OnePlus has unveiled its first smartwatch today and the wearable takes a lot of cues from Apple Watch. While that’s no surprise and many Apple Watch clones have come before, OnePlus Watch looks to differentiate with a round design, 2-week battery life, and other high-end features at a budget price of just $159.
When it comes to Apple Watch inspired features, OnePlus Watch has most of the hits: the sport band (easily swappable), blood oxygen monitoring, tracking for over 100 workout types, over 50 watch faces, built-in GPS, “breathing exercise,” heart rate tracking including HRV/stress monitoring, sleep tracking, sapphire glass display, and more.
But going beyond what Apple Watch Series 6 offers, OnePlus says its new watch will have a huge two-week battery life for regular use or one-week for heavy users and come at a fraction of the Apple Watch’s price at $159. Another battery claim, OnePlus says the watch will be able to get one week of use from just 20 minutes on the charger.
Notably, the OnePlus Watch doesn’t run Google’s Wear OS and uses a custom RTOS build (similar to what Fitbit does) which will open the door to compatibility with iOS as well as Android. However, iOS support won’t arrive at launch in April. OnePlus told our sister-site 9to5Google: “Compatibility with iOS will come at a later date and work with 10.0 or above.”
OnePlus will also sell a special cobalt alloy edition of the watch. While the wearable sounds like it packs a lot, some major limitations include no cellular model and no app store for developers/third-party apps. So in reality, this will sit somewhere between basic fitness trackers and Apple Watch in true functionality.
OnePlus Watch is going up for sale on April 14 in the midnight black base variant.
Oh yeah, and one more thing OnePlus decided to copy was Apple’s keynote design:
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