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oneplus-watch-review:-big,-basic,-and-boring

OnePlus Watch review: big, basic, and boring

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What makes a smartwatch “smart”? Is it the ability to show you notifications from your phone? What about the ability to track your physical activity and wellness, such as step counts, workouts, and sleep? How about providing you information about your day, such as the weather and upcoming calendar events? Or perhaps it’s the inclusion of a voice assistant on your wrist that you can ask to do things without having to use your phone?

Those are the questions I’ve been asking over the past week-plus as I’ve been testing the new OnePlus Watch, a $159 smartwatch and the first wearable from the smartphone company. The OnePlus Watch has all the looks of a modern smartwatch, but as I’ve learned wearing it on my wrist day and night, it doesn’t have all the smarts.

The OnePlus Watch is not like a Wear OS smartwatch, such as those made by Fossil, Motorola, or Mobvoi. Nor is it like a Samsung Galaxy Watch or an Apple Watch. All of those have software platforms that integrate with other apps and services, so you can download apps or watchfaces to the watch itself, just like you might with a phone. That makes them very extensible and customizable — you can easily make the watch look unique and do the things you need it to.

The OnePlus Watch, on the other hand (or wrist?), runs its own proprietary software, based on a real-time operating system. This software is very quick and power efficient, but it is not extensible — there’s no app store or third-party watchfaces to download on the OnePlus Watch. It’s similar to the software on the budget smartwatches you can get on Amazon; if you’ve ever used an Amazfit, Umidigi, or Wyze watch, you’ve used a real-time operating system. The OnePlus Watch is not very different from those in this respect.

This choice of platform affords the OnePlus Watch its greatest strength, long battery life, and also its greatest weakness: it just doesn’t do all that much compared to other smartwatches you can buy.

The OnePlus Watch looks like many other smartwatches, but most especially the Samsung Galaxy Watch Active.

OnePlus Watch software

The OnePlus Watch pairs with and is controlled by the OnePlus Health app for Android — there’s no iPhone compatibility at all. But you don’t need to own a OnePlus phone, it works with basically any modern Android device. I tested it on both OnePlus and Samsung smartphones and the experience was the same.

The app is where you can see what health and fitness metrics the watch has recorded, adjust which apps send notifications on your wrist, and view the available watchfaces. OnePlus has about 50 watchfaces so far, with some offering limited customizability in the form of selectable shortcuts or widgets, such as a weather widget, date, or shortcut to a built-in app like the timer. You can choose up to 14 faces to store on the watch and switch between them without using your phone. The company says it plans on adding more in the future, but as I mentioned earlier, there are no options for third-party watchfaces or third-party app widgets like you get with Samsung, Wear OS, or Apple smartwatches.

The watchfaces themselves are what you’d expect: there is the assortment of analog and digital styles to choose from, with some showing more information about your activity than others. I’m not a big fan of the analog options, so I settled on a digital face. Unfortunately, there’s a bug where digital watchfaces on the OnePlus Watch are stuck in 24-hour time and can’t show 12-hour time. The company tells me it is aware of this bug, and it is slated to be fixed “this month.”

The OnePlus Watch’s interface mimics Wear OS and is easy to navigate.

The watch interface has a familiar layout: swipe down for settings, swipe up to see notifications, press the side button to see your apps. You can swipe right from the watchface to access basic widgets for music control, weather, and activity tracking, similar to Wear OS or a Samsung watch. The design of the interface all looks mostly fine, and there thankfully aren’t any stutters or lags when navigating it.

I do have a few gripes with how notifications are handled. You can’t clear notifications by just swiping them away, like you can with every other smartwatch. Instead, you have to tap into each one and then press clear or scroll to the bottom to clear them all. It’s a clumsy and fiddly process. The OnePlus Watch doesn’t always sync with the notifications I’ve cleared on my phone, either, and occasionally notifications for the same messages would get duplicated, forcing me to see the same alerts more than once.

You can’t do much with those notifications, either. There are no actions you can take other than clearing them from your wrist. OnePlus supports canned message replies in just five apps: WhatsApp, Telegram, Line, Discord, and Facebook Messenger. Notably and frustratingly, that list doesn’t include standard SMS messages. On top of that, there are only four basic replies to choose from: “OK”; “Be right there!”; “In a meeting, contact you later”; and “I’m driving, contact you later.” I frequently use a smartwatch to triage notifications, delete incoming emails, or reply to messages when I’m away from my desk, but I can’t do most of those things with the OnePlus Watch.

The OnePlus Watch comes with a basic set of apps: weather, timer, stopwatch, alarm, workout, sleep tracking, etc. Oddly, it doesn’t have a calculator or a calendar app, so I can’t easily see my next meeting or appointment, something I do a lot with other smartwatches. There’s no way to get your next appointment on your watchface, either. And since there isn’t an app store, I can’t add any apps to that list.

You can forget about streaming music from Spotify or playing podcasts through your favorite app — the only thing you can do with the OnePlus Watch is control what’s playing on your phone or transfer MP3 files from your phone to the watch’s 4GB of storage. Want to track your runs with Strava or MapMyFitness instead of OnePlus’ app? Sorry, no dice. If you want to control smart home devices from your wrist, the OnePlus Watch is entirely useless unless you have a OnePlus TV, where you can use it as a remote. The OnePlus TV is only available in India.

The OnePlus Watch also lacks a voice assistant. I can’t ask it to start a timer when I’m in the kitchen and my hands are dirty, I can’t ask it to turn the lights off or open my garage door, and I can’t dictate a reply to an incoming message. How well voice assistants work varies greatly between smartwatches (Siri on the Apple Watch, pretty good! Bixby on a Samsung watch, less so), but OnePlus isn’t even trying here and I’ve missed having one available.

Lastly, even though the OnePlus Watch has an NFC radio, it does not support mobile payments. You can’t tap your wrist to pay for something like you can with an Apple Watch, Samsung watch, or Wear OS smartwatch.

The OnePlus Watch’s fitness tracking features hit the standard beats.
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

OnePlus Watch fitness tracking

The fitness tracking features are quite basic. It will track your steps throughout the day; the watch will nudge you to get up and move when you’ve been sitting for too long; you can choose between 14 different workouts for the watch to track; and if you wear the OnePlus Watch to bed, it will make an attempt to track your sleep.

I’m not a gym rat, but I did wear the OnePlus Watch on my left wrist with a Fitbit Inspire HR on my right wrist throughout this review and the OnePlus counted thousands fewer steps than the Fitbit every day. None of these devices are perfect with their step tracking, but that kind of discrepancy is going to make tracking a longer-distance run or other intense workout inaccurate or just plain hard to do. I asked a few other reviewers I know who are also testing the OnePlus Watch and each one has had the same issues with inaccurate step counting. OnePlus says a bug fix for GPS optimization and to add more workout modes will be available sometime in mid-April.

While the OnePlus Watch frequently undercounted my steps, it overestimated how much I slept each night.

Sleep tracking, oddly enough, has the opposite problem. The OnePlus Watch consistently overestimates how long I slept each night compared to the Fitbit and Google’s Nest Hub. A bug has also prevented the Watch from syncing its sleep data with the OnePlus Health app, even though other activity synced over fine. The company says this bug should also be fixed sometime this month.

As mentioned earlier, you can’t use other fitness apps on the OnePlus Watch. The OnePlus Health app provides syncing with the Google Fit platform, so it’s possible you could cobble together a syncing solution between other apps using Fit as glue, but I did not test this. In general, the OnePlus Watch’s fitness tracking is fine for basic activity trends, but any fitness enthusiasts will want something more capable and reliable.

The OnePlus Watch only comes in one size: a large 46mm face.

OnePlus Watch hardware and design

In terms of design, the OnePlus Watch is generic-looking — it reminds me a lot of Samsung’s Galaxy Watch Active line. It’s got a round face, there are two buttons on the side, and the body is made of polished stainless steel, which is nice to see at this price point. It comes in silver, black, or a gold-colored special edition — I’ve got the black model and it’s a little boring to look at. Either way, the hardware is solid and put together well — it’s not creaky or plasticky, and there are no rough edges to worry about.

OnePlus is only offering the watch in one size, 46mm, and frankly, it’s big. It’s bigger than I like watches to be on my wrist, and if you have smaller wrists than me you’re not going to have a fun time with this. On the plus side, it’s not the thickest smartwatch I’ve ever worn. Just one size band comes in the box — OnePlus says that customers who need a shorter band will be able to get one by contacting customer service.

The touchscreen is a 1.39-inch 454 x 454 OLED that’s easy to see both indoors and out. It’s colorful, like you’d expect an OLED to be, but there’s no always-on display option, which nearly every other smartwatch has now. That makes it that much more annoying to check the time, though the wrist turn gesture does work well to wake it up.

On the underside are the sensors for heart rate and blood oxygen. As usual, you should not use these sensors for medical purposes — and blood oxygen monitors on even the best smartwatches notoriously struggle with giving accurate readings. Inside the watch are the accelerometers and gyroscopes necessary to track your activity and workouts, plus GPS and Bluetooth radios. There’s no Wi-Fi or LTE here — if you leave your phone behind, you’re going to miss notifications and alerts until the watch is back in Bluetooth range of your phone.

Also missing from the OnePlus Watch are any rotating bezels or crowns — the only way to interact with it is to tap and swipe on the screen itself or push the buttons on the side.

Even though it doesn’t have a voice assistant, the OnePlus Watch does have a microphone and speaker, so you can answer calls from your wrist via Bluetooth. It worked fine in my tests; callers said I sounded clear to them, but the speaker on the watch is a bit crackly at full volume. It works in a pinch.

The OnePlus Watch has exceptional battery life and charges very quickly on its included charger.

The best thing about the OnePlus Watch is its battery life. OnePlus claims up to 14 days of usage between charges — it lasted about 10 days for me, wearing it day and night. Charging the watch is also quick and easy: just 20 minutes on the charger adds half a charge, which translates to literal days of usage. No Apple, Samsung, or Wear OS watch can last this long or charge this quickly.

But at the same time, the OnePlus Watch has such great battery life because, frankly, it just does less than those other smartwatches. The best comparison I can make is that the OnePlus Watch is a fitness tracker in a smartwatch body, which would be an acceptable premise if it were a better fitness tracker.

There are about 50 different watchfaces to choose from for the OnePlus Watch.

The OnePlus Watch may look like a lot of other smartwatches, but I can’t say it compares well to them. It’s limited in features, only comes in one size, and as I’ve gone over, there are several bugs with it that make it feel like an unfinished product. Aside from its long battery life, the OnePlus Watch’s bestselling point is its low price, which is half that of a Samsung Galaxy Watch 3 and over $100 less than the comparably sized Galaxy Watch Active 2. But if you’re looking for a smartwatch for your Android phone, it’s not that hard to find Wear OS models on sale, often for less than the cost of the OnePlus Watch.

For me, a good smartwatch is a lot like a personal assistant on my wrist. It tells me the time, when my next calendar appointment is, what the weather is like, and how active I’ve been throughout the day. I can quickly ask it to set a timer when I’m making a cup of tea or use it to reply to a message from my spouse when I’m running an errand. It also lets me customize its appearance and capabilities through third-party apps, watchfaces, or both. For others, it’s a way to track workouts and keep on top of their personal health.

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.

Photography by Dan Seifert / The Verge

Hisense Roku R50A7200GTUK

Our Verdict

Between the excellent operating system and solid all-round performance, this is an impressively complete package at a reasonable price

For

  • Excellent upscaling
  • Bold, colourful picture
  • Superb Roku UI

Against

  • Sonically lightweight
  • Colours can be heavy-handed

There are reasons why wine is dated by year. The grapes might come from the same fields, the fermentation process may be identical and the barrels alike, but the taste and quality still vary from season to season. While TV panel production is unlikely to be quite so affected by the weather, the Hisense Roku R50A7200GTUK proves that just because you use the same materials and method as last year’s excellent vintage, it doesn’t mean the results will be the same.

The Hisense Roku R50A7200GTUK is likely to be the cheapest 50in TV we’ll see on sale in the UK this year from a major manufacturer. It promises a good-sized, punchy 4K HDR image and all the major apps and services you could need, without so much as an additional box or stick in sight.

It’s a pledge that Hisense delivered so well in 2020 with its R50B7120UK model that it has decided to leave the recipe pretty much as it was for its 2021 Roku TV. While there are many Roku TVs available in the US, for the UK this Hisense model stands alone.

Pricing

The Hisense Roku R50A7200GTUK is priced at £349, although if last year’s set is anything to go by, that could drop significantly later in the year. The Hisense Roku TV A7200GTUK is also available in 43in, 55in and 65in sizes, though our review sample here is the 50in version. On paper, these other panel variants are identical, apart from that the 43in size comes with a lower-powered, twin 7W speaker system and the top-end size benefits from a two 10W speaker set-up.

These Hisense Roku TVs are only available in the UK and are Argos exclusives.

Features

(Image credit: Future / The Map Of Tiny Perfect Things, Amazon Prime)

The Hisense Roku R50A7200GTUK is simple and unassuming in style and appearance and the chassis is almost the same as the previous model. It’s a little more even on the rear, though the overall thickness remains identical. The feet are matte plastic instead of gloss, but that’s about it.

The one key improvement is on the front, where the bezel has been reduced from a basic-looking 1cm band to something closer to 4mm, giving a more contemporary aesthetic. There’s no change to the usable and fully featured remote control. There are direct shortcuts buttons to Freeview Play, Netflix, Google Play Movies & TV, Spotify and Rakuten, plus some clear navigation and media controls too.

Around the rear of the set are three HDMI 2.0-rated ports which can manage frame rates of up to 60Hz at 4K level. There’s also a USB 2.0 socket, a wired headphones connection, and ARC support for easy connection to a soundbar.

Hisense Roku R50A7200GTUK tech specs

(Image credit: Future / The Map Of Tiny Perfect Things, Amazon Prime)

HDR formats HDR10, HLG

Sound formats Dolby Audio, DTS Studio Sound

Inputs 3x HDMI 2.0 (inc ARC), USB 2.0, headphones out

Freeview Play Yes

Dimensions (hwd) 72 x 113 x 26cm (with stand)

Weight 9kg

The Roku TV smart platform is pretty close to flawless. It covers all the major streaming services as well as thousands of seriously niche ones. You want a channel dedicated to crossbow hunting? It’s there. Fancy gaining more knowledge about the cigar industry? You’ll find that here too, along with plenty of other topics.

The only gaps in its offering are Britbox, Apple Music, Amazon Music and VLC, although it does have its own Roku media app, and Airplay support means you can stream most missing content from Apple devices.

You’ll find 4K HDR content available on all the big players. Since last year’s model was launched, UHD support for Google Play has arrived as has the BT Sport app, which is good news for football fans.

It’s also well worth downloading the Roku Channel, which brings free access to over 10,000 films, TV episodes and documentaries from over 40 content partners. But it’s not just the apps that make Roku great, it’s the ease of use. The menu system is simple and clear and the universal search is excellent. Type in the name of an app, TV show, film, actor or director and it brings up all the information you need. Results pages show all the streaming services where each title is available, with the resolution and price information. That now includes the catch-up services, which is an upgrade on the platform compared to last year’s Roku TV.

To set up voice searching, you’ll need to download the handy Roku TV app allowing you to add new channels, cast content from your mobile or tablet to your TV, or just use it to control playback. We also love the Private Listening mode on the app interface; press that and the TV’s sound is routed through your device. Attach a pair of headphones to your mobile and you have a personal AV experience – perfect for late-night viewing.

For live TV, the Freeview tuner is at the helm, along with the Freeview Play homepage of curated catch-up content. At the heart of the experience is the exact same quad-core processor to do the leg work. It offers more than enough to drive the system with barely a hint of lag or frozen responses at any point. Once again, Roku TV is a pleasure to use from top to bottom, from app to screen.

Picture

(Image credit: Future / The Map Of Tiny Perfect Things, Amazon Prime)

Despite its low price, the Hisense Roku R50A7200GTUK is still a direct-lit LED TV – and it shows. Compared with others at this end of the market, the light levels are fairly even across the panel and, even if there’s a little bit of bleed, the blacks are strong with no off-putting blotchiness. Unlike pcirier direct-lit LED sets, though, there appears not to have been enough left in the budget for any local dimming zones, and that’s probably the most telling absence on the spec sheet.

We watch the opening sequences of Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol.2 on 4K Blu-ray and the Missouri cloudscape is more heavy-handed than we’re used to. The dramatic overtones are still there, with plenty of contrast to handle that, but the lack of close control to individual areas of the backlighting means that it’s missing the subtlety of a more expensive TV set.

However, Hisense seems to know where this TV’s strengths lie. It’s not trying to offer finesse, it’s aiming to land a punch. And it does so successfully. The picture is bright and colourful, and even sharper and richer than its apparently identical predecessor.

This second run of Hisense Roku TVs for the UK really comes into its own once we leave the confines of Earth and head to the Sovereign planet for the Guardians’ battle with the Abilisk and a firework display of colour and fun.

The kaleidoscope of gases spewed by the multi-dimensional, tentacled monster look terrific, and the characters flying around it are bold and well-defined in all their HDR glory. There’s no adjustment for motion processing onboard, but while there’s some judder it isn’t hard to cope with. There’s no blurring and smearing of the action to distract either.

Switching down to standard-definition material with Star Wars: The Force Awakens on Blu-ray, we are reminded of last year’s Roku TV and its brilliance with upscaling from 1080p. Fortunately, that ability remains intact.

The opening scene in the hut is as revealing in terms of shadow detail as we could hope. It’s worth adjusting the brightness slider in the picture settings until you strike the right balance. In terms of starting points, the ‘Normal’ setting gets you closest to the best results, but make sure ‘TV Brightness’ is set to max.

Both the early scenes of Rey’s desert home on Jakku and the lush green forests of Maz’s home planet of Takodana are produced with enthralling colours and so much natural detail that it’s hard to find fault with the picture. Even watching BBC News in SD, the picture is remarkably sharp and stable for a panel this size, even if the colours are more simplistic.

Our only real criticism of the image is at higher resolutions. Occasionally that punchy approach can take things too far; it doesn’t have the same chromatic complexity as more expensive TVs. The result is that every now and then, the colour of a piece of clothing or skin tone misses the mark.

For example, Quill’s overcoat ends up a little too oxblood in the throne room scene in front of Princess Ayesha. There’s also a moment when Gamora’s green face is a little too lurid, but there are relatively few of these mishaps. What this TV does with its limited technical resources is impressive.

Sound

(Image credit: Future)

According to the spec sheet, there’s no difference between the Hisense Roku R50A7200GTUK and its 2020 predecessor, but their two sonic presentations are like chalk and cheese. One favours clarity, the other authority, but ultimately neither one produces particularly better TV sound than the other. It seems there’s only so much life that can be squeezed from this modest two 8W speaker system.

As with the picture adjustments, there are only a few settings to play with – only really the DTS processing mode and a dialogue enhancer. There’s also a TruVolume mode for night-time listening which will limit the peaks and troughs of loudness at any one volume level, so that you can hear the onscreen action without waking your neighbours.

Watching the battle sequence outside Maz’s tavern midway through Star Wars: The Force Awakens, gives an excellent sense of what this speaker system can manage. Given its limited resources, this TV copes pretty well. The sound effects of the laser blasts and the TIE fighters screaming past are crisp and detailed. The battle cries and dialogue of the rebels and troopers are clear and placed effectively in the soundscape. When the X-Wings come to the rescue and chase off the Empire, the rousing score still manages to excite.

Naturally, there’s room for improvement. There’s not enough under the hood here to produce the whole frequency range with quality. Hisense has opted to prize the midrange and upper-mid sounds, which is good for voices but means that there’s not a huge amount of impact to gunshots and explosions. Equally, the sound can feel a little strained and congested in the treble. If you find it borders on being difficult to listen to, switch off the DTS.

That said, to expect much more from a TV at this price would be unrealistic. It never fails to deliver the meaning of the source material, no matter the content. You might wish for a little more fun while watching big action movies, but you’ll be thanking your lucky stars every time you opt for more character driven dramas.

Does it spread the audio all the way round the room? Does it offer height-infused Dolby Atmos sound? No. It’s a TV with small speakers and just enough processing that means you can understand what everyone is saying. Not all soundbars can manage that.

Verdict

The vintage may be different, but this is another great year. We suspect that Hisense and Roku have made the best 50in TV you’ll find for under £350 in 2021. Neither the picture nor the sound are perfect but, combined with a brilliant feature set and an unbeatable content offering, the results are a lot more than the price infers. 

It’s like uncorking a £4 bottle and discovering that it’s no cheap plonk. And that’s something we can all drink to.

SCORES

  • Picture 4
  • Sound 4
  • Features 5

MORE:

Read our guide to the best 4K Ultra HD TVs

Read our Hisense R50B7120UK review