OnePlus is a company known for making quality tech at a lower price than most of its competitors. The OnePlus 12 and OnePlus 12R are perfect examples of that. The company’s latest gadget, the OnePlus Watch 2, looks to follow a similar pattern, offering features that exceed those of its competitors at a lower price.

The original OnePlus Watch wasn’t without its share of problems. We gave it a three out of five in our 2021 review, citing unreliable GPS and step counting, a lack of an always-on display, no contactless payment options, and missing iPhone support as the biggest problems. Thankfully, OnePlus has resolved most of those issues with the OnePlus Watch 2, as we’ll discuss in this review.

Price, specs, and availability

The OnePlus Watch is available for pre-order starting from Feb. 26, 2024, for $300, a solid price for the features it offers. The latest watch is scheduled for a full release on March 4 on the OnePlus website, so there’s not a long turnaround time between when you can pre-order the device and get it on your wrist. Wider availability on Amazon starts on March 1.

Attractive design improvements

Visually stunning round face wearable

I’m a longtime Apple Watch user. I’ve tracked my steps, activity, and notifications with Apple’s wearable for a long time now. The one thing I’ve never liked about the Apple Watch is the square case. It makes it more obvious that I’m wearing a smartwatch. With the OnePlus Watch 2, you get the stylish look of a round face, which makes it look more like you’re wearing a traditional watch at first glance.

Outside the round face, the OnePlus Watch 2 is attractive. Every detail, from the stainless-steel chassis surrounding the face to the textured fluor rubber band and stainless steel buckle, looks high-end despite the watch’s reasonably low price point. And as lovely as it looks, that same band makes the watch feel incredibly comfortable even after wearing it all day and night.

The screen is a 1.43-inch 2.5D sapphire crystal face AMOLED, and it looks gorgeous, especially with the wide variety of free watch faces offered by OnePlus. The display has a sharp 466 x 466 resolution with a 60Hz refresh rate. It can also hit 1,000 nits of brightness — though enabling the high brightness mode drains the battery faster.

Unlike the original OnePlus Watch, the second one comes with an always-on display. Of course, taking advantage of it impacts battery lift significantly, but I’m willing to sacrifice uptime for quick access to the time and other essential information. OnePlus says you can expect to reduce battery life by around two days with the always-on display enabled, but I tend to charge my smartwatch every day, so this was a non-issue for me.

Side-by-side with more expensive smartwatches like the Samsung Galaxy Watch 6, which retails for the same price as the OnePlus Watch 2, it looks just as beautiful, if not even nicer. OnePlus certainly thought about the details and made sure to create a watch that looks and feels a lot nicer than its price point.

Features and connectivity options

Massive improvements to usability

Almost every issue Pocket-lint had with the OnePlus Watch has been resolved with the OnePlus Watch 2. The lack of always-on display was a killer; as mentioned, that’s been fixed with the newer model. The first watch didn’t offer contactless payments, but this one does, and it worked quite well in my testing.

We called the original OnePlus Watch unfinished, but nothing about this one feels that way. Just about every feature you could want from a smartwatch is supported here.

The interconnectivity with an Android phone through the OHealth app feels just as seamless and pleasant to use as the Health app on an iPhone with an Apple Watch. You can seamlessly switch watch faces and download new ones, manipulate and add new tiles to your watch, tweak your step and activity settings, and much more.

A lot of improvements come down to the new watch using Wear OS instead of OnePlus’ own software. The Watch 2 still has hints of the OnePlus OS, as it features a Dual-Engine Architecture that runs both the RTOS and Watch OS, depending on the use-case. OnePlus says this is done to improve battery life, and based on how long the watch lasts on a charge, it’s a winning strategy.

The one remaining issue is the need for better support for connecting to iPhones. This is a smartwatch made for Android owners, so if you’re an iPhone user, you’ll want to stick with your Apple Watch. It’s a drawback, but not one that’s overly surprising, since the divide between Wear OS and watchOS has been a longstanding issue, and it’s one that seems designed to keep people trapped in their current ecosystem.

Tracking performance and data gathering

It does it all, and then some

If you can think of something you’d want to track with a smartwatch, the OnePlus Watch 2 can probably do it easily. It features dual-frequency GPS, which improves significantly the middling GPS tracking offered by the previous model. In my testing, while walking, the GPS was incredibly accurate and worked without problems.

Outside of GPS tracking, the OnePlus Watch 2 comes with sleep, stress, heart rate, pulse oximeter, light, and geomagnetic sensors. I tried the sleep tracking, and it’s pretty robust compared to other watches I’ve tested. Not only does it keep track of when you’re in deep sleep, light sleep, REM sleep, and awake, but it also tracks your breathing rate to assess your snoring risk. It even scores your sleep, so you can get an overall feel of how well you’re resting and figure out if there’s anything you can do to improve.

The stress monitoring features were also quite useful. I noticed my scores aligned with how I was feeling at the time. For example, when writing this review against a tight deadline, I noticed that my stress score went up minimally, as I tend to keep a pretty level head even when up against the wall.

OnePlus even added badminton and tennis tracking features that’ll be quite useful for players of those sports. There are 11 professional and more than 100 sports modes with tracking and feedback designed to help athletes improve. I found the best Garmin smartwatches for fitness tracking features. I tested out the ice hockey workout, and it seemed accurate at tracking the number of calories in that the numbers were comparable to what I saw tracking a similar hockey game with my Apple Watch.

Verdict: Smart updates to a budget-friendly watch

OnePlus made some intelligent changes to this smartwatch. The company improved upon the previous model’s mistakes to create a well-made smartwatch. It’s not perfect, especially if you’re an iPhone user, but if you have an Android phone and are looking for an affordable smartwatch with all the features you could ever want, this is the way to go.

Between the gorgeous-looking style of the watch and the improvements to its feature set, I definitely recommend picking this one up if you’re in the market for a new watch and don’t want to spend upwards of $500, as the $300 price tag offered by OnePlus is more tolerable.