OnePlus Watch 2R: Hey, not half-bad!

Slap two standard hands on the OnePlus Watch 2R dial, and you'll be able to fool many people that the device is a regular mechanic watch! Okay, not exactly, but the design is pretty classic and straightforward round one, with nothing too posh or exciting going on here. 

The only creative freedom taken with the OnePlus Watch 2R and certainly not something we've seen on many other smartwatches is the printed 24-hour dial on the front of the watch, which definitely break the monotony of the classic but somewhat boring design. 

Other than that, the watch case is made of smooth aluminum that feels great to the touch. The back of the case is plastic, which surely helps keep the weight down. In fact, the whole OnePlus Watch 2R weighs just 37gr without the straps, which is just as much as a standard 45mm Apple Watch. 

Size-wise, it's a 45mm device, which is undoubtedly on the larger size and might not look great on people with thinner wrists.

At the front, we get neither sapphire nor Gorilla Glass, but a regular 2D glass, which is surely an indication that you scratches and grooves could develop with time, so it's likely a good idea to pamper the watch a bit more than usual.

The watch itself is IP68-rated, so the standard water resistance in up to 1.5m of water for up to 30 minutes. However, OnePlus warns that you shouldn't take the watch with you when diving, snorkeling, visiting saunas, hot springs, and fast currents.

The display itself is a 1.43-inch OLED one, with a maximum brightness of 600 nits and peak brightness of 1,000 nits when the watch senses it's under intensive lighting. It's a beautifully crisp and vivid display, so no complaints on that part. My only complaint is in terms of the minimum brightness, which still feels a bit too bright and distracting during the night. 

In terms of bands, OnePlus relies on the good ol' tried-and-tested 22mm lug system. This means that you're not tied to a specific band attachment mechanism, but can use any standard watch band. That's cool because it gives you limitless options in terms of band choices. 

The OnePlus Watch 2R comes with two operating systems––Wear OS and RTOS. 

The Wear OS environment is what's referred to as Smart Mode and gives you all the regular Wear OS features and functionalities. You can download third-party apps, control your Google Home-enabled devices at home, reply to notifications, and talk to the Google Assistant. 

RTOS, on the other hand, comes alive when you enable the Power Saver mode. You can only use a handful of features in Power Saver mode, like heart rate and SpO2 monitoring, sleep tracking, workouts, alarms and timers, media controls, and basic navigation thanks to the compass app. At the same time, most third-party apps, fancy watch faces, and SOS calls are unavailable.

The Smart Mode comes with 32GB of storage and 2GB of RAM, while in Power Saver mode the watch has access to dedicated 4GB of eMMC storage. 

You pair the smartwatch with the OHealth app on your Android phone. It doesn't have to be a OnePlus one, you could use it with any Android 8.0+ device. iOS is not supported, however. OHealth, on the other hand, doesn't deliver as much data as, say, Samsung's own Health app. 

The OnePlus Watch 2R comes with dual-frequency L1+L5 GPS on board. If that sounds familiar, it's the same GPS as the ones on the Galaxy Watch Ultra and the Apple Watch Ultra and deliver enhanced accuracy in metropolitan areas with high buildings that could otherwise obstruct the GPS signal. I tested the GPS accuracy during a workout and it's pretty accurate, all things considered, pretty much on par with its much pricier competitors. Great!

There's also NFC on deck with full Google Wallet support, allowing you to pay quickly without your phone nearby, which is always a neat feature to have. 

There's probably more than 100 different workouts: everything from outdoor running and tug-of-war to darts and kite flying are covered. During activity tracking, the OnePlus Watch Ultra 2 will show you your current heart rate, calories burned, activity duration, effort zones, cadence, and lets you change media controls. The UI is straightforward and easy to navigate. 

The watch has an automatic sleep mode, which kicks in once it detects you've fallen asleep. From what I can say, it appears to be pretty accurate to the minute. The smartwatch will also detect naps you take during the day, if any, which is a great feature to have. 

After a sleep, you can explore your data on the watch, and it will break down your sleep as well as give you an overall sleep score that will let you compare your day-to-day sleep. 

Heart rate monitoring and relatively slow SpO2 tracking are available, but apart from that, there's not much in terms of health tracking. Heart rate accuracy isn't ideal, either. It takes quite a while to nail a reading, up to 10 seconds at times. 

The results are not very consistent: while the watch is taking a reading, there's quite a wide amplitude between the min and max readings even if you're sitting still and completely calm. Heart rate is up to 3-4bpm off the Apple Watch. Probably neither of them is too accurate, but worth mentioning that there's a disparity here. 

OnePlus Watch 2R Battery and Charging

Now that's battery life

However, OnePlus once again delivers exceptional battery life with the OnePlus Watch 2R. There's a respectable 500mAh battery tucked inside the smartwatch, but what's impressive here is the efficiency achieved along the Snapdragon W5 Gen 1 and BES2700BP chips.

In my personal experience and with my specific relatively lightweight usage, the phone uses up to 25% per day in Smart Mode. This means that I get to enjoy the full capabilities of Wear OS, like custom apps, a barrage of notifications, and sleep tracking during the night. Thus, I can easily use the watch for up to 4 days at a time, which is superb. 

Disabling Smart Mode logically hampers the overall functionality of the device (fancy watch faces, SOS calls, most apps and tiles are unavailable), but stretches the potential battery life up to 10 days. You can still use the basics, though: heart rate and SpO2 monitoring, sleep tracking, workouts, alarms and timers, media controls, and basic navigation thanks to the compass app. 

So, while this Power Saver mode puts the OnePlus Watch 2R on the thin border between a proper smartwatch and a 'dumb' smartwatch, it is a surprisingly viable way to use your smartwatch. The only downside here is that switching back to Smart Mode requires the whole smartwatch to reboot, which isn't ideal. 

In terms of charging, it takes around an hour to fully charge the device. That's fine: with such a good battery life, any charging time is technically excusable. 

The haptics on the OnePlus Watch 2R are pretty terrible, similarly to the regular OnePlus Watch 2. Although you can adjust the vibration intensity, you will either end up with a too weak or too annoying vibration feedback. The watch lacks the precision and strength of more premium smartwatches, which is normal to expect, but still worth a passing mention. 

OnePlus Watch 2R Competitors

From the Wear OS camp, the competition is represented by the Galaxy Watch 7, another proper smartwatch with a very decent software feature set, a multitude of health-related features, and a more premium build, including a sapphire display and better water resistance (up to 50 meters). The only downsides are the inferior battery life and slightly higher price. 

The OnePlus Watch 2 is another alternative. It is basically the same smartwatch but slightly more premium. Still, we'd recommend getting this here OnePlus Watch 2R, which is a substantially better value for money. 

On the Apple front, you have tons of options like the Apple Watch Series 9 or the Apple Watch Ultra 2, but both are costlier, can't match the battery life, and are in an entirely different ecosystem that you can't really jump in that easily.