In the last five years, several brands have jumped (and assaulted) to the fore with devices that combine an excellent quality-price ratio, reducing the market share of the large companies and, in their own way, promoting innovation. Nothing, realme or OnePlus, are some of them. And precisely this last house has presented the new version of its smartwatch, the OnePlus Watch 2.
Generally, when a continuation of a previous device arrives, it is only an adaptation of it to current times: new chip, more battery, faster or wireless charging, but these are automatic responses, not considered. What OnePlus has done is that and a little more.
We go by steps. This is a heavy watch (49 grams without the strap), partly due to its characteristics: Sapphire crystal dial (very resistant), submersible to 50 meters, resistant to 40º below zero and 70 °Cice, dust and all with a classic design (round dial), in black and green and with around 100 dials available directly.
Important detail: if we want other spheres we can download them without problem, but the battery is reduced and one of the clock's two brains automatically begins to “control”. And this is one of the first interesting details of the OnePlus Watch 2: It has two microchips, the Snapdragon W5 and the BES2700. Thanks to this, the watch can decide between efficiency and power, assigning one of the two brains to each task. And with this it also saves battery. We realize? The change in processing is not perceived at all, we do not see traces that certain tasks are done by one or the other.
The interesting thing is that this is not your only double bet: It also uses two operating systems to take full advantage of the “brains”. These are Wear OS 4, a very powerful operating system, but with a high energy demand, and RTOS, a very “light” one that can be used around the house for the simplest tasks.
All of this contributes to making the battery very remarkable in this watch: up to 12 days. Of course, with basic conditions and almost no GPS. The battery is fully charged in just over 40 minutes and 5 minutes of charging is enough to reach 20%.
One of the strengths of the watch is his ability to analyze sports routines (up to 100 different types of exercise). It is very correct in measuring heart rate, the same for the GPS, a deviation that is not imperceptible, but more than tolerable. The blood oxygen saturation reading, always keeping in mind that it is not a medical device nor does it claim to be, is also very good. It also works during sleep, allowing breathing and lung capacity problems to be assessed. In short, without being a watch, like the Coros or Garmin, it is one that shows very notable off-road capabilities. Important detail in this sports section: the screen has a brightness of 1000 nits and performs very well in challenging environments.
And speaking of screen: AMOLED 1.43 inches, very good resolution, touch and resistant (sapphire crystal). He is not very fond of footprints and dust, but he does not reject them outright either and on “wild” days they clearly accumulate. Like most mobile phones, it has the option of always-on screen or for the content to only be visible with the movement of the wrist or touch.
On the sides it includes two buttons on the right side that control access to functions. They are very intuitive and easy to understand in use.. In fact, they can be customized to execute other actions in addition to the default ones, both for one click and for two.
But all that glitters is not gold: the OnePlus Watch 2 does not include Qi wireless charging, something that taking into account its price (€329) is a bit backwards. It is also not compatible with iOS and has great difficulty when transferring data from one phone to another.
Verdict:
Without a doubt, it is one of the most interesting smart watches with the best quality/price ratio… for Android users.