This is the OnePlus Watch 2 and it’s a very good upgrade over the Watch 1 that launched
in the year 2019.
I’ve been testing this watch for the past few days and there’s a lot to talk about. Some really good things and some not so much.
But overall, I am really impressed with this watch.
Starting with the design, Watch 2 retains the circular design from Watch 1 and it looks
very premium in the stainless steel chassis. On the right side, there are two buttons.
Pressing this button takes you to the home and the other one is a customizable
action button. One thing to note here is that the circular button rotates but it doesn’t do anything.
OnePlus should have integrated scrolling into the circular button to make it more useful.
At the bottom you get the sensors, mic, speaker and pins for charging.
On the front there’s this beautiful 1.43-inch circular AMOLED display
protected by sapphire crystal, which is nice considering watches do get scratched quite easily.
The display is sharp and bright and in our testing it reached 1000 nits which is pretty
good. The auto-brightness also works well in both indoors and outdoors. Also the race to
and touch to wake options work just fine. Always on display is also present here.
However, if you look closely you’ll see that the bezels around the display are slightly
on the thicker side. OnePlus Watch 2 comes in just one size which is the 46mm and it weighs 80 grams with
the strap so it could be a bit big and heavy for some.
But I’ve been using the Watch Ultra for quite some time and I find the size to
be appropriate. Now let me take you through the internals of the watch because that’s where things
get very interesting. OnePlus believes that the only thing holding back the VROS smartwatches is the sub-par battery life
and with Watch 2 they have solved this problem. Here’s how. OnePlus Watch 2 is powered by two chipsets and two operating systems.
Snapdragon W5 works as the performance chipset and the Be S2700 is the efficiency chipset.
So for intensive tasks involving the VROS, app launches, maps, music etc. W5 kicks in.
And for moderate tasks such as always on display, background activity, notifications etc.
the second operating system RTOS comes into picture that runs on PES2700.
And the best part is that all that happens automatically in the background and the user doesn’t have to do anything.
This dual chipset dual OS functionality is responsible for the extended battery life in the OnePlus Watch 2
which I’ll talk about later in the video. Overall, the UI is pretty smooth and responsive to swipes and gestures.
The haptics are also very strong and of very good quality. And by the way, Wear OS is based on Android 13
and OnePlus has promised two years of updates to this watch. When it comes to rest of the features and customizations,
there are 20 watch faces available on the watch and more can be added from the companion app. You can also install third-party watch faces from play store and there is support for third-party widgets as well. There’s one thing though,
the O-Health app is only available for the Android users. These are all the sensors on the OnePlus watch too.
Heart rate and SPO2 are pretty accurate in our testing. Sleep tracking also works well with accurate timings
and there’s a detailed breakdown in the app with proper sleep score.
Step data was slightly off when we compared it against Apple Watch Series 9 on a 20 minute
treadmill walk but the heart rate was on point and when it comes to workouts there are options
for walking, running, cycling, rope, badminton, swimming and more. The call quality on the Watch 2 is also very good.
The mic quality is great, the other party didn’t have any complaints but speakers are slightly less loud.
Lastly Watch 2 has a dual frequency L1 L5 GPS for navigation. The precision that OnePlus claims is of 30 cm.
However, in my testing, I found the GPS to be out of touch with the root.
The compass was a bit finicky and required recalibration at times while walking down the
street with navigation on. Coming to the battery, OnePlus Watch 2 packs a 500mAh battery and supports VOOC charging
which takes the watch from 0 to 100% in just 1 hour.
As for the battery life, OnePlus claims 2 days with smart mode and 12 days with RTOS.
I used the watch extensively for 24 hours with every fitness feature set to on.
Connected to my phone all the time, I played some music, used GPS navigation and tried
out various fitness tracking modes and the watch was still left with 30% charge, so the
watch can easily last 1.5 days without any problems which is pretty good.
And I almost forgot to tell you that OnePlus won’t be launching the LTE variant of this
watch. All said and done, OnePlus Watch 2 is a solid upgrade over Watch 1.
The clever use of two operating systems and two chipsets to enhance the battery
life of the watch is a move in the right direction. Apart from that there’s everything you expect from a smartwatch, nice and bright display,
very good build quality, all the fitness features and of course rear OS.
Yeah lack of different size options and LTE variant can probably put off some users
but other than that this is a solid smartwatch.
Thankyou!
