Watch 2
What separates the new OnePlus Watch 2 from every other smartwatch on the market is that it gets a generous 100 hours of regular use, in between charges. There are some asterisks in there, mainly that it needs to be in “smart mode” the entire time to get the four full days. And most people probably will be. In “power save” mode, you can reportedly get a whopping 12 days of juice. Having had the watch for a few weeks, I used the smart mode and got a little bit more than three days of usage. That’s still impressive.
But what really sold me on this product is its ability to monitor breathing problems while I sleep. My wife has complained for years that I snore. At one point, my doctor even gave me a contraption to wear for a few nights in case I was suffering from apnea. Thankfully, I was not. But apparently that hasn’t stopped me from snoring. So I toggled on the phone’s switch dedicated to breathing problems, to see if I could find patterns. Plus, you need to place your phone down by your pillow all night. Built into the OHealth app, the watch checks my breathing rate all night, snore risk assessment, my sleep depth to the minute, heart rate variability, and detailed sleep tracking analysis. It’s been inconclusive thus far, except that I discovered I’m actually asleep for longer than I thought – which in my case is a good thing. And by the way, using this snore monitoring feature significantly erodes battery life.
But I’m okay with that, because this is probably the fast-charging smartwatch on the market. It seriously recharges from 0 to 100 in an hour, thanks to the smart and tiny fast-charging cradle that comes with the watch.
The watch uses the latest version of Google’s Wear OS, and features 2GB RAM, 32GB ROM, plenty of memory and storage, scratch-resistant sapphire crystal cover, sleek and premium circular look, plus a unique Dual-Engine Architecture with two chipsets — the Snapdragon W5 performance chipset and the BES 2700 MCU Efficiency chipset – that can transparently shift between low power and high-performance engines for a smooth experience with optimized battery life. It also comes with a large selection of watch faces, plus you can personalize it with your own photos.
I’ve tried several smartwatches in the past, but always get bored with them after a week or so. That may not happen with this one because I’ve been using it for my morning jogs and found it’s the first watch I’ve ever used in which the comfortable band does not irritate my skin. So now I can keep track of all my exercising and still have access to podcasts and text messages without having to take my phone out of my pocket. That’s game changing to me. Plus I made some phone calls through the watch and people say it sounds better than when I’m talking on my phone.
Overall it works fast and smooth, just as you would expect from a premium smartwatch. And until I can solve my sleep issues, I plan on wearing it nightly. It’s currently offered in Radiant Steel or Black Steel.