OnePlus Watch 2 Review: Total Redemption!

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Transcripts

(upbeat music)

- So this smartwatch

has one really interesting trick up its sleeve

that I haven't seen in any other, and that, honestly,

I don't think we're ever gonna see again.

So at this point we know

what a smartwatch is already, right?

This is a stable, mature category.

They deliver mostly across the board

on all the same functions.

And aside from the one crazy trick,

this one is no exception.

This is the OnePlus Watch 2,

three years after the original OnePlus Watch

and it costs 300 bucks.

So for the $300 you're spending,

you're getting a pretty nice circular watch design.

It comes in this black or silver stainless steel body

and a sapphire cover glass

over a 1.4 inch, 60 hertz AMOLED display.

Design-wise, you could argue

it takes cues from maybe the OnePlus 11

or the OnePlus 12 with the way the camera bump

is melted into the side rail of the phone.

They've done a similar thing here

with the buttons on the side of the watch.

So there's a circular button at the top

and this rectangular button at the bottom.

And I kind of like it. It's a nice shape.

It's got this little subtle, classy variation

of just the pure circle.

And then the back looks pretty standard too.

You got the four pins at the top, those are for charging.

And it has all the sensors you'd expect

for a smartwatch in the middle,

optical heart rate sensor,

pulse oximeter for blood oxygen,

and of course, it still has the interchangeable bands,

same as gen one.

And the whole thing is actually both IP 68

dust and water resistant

and reaches a US military standard for durability.

Basically means it can also withstand extreme temperature

and moisture

and shock among other things. (watch taps)

It's not too heavy, it's built pretty well.

This display goes up to a thousand nits peak brightness.

So it looks good. It's built well across the board.

Nice. So what's the catch?

What's the weird twist?

Well at the beginning I mentioned like we already

kind of know what a smartwatch is,

which is a tiny computer on your wrist with a tiny screen

and a tiny battery.

And that's fine.

Like they all tend to have pretty short battery lives

just because they're so small,

and so you kind of just charge 'em every day.

And that's the way it is.

Like the main competitors here are the Apple Watch,

which is 18 hours,

although that's not the most direct competitor

'cause that's the iPhone.

But the Galaxy Watch, one of the best,

40 hours of battery,

and the Pixel Watch, the newest one,

24 hours of battery life.

But this one, OnePlus is claiming 100 hours.

100 hour battery life in Smart Mode,

which is not the battery saving mode,

it's actually the default mode out the box.

100 hours.

So 96 hours is four days.

I feel like, you know, 100 sounds cooler

so they just went with 100.

But four days of battery sounds a lot less inconvenient.

So, you know, I had to put that to the test.

So for the past four straight days

I've been that guy walking around

with both an Apple Watch Ultra,

which claims 36 hours of normal use

and this thing.

Doing all the same stuff with both watches on,

getting notifications, doing workouts,

just poking around the UI.

And by the end, I was actually very impressed with both.

So the $800 Apple Watch Ultra

actually over performed the 36 claimed hours for me.

By hour 56 it was about ready to die.

Now meanwhile, the OnePlus Watch had about 15% left.

Now you're probably thinking, wait,

that's not even close to 100, it's like 50 something.

But OnePlus told me that

if you turn the always on display off,

that's good for two more days of battery life,

it's actually off by default.

I turned it on for this test,

but that would get you well over the 100 hour mark.

To be fair, that's also probably true

about the Apple Watch Ultra.

Now one detail to consider that I think actually mattered

for this particular test.

I've been wearing hoodies a lot

'cause it's that type of weather.

And so even with the sleeves on this Chevron Hoodie,

which I'll link it below

'cause you probably wanna check it out.

It covers the watch.

And so when you cover the watch with your sleeve,

it thinks it's in the dark

'cause the light sensors are covered

so it turns the brightness way down on the watch.

And so I think that's why it outperformed

the battery numbers that it's claiming

is 'cause I had a sleeve over it a lot of the times

and the brightness was low.

But even still, this $300 watch

outperformed this $800 smartwatch just in terms of battery.

Now here's the thing.

The way that they're achieving this battery life

is, I think, more interesting than the battery life itself.

This is the twist.

See, most smart watches have a chip inside,

computing everything,

with some high powered cores and some high efficiency cores

to balance out power and battery life.

This watch has two entirely separate processors

and two different operating systems

running for each of them.

So there's a high powered Snapdragon W5 inside,

that's powering Wear OS 4

and that only lights up for things connected to that.

Then there's also a BES 2,700 chip

that is always on and runs RTOS.

And they both share the same 32 gigs of base storage

and two gigs of RAM.

So Wear OS kicks on for the more intensive tasks

like maps or music playback.

But the RTOS that's always on

is for those basic, low power tasks:

heart rate monitoring, phone calls,

notifications, background stuff.

It's like a hybrid car.

It's really interesting.

And a fully electric car, you guys already know

has all the benefits of being really responsive

but not the best range.

But a gas car has a ton of range,

just not as responsive as fully electric.

So if you get a hybrid, best of the both worlds,

responsive and range.

And this watch, it's a hybrid with the best of both worlds,

responsiveness and range.

So I've been pretty impressed.

You know, using this thing, it's responsive.

It has a ton of watch faces.

There's a lot of custom workouts

which look very familiar with tracking

and everything that still sends all the data

to the OHealth app in plenty of detail for me.

I do still wish now, shoveling snow was a workout type,

but that's another story.

But you know, these here are regular weightlifting workouts.

And also, can I say I really like that it is

hold to end the workout, not tap to end.

So it's way harder to accidentally stop a workout.

Great idea.

Also another weird quirk,

this button here has a crown that rotates.

But that rotation doesn't actually do anything.

It doesn't change the volume,

it doesn't scroll up or down in anything.

It does nothing. It's not connected to anything.

It just freely spins.

apparently, that's literally just to make it

more durable upon impact.

Doesn't serve any function.

Also, it does have this weird hitch,

that it hasn't really gotten any less annoying,

which is if I get a notification,

I feel the buzz on my wrist,

then I lift up my wrist

and it takes like a full two seconds

to show me the notification I just got.

Not that two seconds is a disaster, it's not a ton of time,

but it's longer than you expect,

and it kind of annoys me to have to wait

in comparison to other watches,

which will just show me the notification right away.

And I feel like you can actually see the moment

that it fires up the Snapdragon W5

and Wear OS kind of snaps on right in front of you

before it shows you that notification.

It's very odd.

But here's the other twist on top of

everything we've already talked about.

I don't think this dual chip system

is all of the magic creating this great battery life,

because this watch also has a 500 MilliAmp hour battery.

Now 500 MilliAmp hours doesn't sound like a lot,

but here's the sizes of other smart watches

in competition with this and their battery sizes

and how long they last.

And it's a little bigger than you'd expect.

Now if I gave the Pixel Watch 2,

which also has a Snapdragon W5, by the way.

If I gave the Pixel Watch 2 a 500 MilliAmp hour battery,

do we think it would last 50 hours?

I don't know, but there you go.

Honestly, at the end of the day

I just came away from this mostly just impressed

that they actually kept the price of this watch so low.

Because two chips and two OSs

and the work that goes into that,

I dunno, to me that just sounds expensive

and it's really not missing anything else too drastic.

I think it's competitive in a lot of good ways at 300 bucks.

So I think the clear positives would be:

a nice design, really classy looking design, nice display,

dual frequency GPS, so that's for better accuracy,

and then of course really good battery life.

The four days we talked about is awesome,

but if you put on power saver mode,

it's up to 12 days of battery life.

Now this is gonna disable a lot of the Wear OS things,

so it's just basic stuff, exercises, heart rate monitoring,

but you could get it to really last a week if you wanted to.

But then the weaknesses are

definitely the delay in checking your notifications.

The haptics also aren't that nice,

and there's no iPhone compatibility,

but you already knew that.

But I would also say the charger is not that cool.

Honestly, it's kind of clunky.

I mean it works perfectly fine, don't get me wrong,

but it's just like a big plastic block

with pins and magnets in it.

But it'll get you a full day's charge in 10 minutes

and a full charge in an hour.

So that's acceptable.

But for 300 bucks, I'd say OnePlus has redeemed itself

from its previous efforts in smart watches.

It's pretty good.

Like in a world of smartwatch gimmicks,

there's the one with earbuds inside,

there's the one for fitness,

there's the one for the iPhone.

Maybe this is the one with the hybrid system

and pretty good battery life.

(upbeat music) Maybe that's enough for you.

Let me know in the comments below.

Either way, that's been it.

Thanks for watching.

Catch you the next one. Peace.

(upbeat music)