels, mental wellness, wrist temperature, sleep quality, and vascular age. European users will get EKGs in 2 years. The new test measures your arteriosclerosis. It is similar to the feature Oura introduced last year, and is intended to gauge your circulatory system’s overall state. (My life is normal.)
This oversight was forgiven because there is a proper rotating crown. This time, you can actually use it to scroll through screens — a baffling omission from the last watch. There are delightful haptics that go along with it, and while this isn’t a groundbreaking addition, it soothes my inner curmudgeon that OnePlus has seen the errors of its ways and now upholds the nerdy wearable covenant that a rotating crown must also scroll.
A Senior Reporter on Wearables, Health and the Apparatus of a Physical Therapist with 13 Years of Experience in Silicon Valley
is a senior reporter focusing on wearables, health tech, and more with 13 years of experience. She was a writer for Gizmodo and PC Magazine.