Now there are some pros and cons for essentially sitting back and waiting to enter into a saturated space and taking some time in doing so. The pro in a situation like this is that you get to sit back and observe and see what works so, for example, this market is relatively dominated by the apple watch and a lot of great offerings from fitbit. Now there is a little bit of a mixture of some things that google offers in terms of wear os and their hardware manufacturer partners and, of course, samsung’s galaxy gear line as well. But, needless to say, it is relatively saturated with products. So one advantage that oneplus has had through this time is being able to sit back and seeing what works from a hardware build perspective, feature build perspective, materials and i’m, also, assuming that, as these products have evolved over time, their manufacturing costs have gone down, because you Should have a wide selection of hardware manufacturers to choose from as well now the biggest con about a situation like this is that when you wait this long, a lot of customers are expecting you to get a lot of aspects of your product right. Even though it’s a first generation product now, which we all know that first generation products, typically don’t, live up to the hype and typically come with a lot of bugs and kinks that need to be ironed out down the road and i’m. Sad to say that the oneplus watch falls into that same category.
There are definitely let’s call them areas of improvement available for the oneplus watch, but i don’t want to start the review on a downer, because there are some aspects that the oneplus watch absolutely does nail and the first one is it’s build quality for a watch. That starts at 149. The oneplus watch feels really solid and well put together. Now the enclosure of the watch is actually stainless. Steel, which let’s be honest at this price point you’re not going to find another wearable or a smart watch that features stainless steel on the enclosure. The quality of that steel is a little offset by the fact that the belly of the watch or the part that sits on top of your wrist is made out of plastic, but, needless to say, i’ll take that combination at this price point any day. I’M. Also, a huge fan of the round circular display, i feel like it, looks more like a classic timepiece, more so than it does an actual smartwatch, and the quality of the display itself is actually really nice. It gets plenty bright and it looks relatively sharp in almost any viewing angle or situation, especially if you go into the settings like i did and disable auto brightness and just crank up that display brightness to like four or five on the scale. It just looks really really nice one thing to keep in mind, though the watch is big. It comes in at 46 millimeters which, when you compare it to a lot of other smart watches or wearables on the market, typically speaking, 46 millimeters is going to be your large option, but with the oneplus watch 46.
Millimeters is your only option now i don’t have large wrists by any means, but i do like large watches. So, for me this wasn’t a problem, but if you are like me and you have smaller wrists and because of that, you prefer smaller watches, the oneplus watch may not be for you and another thing to keep in mind when it comes to bands. It’S really nice to have that quick release hook, enclosure, which means that you can swap it out for other quick release bands relatively easily. But as far as what you’ll get in the box, it’s going to be the band that’s going to fit more people which is going to be a little larger. So i find that when i’m wearing the oneplus watch i’m already on like hole number two, because again my wrists are smaller. If you want that smaller band from oneplus that’s, unfortunately, gon na have to come in a second package. The battery life on the oneplus watch is also fantastic. I mean it’s almost in a league of its own, compared to any other wearable or smart watch on the market. Now, when you compare it to something like an apple watch, my apple watch typically will. Last me one to two days and if you compare it to something like my fitbit, my fitbit will typically last me four to five days. My oneplus watch was powering through at least one week with no problem now here’s the thing there are a couple of use factors that go into how i wear my wearables that probably extended my battery life too, such as the fact that i don’t wear any wearables.
Whenever i sleep and sleep tracking is definitely something that will increase your battery life usage, but needless to say, i mean using it to track workouts using it on a day to day basis. It was lasting well over one week. I think i was losing maybe five to six percent battery life every single day, which is just nuts to think about on a smart watch and another cool thing is the proprietary dash charger or warp charger, whatever they’re calling it? These days, that’s included inside the box, can take you from about zero to fifty percent in, like 20 to 25 minutes and on a watch like this 50 battery life is like six to seven days of relatively normal use. So when it comes to endurance and when it comes to charging, this smartwatch is in a league of its own it’s, pretty nice. Another aspect that i feel leads to relatively good battery life on the watch is oneplus choice. In software they decided not to go with google’s wear os, which, honestly i can’t blame them. Wear os has had its fair share of troubles, including some major things like just how often it receives software updates discrepancies between various hardware manufacturers overall performance issues, you get what i’m saying oneplus decided to go with real time os, which is actually not any kind of New watch operating system it’s actually something that we’ve seen before on a lot of other low price, wearable makers, but they essentially, in my opinion, kind of just cloned google’s wear os, albeit they took away a lot of the fancier animations in the ui that you would See in order to make sure that performance is smooth things like the quick setting toggles from the top of the watch, and even the notifications, when you swipe up from the bottom, look exactly like what you’ll find on wear os like.
I said, though, there’s no fancy animation, so performance looks and feels much smoother in terms of interaction with the watch. There are two buttons on the right side. The top button is going to be your power button whenever you first want to power it on and then from there it’s going to act as your application menu button and the bottom button is going to be a function button that you can actually reprogram in the Settings to launch various apps or various tasks on the watch so from a performance perspective. I had absolutely no issues, it’s, actually really really nice. It just seems like they kind of cloned the look and somewhat of the feel from an operating system that they didn’t really want to go with in the first place. So i thought that was a little strange here’s where things start to get a little shaky to the point where, honestly, at times the oneplus watch feels like a relatively incomplete product. The software is good in terms of performance and interaction and speed and fluidity, but it seems so basic and it also feels like it’s lacking a lot of core features that really should be there out of the box, the first one i noticed right away after i Finished setting up my oneplus watch and starting to use it is that there’s no option for a 12 hour clock format. Now i understand that in a lot of regions and a lot of other markets having a 24 hour, clock format works for a lot of people but i’m going to go out on a limb here and say here in the united states 90 to 95 percent of People are probably going to prefer a 12 hour format and i searched the settings for 20 minutes before i finally decided to look it up, and i realized that it’s, just not there how something as small as not having an option for a 12 hour clock format Got past like a software development team and the final testing team and actually made it to the full blown retail product is beyond me and another thing that i feel is kind of weird there’s.
No support for third party watch face makers or third party application developers, which means that even something as basic as wanting to download a music streaming service like spotify, because the oneplus watch does support the option to have music on it. As well as paired to an external bluetooth headset, you just can’t do that. So, if you’re, using pandora, if you’re using spotify for your music playlist – and you were thinking, i’ll download, my songs to the watch, hook it up to a bluetooth headphone and go out for a run one night with just the watch. It’S not gon na work and in terms of the workout application itself. It is the one natively provided by oneplus, but even core features in that don’t necessarily work for one, the amount of software or i’m. Sorry, the amount of workouts available to track in the software is 14. oneplus promised 110. now i’m. Not looking for perfection here by any means, but 14 is 12 of 110 quick maths. At the very least, i would hope to see maybe 50 to 60 workouts on here, a lot of popular workout options, especially the ones you’ll see here in a us market like football, soccer, basketball, weightlifting, those are not available and when it comes to something like running, I found that a lot of times the gps in the actual workout app just wasn’t loading, so the watch was able to track your distance. Your calories burned your steps, your overall pace, but as far as tracking what your running heat map looks like on an actual map, it just wouldn’t load.
So there are definitely a lot of things that oneplus can improve from a software perspective on this watch. That again, just makes it seem like it, wasn’t, really ready to be put in a box and shipped out to customers. Yet as far as connectivity to a smartphone goes, the oneplus watch can only pair to an android device running the oneplus health app. So if, for whatever reason, you owned an iphone – and you were interested in the oneplus watch – sorry but that’s, not gon na happen. As far as watch faces go, like, i said, they’re currently only being developed by oneplus and you have a selection of 50 at the time of this video now keep in mind, you can’t store all 50 on the watch. The watch only allows you to store about 14 at a time before the watch face. Storage gets full in the software as weird as that may sound, and as far as customizing the watch face goes you’re very, very limited. There are certain watch faces that may come in two to three different color options, but from a general use and customizability perspective, what you see is kind of what you get now. I do want to spend some time talking about the accuracy of some of the health tracking features, because this watch does also come with the ability to one track, your heart rate, but two, which i was definitely not expecting at this price point: blood oxygen monitoring.
I wonder where they got that idea from now. I found from a heart rate tracking perspective, especially if you’re just going to go into the application and start tracking your heart rate right away compared to something like an apple watch. The oneplus watch, for whatever reason, will start out a little bit higher on the beats per second range, so my resting heart rate is generally anywhere from 63 to 65 beats per minute, and my apple watch is pretty good about picking that up as soon as i Start tracking my heart rate in the app i found that the oneplus watch would show like an initial reading of like 78 to 79, which for me is relatively high for resting heart rate. But then, after a few seconds, immediately drop back down and regulate itself. To about like 65 or 66 beats per minute now from the blood oxygen monitoring perspective, i found that the one plus watch was a little bit lower in terms of blood oxygen saturation compared to something like an apple watch. Normally, whenever i take that test on an apple watch, i’m sitting anywhere from 98 to 99 blood oxygen monitoring, but on the one plus watch, it was around like 93 to 94 and when it comes to workouts. I found that the oneplus watch was really off in terms of overall step count from my apple watch. So, for example, when i tracked a run using both my watch, both my watches, i guess i should say i found that on a let’s say one mile run.
I maybe had 3 000 steps on my apple watch and on a one mile run with my oneplus watch. It was probably off by about five to six hundred steps. Now i understand that a lot of fitness trackers may have some small discrepancies here and there, between heart rate, between blood, oxygen monitoring and between steps, but this discrepancy is relatively large, considering that it does come with fitness tracking features, although i do have to say that I don’t feel like any of this is necessarily hardware related. I feel like a lot of this can be recalibrated with some future software updates, so hopefully, oneplus ends up fixing the overall tracking experience with some software updates down the line. But again, this type of experience just makes you feel like it may not necessarily have been ready for this type of stuff outside of the box. So all in all this entire experience just leads me to believe that, while there are some awesome spots and highlights about the oneplus watch like its build quality and its battery life, the fact that the software still feels this incomplete makes me feel like that. If you are even considering buying this watch for your android phone, you should probably just wait. I didn’t have the highest expectations about this watch going into it mainly because it had a starting price point of 149 dollars which, by the way, if you were like me – and you were monitoring the oneplus website a few days before the watch even dropped, oneplus was Offering a 20 voucher as long as you had a oneplus account.
So not only did i get this watch for not even its retail price. I went into it not having the highest expectations because i’m not going to compare a 1′ dollar watch to a 450 apple watch. Those are apples and oranges, no pun intended on that one. But, needless to say, even at this price point i feel like the product should be more complete than it actually is, and for a product like this that’s been in development at one plus for what surely has to be well over a year, i think, quite frankly, It’S inexcusable that it only comes with 12 percent of the workouts that they promised to track gps on running and and activities that involve gps tracking, hardly even works. Whenever you want to track your sleep. Obviously, it’s not going to be the most accurate thing, but at the same time a lot of folks who have the oneplus watch are complaining about issues with sleep data even sinking to the phone that the watch is paired to. And on top of that, there are just basic things in the software, like the ability to turn on a 12 hour clock format that just aren’t here right now. So if you are interested in the oneplus watch, i say wait. Even if you have the opportunity to buy it because there’s a lot that oneplus has to iron out with this watch, and hopefully they do with future software updates. But for now i don’t think you should be spending any amount of money on this, because an incomplete product like this should never have been available to buy in the first place.
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