OnePlus launched the OnePlus Watch 2R, the company’s latest smartwatch, earlier this week at an event in Italy. This retains the features of the OnePlus Watch 2 including Google’s WearOS + RTOS offering a dual architecture since it uses dual chips, and promises 100 hours of battery life. However, this switches the stainless steel body with a lighter aluminium body, and the smartwatch also gets cheaper. Which one should you go for? Watch 2 or the Watch 2R? Let us dive into the review to find out.
Box contents
- OnePlus Watch 2R in Gunmetal Gray color
- Charging Dock
- USB-Type C charging cable
- User manual
- Safety Information and Warranty information
Design and Build
The OnePlus Watch 2R has a familiar circular dial, same as the OnePlus Watch 2. However, this is 12 grams lighter at 37g grams without the strap, thanks to the aluminium alloy case. With the strap, it is 59 grams, which is way lighter than the Watch 2 which weighs 80 grams. It is still huge, so might be big for these with small hands since it is 47mm. It looks and feels premium, and has a matte finish, so it doesn’t attract fingerprints.
The smartwatch has 5ATM + IP68 water resistance, so you can even wear when swimming. There is no mention of MIL-STD-810H certification, and it also lacks the Sapphire Crystal protection for the screen.
There is Acceleration sensor, Gyroscope sensor, Optical heart rate sensor, Optical pulse oximeter sensor, Geomagnetic sensor, Light sensor and Barometer sensor. It uses Bluetooth 5.3 to connect to Android devices, and doesn’t work with iOS. It has Dual-frequency GPS L1+L5 as well has Beidou, Galileo, GLONASS, and QZSS.
Coming to the strap, it is made of skin-friendly rubber strap that is durable and sweat resistance. The 22mm straps are also interchangeable, so you can use your own straps.
There are Home and multifunction buttons on the right, with a metal finish on the right side. You can also press and hold the home button to turn on Google Assistant, press is once to wake it up and double press to launch the most recent app you opened. Pressing the multifunction button once launches the sports app, pressing it twice launches Google wallet, and press and hold lets you power on the watch / open power menu.
You can also see the tiny microphone on the back part on the left side, and the speaker is on the other side. Since this has Bluetooth calling support, you can take calls directly from the watch when you connect it to the smartphone over Bluetooth.
On the back which is made of plastic instead of Plastic +glass fiber in the Watch 2, there are heart rate and SpO2 sensors with glowing green and red LED lights when you are using it to measure heart rate, and SpO2, respectively. There is Made in China branding on the back along with the model number. You can also see the contact pins for charging.
The watch is powered by a Snapdragon W5 4nm processor when is used for Wear OS, and the watch also has BES 2700 power efficient chip which it is runs RTOS to handle background activity and daily tasks. It has 2GB RAM and 32GB of internal storage.
Display and features
Coming to the display, the OnePlus Watch 2R has a large 1.43-inch (466 × 466 pixels) AMOLED colour touch screen display, same as the Watch 2, but the is are text in the outer bezel similar to what you see in a sports watch. This might not be preferred by everyone. Even though this doesn’t use Sapphire Crystal protection, I didn’t notice any scratches during my use.
You can set it to turn on when you lift your hand, and the screen turns off in a few seconds to save power. The touch screen is smooth to use, has good viewing angles, and the outdoor visibility is good as well since it has up to 1000 nits peak brightness in high brightness mode and the default maximum brightness is 600 nits. You can adjust the brightness from level 1 till level 5, and the ambient light sensor is helpful in settings up the brightness according to the condition.
There is also an easy notification shade option when you swipe from the bottom. The quick settings come up when you swipe from the top. This has Airplane model, touch lock, find my phone, bedtime mode, DND, brightness adjustment, Bluetooth headphones, volume control, sound / vibration toggle, battery, option to switch between smart and power saver modes and settings option.
Bluetooth Calling
The built-in calling feature is good if you are calling indoors, but not the best outdoors in traffic. It shows call log, and there is even a dial pad, in addition to the contacts option which is synced from Google contacts so that you don’t have to pick the phone.
Software
The OnePlus Watch 2R runs Wear OS 4, and it also uses RTOS, thanks to the company’s own dual engine architecture. This lets you switch between two entire wearable operating systems.
If you want to use the Wear OS apps, you can use smart mode, otherwise the power saver mode can handle background activity and daily including fitness and sleep tracking while improving the battery life.
Swatch from Smart mode to power saver mode takes a few seconds to switch, but the watch restarts when it switches from power saver mode to smart mode, so it takes a couple of minutes to switch.
The Wear OS 4 brings support for watch-compatible apps on your smartphone, so they will be downloaded onto the smartwatch. Even though the smartwatch works with any Android phone, OnePlus smartphone users get synchronization of the Weather and Alarm apps between the OnePlus smartphone and OnePlus Watch.
App
The OHealth companion app has health, fitness and device tabs. These give all the important details at a glance. The app lets you manage notifications. There are lot of workout and health settings, and enabling more features will decrease the battery life.
You can install apps such as Strava, Audible, Spotify, WhatsApp or any other Google apps such as YouTube Music, and Google Maps directly from Google Play. There is offline music playback support for both Spotify and YouTube Music to make use of 32GB internal storage. There is Google Pay wallet app, but it doesn’t work in India.
The app also lets you customize watch faces. There are 20 built-in watch faces and 80 downloadable watch faces, and you can also get more watch faces using third-party apps from Google Play. Complications offer quickly access important information at-a-glance and launch the apps you use the most.
Fitness tracking
The OnePlus Watch 2 has support for over 100 sports tracking modes. This includes running, walking, cycling, swimming, rowing machine workouts, and elliptical machine workouts.
It offers insightful recommendations based on your personal data for running and badminton mode. Steps tracking is accurate compared to data from a phone. GPS tracking is accurate compared to Strava app on a phone, and the GPS tracking doesn’t cut out if there are some intrusions like trees or bridges, since has dual-band GPS. It takes a couple of seconds to get a GPS lock, which has improved a lot since I had used the OnePlus Watch 2 a few months back, which uses the same hardware.
For running, it shows a lot of data such as pace, elevation, heart rate, Vo2 Max, cadence, stride length, and even shows running power that is available only in high-end smartwatches. There is also a summary for workouts that gives you a quick glance. You can swipe to pause a workout in the middle, resume it or stop it.
OnePlus says that the watch offers number of swings taken and the longest continuous rally for Badminton. The Tennis mode shows tennis-centric stats like the number of shots played, and offer details about what type of shot was played, differentiating between shots like forehand and backhand, topspin, slice, and more.
The Skiing mode offers total skiing distance, ski time, maximum speed, average speed, vertical distance, maximum slope, and maximum altitude. For individual downhill runs, you can even track the time, distance, and maximum speed per run as you try to top your Personal Best every time, says the company.
The OHealth app doesn’t have any coaching features. You can share the workout data as an image, but there is no option to download the data. There is Google Fit sync, and finally Strava sync natively. It also has support for Health Connect by Android for managing data permissions from multiple health and fitness apps and devices.
Sleep tracking is accurate and there is also data for different stages such as REM, Light and Deep sleep with a chart. It also shows average blood oxygen level. It also says the watch can detect Snoring when you place the phone near your face during sleep, but I didn’t try it. Overall, the watch has the best fitness and sleep tracking.
Heart rate, SpO2 and Stress monitoring
The smartwatch uses LED lights and photo-diodes to illuminate the blood vessel for a while and monitors the heart rate via the change of green light absorbed. You can’t say this is 100% accurate, but heart rate recordings — both resting and active, are good. It stores the data with date and time. There is also Vo2 Max data. Compared to pulse oximeter, this is almost accurate. It can also measure stress throughout the day.
Battery life
The watch has a 500mAh battery, and the company promises 100 hours or 4 days of battery life in smart mode. I have been using it for over a week now, and for my heavy use with all the tracking including advanced sleep tracking enabled, notification enabled, few calls, and 40 minutes of outdoor running every day, I got the promised 4 days of battery life in smart mode, which is better than the Watch 2, even though this has the same battery capacity. It looks like the company has worked to improve the battery.
In power saver mode, it promises up to 12 days of battery life. The watch goes to hibernation mode during sleep to save the battery. Battery life might vary depending on frequent use of the display with increased brightness, use of GPS, heart rate monitor during workouts, Spo2 monitoring during sleep and all the notifications turned on.
The watch uses a proprietary charging method, but the charging dock has a removable cable, so you can use any cable. It takes about an hour to charge the watch fully using OnePlus’s VOOC charging at 7.5W, which is good. OnePlus says that a 10-min charge can offer a day’s battery life in smart mode, which is accurate, since it took about 20 minutes for 50% charge, and 100% charge takes less than an hour.
Conclusion
Overall, the OnePlus Watch 2R is a cheaper alternative if you want all the important features of the OnePlus Watch 2 such as AMOLED screen, powerful processor along with an efficient co-processor, accurate fitness tracking and long battery life without compromising the user experience in a light weight body.
Pricing and availability
The OnePlus Watch 2R is priced at Rs. 17,999 and is available from Amazon.in, Flipkart, OnePlus.in, OnePlus Store App, Myntra, OnePlus Experience Stores and select offline partner stores.
Pros
- Brilliant AMOLED display
- Good build quality
- Smooth performance with dual chips, dual OS
- Useful fitness insights
- Good battery life in smart mode
Cons
- No Sapphire glass protection from Watch 2
- No option to download fitness data in OHealth app