This is the new OPPO Watch X, also known as the OnePlus Watch 2. They’re both the same thing but with different names. It’s the company’s new true smartwatch that runs on WearOS 4.0 – and boasts a supremely long battery life. Is it true? Does it actually last that long? What are the features available? Let’s go through them in this video – but I have a disclaimer.
My time with the OPPO Watch X is less than a week because of the weird rushed timeline that OPPO has and I had to return this watch only about 5 days after using it. But I have discovered many things about this watch.
Firstly, the OPPO Watch X is available in two colors – the Platinum Black or Mars Brown, both of them have different color for the watch unit itself. The Platinum Black has a black stainless steel body whereby the Mars Brown uses a silver colored stainless steel body.
As for the OnePlus Watch 2, it has the exact same black color called Black Steel, but instead of having a brown color – they have a grey-blue strap for the silver chassis version called Radiant Steel. Personally, I like the Radiant Steel a lot more.
There are two buttons on this watch here – one button on the bottom side that can be programmed to whatever we want to do, and then there’s a crown at the top side. The crown can only be pressed to bring up the app drawer but turning the crown does nothing. Yeah, that’s weird.
It has a screen size of 1.43-inch and the screen looks good. The colors are vivid and the screen is bright, but the bezels are rather thick. As you can see if I change the watchface to something more colorful… then it reveals a very thick bezel.
Now, let’s talk about the battery life first. It has a 500mAh battery inside and it’s actually not the largest in comparison, yet it can last for 4 days with a single charge. Yes, I only charged once and I am still using it until today. This is the longest-lasting battery life in a WearOS smartwatch that I have used so far. And that is because OPPO did some smart engineering with it.
You see, there’s something called the “Dual-Engine Architecture” in this watch. It’s essentially two different chipsets in a watch – a Snapdragon W5 and another BES2700BP MCU. Not Marvel Cinematic Universe, but microcontroller unit. It technically uses two operating systems at once, as the Snapdragon chip runs on WearOS and the MCU runs on a real-time operating system, also known as RTOS.
The entire idea of this is the same as our phone’s chipsets with a cluster of performance and another cluster of efficiency cores. This way, if the watch needs to do some demanding tasks then it’ll switch to the performance cores. If it’s just displaying time, then it’ll use the RTOS and the low-powered MCU. That’s how they get such a long battery life.
But there’s a catch. This MCU will only kick in if the watchface supports it. The website says “it’ll be supported when using an official supported watchface” but it doesn’t say which watch face is actually supported. I guess every first-party watchface like this one I’m using right now.
There are lots of built-in watchfaces so I think there’s going to be something suitable for everyone and they’re customizable too.
Why I chose this watchface is because of how many complications – or in this case, the information on the screen. Each of the 4 quadrants is a complication, and the middle two circles are also complications too. All of them can be customized within the OHealth app, but the choices are quite limited.
I wanted to add the chance of rain but there is no such thing. I mean that’s one thing that I actually want to use – but it’s not here. Not really a big deal, though.
Since this watch is running on WearOS, I could’ve installed Facer and Timeflik and use whatever watchfaces I want with whatever complications I want – but that will also affect the battery life since it won’t be using the Dual-Engine Architecture. I wish I have time to test it, but I don’t.
Now, let’s talk a bit about the OHealth app. This app is… rather simple, in my opinion. We’ve talked about the watchfaces, and there are tiles that we can add well. For me, I only use these tiles and they scroll from side to side on the watch in an endless loop.
Notifications – okay, this is something that I have to explain. Notifications are split into two parts – one of them is to sync everything from the watch to the phone, and another section is to sync everything from the phone to the watch. We can select which app to sync the notifications from each section, but there is no “select all” or “unselect all” button. By default, it syncs everything.
The notifications are displayed in a list when we swipe from the bottom of the watch. If all notifications are synced… it gets messy. We have to scroll all the way to the bottom to see the “clear all” button.
When I do get a notification, it’s not a strong vibration. I ended up missing a lot of notifications and I have already set it to the strongest vibration strength. That’s a bummer.
Then there’s also a bunch of workout and health settings that we can customize. I just left everything in default as they’re good enough and they turned on everything anyway.
There is an exclusive badminton mode that can detect how you play the game. Backhands, smashes, everything can be detected by the watch but I don’t have time to play badminton with this watch during my time of testing it.
However, it does lack a few features. For example, the lack of blood pressure detection or electrocardiogram features. It also lacks DND syncing and that’s a big problem for me as I keep getting notifications on the watch even when my phone has entered the scheduled DND mode. Kinda weird to not have these features, honestly.
Oh – the quick settings menu can’t be customized either. Everything is set in stone – which I find it to be just oddly limiting for no reason at all.
And while we’re on the subject of the software, remember when we showed off the app drawer is this? Well… I think OPPO knows many people won’t like this interface so we can change between two more interfaces. So we don’t have to cosplay Apple watches if we don’t want to.
This default strap is made out of fluororubber and it feels actually very comfortable to wear. It’s easy to wear and has this locker thing. It’s also easy to take out as it’s pretty much frictionless.
But, if we want to change the strap, then we can. Just unlatch this, and the entire strap falls out. It’s made out of 22mm in width. It supports all sorts of straps but the default strap has some special contour to match the watch’s shape to make it look homogenous.
Oh – I want to highlight one more thing – the charger. I think OPPO’s way of making this charger is brilliant. It’s a proprietary small little puck with a detachable USB-C port. OPPO says that this watch supports some SuperVOOC feature – but it’s actually just a 5V 2A charger.
Charging speed is indeed fast since it is technically a wired connection, so we can get it to full charge in an hour’s time.
Should you buy the OPPO Watch X?
Honestly, I think for the price of RM1,399 – it’s very competitive. The strengths of the OPPO Watch X is obviously going to be its magnificent battery life with its brilliant engineering while running WearOS like any other true smartwatches.
However, there are a few missing features like DND syncing, blood pressure monitoring, and also electrocardiogram as mentioned earlier. Customizations are also quite limited as of now, but some of these features can be added via a software update – but no promises on whether or not OPPO will actually add these features.
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