Last year, OnePlus made a splash with two excellent watches running Wear OS. Its Watch 2 and, even more so, the very affordable Watch 2R met our discerning eye. It's an understatement to say that we were eagerly awaiting this Watch 3 (€350). Unfortunately, the Chinese brand was slow to get going due to a very amusing typo on the back of the device that indicated "Meda in China" instead of the usual "Made in China." Nothing too serious, but this blemish was enough to delay its release by a few weeks. Here is our opinion on the OnePlus Watch 3 after several days of testing on the wrist.
A blunder that is all the more strange given that OnePlus has taken great care in the presentation of its watch. Its finish is simply impeccable, thanks in particular to a very beautiful titanium bezel (the rest of the case is stainless steel). A good point for those who want to use their traditional watch strap, for example, is that it uses a standard 22 mm fastening system. This gives an almost unlimited choice rather than being limited to proprietary models, as many competitors do.
A watch resistant to everything, or almost everything
On the right edge are a rotating crown, absent from the Watch 2 (with button), and a classic button. It is on the latter that you place your finger to measure the electrocardiogram (ECG). OnePlus has not skimped on the resistance of the whole thing with IP68, 5 ATM certifications and the MIL-STD-810H military standard (for operation between -40°C and 70°C). It is also equipped with an ultra-strong sapphire crystal glass. Suffice to say, you'd have to do it on purpose to damage it.
The LPTO AMOLED screen allows a 1 Hz refresh rate to save battery life when using the "always on" function. It also grows a bit in size: from 1.43 inches on the Watch 2 to 1.5 inches here. Its brightness also improves; from a modest 1000 cd/m2 to 2200 cd/m2 on the Watch 3. Suffice to say, we never managed to catch it at fault, even in direct sunlight. To put its performance into perspective, only Apple's Watch Ultra 2 and Samsung's Galaxy Watch Ultra go up to 3000 cd/m2. This round screen displays a beautiful definition of 466×466 pixels. Obviously, this doesn't come without resulting in a rather massive device of 46.6 x 47.6 x 11.75 mm that won't fit even the smallest wrists. Its weight of 49.7 grams is not insignificant since you can feel that you are wearing the watch, at least for the first few hours, before gradually getting used to it.
Impressive battery life for Wear OS
For connectivity, OnePlus uses Bluetooth 5.2, as well as 2.4 and 5 GHz Wi-Fi. However, no cellular connection is offered to use the watch without a smartphone. The watch's hardware architecture remains as smart as ever, with the use of two chips: Snapdragon W5 and BES2800. The first, more power-hungry one, handles tasks requiring power, the second, very sober one, handles more modest ones.
This allows it to brilliantly take advantage of the 631 mAh battery (500 mAh on the Watch 2) to achieve astonishing battery life on a Wear OS model. We managed to use it for 4 days straight without recharging! An exceptional performance for this type of watch, especially since we had activated all possible health monitoring, the "alway on" display and wore it at night for sleep monitoring. Add to that several exercises lasting a total of about 3 hours.
Our opinion on the GPS and the heart rate sensor
Measuring sports activities is one of the strengths of this new OnePlus watch. More than a hundred disciplines can be analyzed, with a focus on 11 of them that benefit from specific information. These include, for example, stride length when running, hitting speed in tennis, stroke frequency when rowing, and elevation gain when skiing. We mainly tested it on familiar cycling routes, particularly to get a glimpse of its GPS and speed measurement capabilities. Indeed, the Watch 3 uses a dual-frequency GPS (L1 and L5), which is supposedly a guarantee of precision.
The process didn't disappoint, as the track recorded by the Chinese watch proved to be very accurate, on par with our reference Apple Watch Series 10. Each has its slight shortcomings, but ultimately, both are on par and rarely make mistakes. However, we were surprised by the maximum speed reached indicated by the Watch 3: 49 km/h compared to 42 for the Apple Watch. This latter estimate is much more realistic given the section we were on at the time. We would have liked to develop as many watts as necessary to reach this speed, but our cycling abilities are far from those of Tadej Pogačar.
The Watch 3 is also loaded with all kinds of sensors: ECG, wrist temperature, heart rate, pulse oximeter, geomagnetic, light, acceleration, gyroscopic and barometer. It was, of course, the heart rate monitor that interested us the most in our sports activities. While the frequencies recorded were close to those of our reference model, we noted, however, the difficulty the Watch 3 had in detecting significant variations. This was evidenced by the dip at the 5th kilometer when we took a short break, which was clearly seen by the Apple watch, but much less so by the OnePlus watch. A shortcoming that can be disabling during certain exercises, such as interval running.
The rich Wear OS ecosystem
Of course, the great advantage of this Watch 3 is its use of Wear OS, an operating system that is certainly power-hungry, but which offers a whole ecosystem of applications, ranging from Strava to WhatsApp, including Spotify and Wallet, allowing contactless payment in stores. Suffice to say that we are far from certain models which do not allow the installation of third-party applications and whose usefulness is therefore limited.
Its use is fairly standard for the Google operating system, combining gestures on the screen and use of buttons. By sliding your finger down, you access the quick settings, up to notifications (which you can respond to), to the right or left to tiles, a kind of widget. Pressing the crown displays all the applications, pressing the button below directly opens the application dedicated to exercises.
In addition, the OHealth application allows you to display all your health data, a summary of physical exercises, but also gives also access to the watch settings. We regret some translation errors ("My watch", really?). Several dials are offered, as is the customization of tiles; from favorite contacts, to Google Maps or the weather. In short, this Wear OS 5 is clearly a mature, responsive system on this Watch 3, easy to use and a pleasure to use on a daily basis.
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