OnePlus Watch

The OnePlus Watch is almost impossibly beautiful for the money but it doesn’t do enough.

The OnePlus Watch is a great first smartwatch from OnePlus, blowing pricier rivals away in a couple of key areas, with sleek looks and week-long battery life. However, with a bespoke operating system it can’t load more than the preinstalled selection of basic apps, and its companion smartphone app is only available on Android at launch. Despite a few software glitches betraying its first-gen status, the OnePlus Watch is good value for the price, which is notably lower than Samsung and Apple competitors.

For $159, the OnePlus Watch is certainly affordable, but it would have felt half-baked even in 2018. If you’re after a cheap watch for your Android phone that can reliably track your fitness and last about a week, consider a lower-cost Fitbit like the Charge 4 instead. Even the older Versa would serve you well. Until OnePlus seriously improves its software, its debut smartwatch can’t compare to what’s out there.

The OnePlus Watch might pack all the right competitive features and sensors at a reasonable price, but it struggles to properly function as a useful smartwatch.

The OnePlus Watch offers an excellent touch screen and some nice health and lifestyle features, but is held back by a lack of third-party app support, GPS issues, and a bulky design.

In that framing, the OnePlus Watch isn’t really a smartwatch and based on my experience, it isn’t a great fitness tracker either. Instead, it’s just a clever watch, and it can be useful if your expectations of it are low. But if a smartwatch is going to take up real estate on my wrist, it has to be more useful than the OnePlus Watch.