Watch with Wear OS

Review: Oneplus Watch 2R - Best and Now Also Cheap

By addressing the system's biggest weakness, Oneplus makes the best watches with Wear OS.

Published 16 December 2024 - 03:33 Modified 24 January 2025 - 17:16

Google's Wear OS system is finally becoming the established alternative for smartwatches for Android. In addition to Google's Pixel Watch and Samsung's Galaxy Watch, Xiaomi and since this spring Oneplus also use the system. With Wear OS, you get both health tracking and the flexibility that comes with being able to install apps on the watch.

But Wear OS has a major weakness, and that is that the battery life is so short, typically less than two days. This means you either have to charge the watch frequently or give up sleep tracking and charge the watch overnight. The Apple Watch admittedly has even shorter battery life, but at least Apple can refer to a system and user interface with a wow factor, something that does not materialize for Wear OS.

Oneplus has solved this by putting two systems and two chipsets in their watches that drive them. The Snapdragon W5 Gen 1 chipset that drives Wear OS 4, and a power-efficient BES2700 chipset that drives an RTOS system.

Another way to put it is that the Oneplus Watch 2R is a smartwatch and a fitness band in one. The fitness band handles the watch faces and health and fitness tracking, and when you need to access more advanced smartwatch features, it activates Wear OS. This way, the Oneplus Watch 2R spends most of the time you use it in a power-saving state with Wear OS resting.

It might sound like this would make the watch slower, but I notice surprisingly little of that. I might find that the response isn't lightning-fast when I lift my arm and the animations can feel a bit sluggish, but this is also true for other watches with Wear OS. What I don't notice is that the watch would somehow become slower by having Wear OS in standby mode for a large part of the time.

Double the battery life

Then again, one shouldn't exaggerate how much better battery life you get either. You can set the watch to power-saving mode, and then you get 12 days of battery while still measuring your health and fitness, but then you've locked the watch to being a fitness band. Good perhaps for occasions when you're traveling, but in practice, you'll likely prefer the smart mode that switches automatically. When I use it, with heart rate monitoring on but blood oxygen measurement off, and log workouts daily, I get over four days of battery life, but in the last hours, the watch goes into power-saving mode so I can't access the smartwatch features. As a smartwatch, I get about twice as much battery life as with other watches with Wear OS, and it makes a big difference for the user experience.

When the watch needs to be charged, it should be able to charge from empty to full in an hour. Ten minutes of charging should also give you a day's use in smart mode, that is, with Wear OS active. The watch does not have wireless charging, but the charger itself consists of a small adapter with a USB connector that is very convenient to carry with you if you need to charge on the go.

Oneplus Watch 2R is Oneplus's second watch with Google's Wear OS as the system. It is essentially the same watch as the Oneplus Watch 2, the dimensions are the same, making it a rather large watch, and the specifications are the same as well. Therefore, please also read my colleague Erik Mörner's test of the Oneplus Watch 2. The differences mainly consist of material choices. Where the Oneplus Watch 2 had sapphire glass and a steel frame, the Oneplus Watch 2R settles for impact-resistant panda glass and an aluminum frame. It's not all bad, as the watch becomes significantly lighter. And of course, 600 kronor cheaper, making it cheaper than, for example, the Samsung Galaxy Watch 7, but not as cheap as the Galaxy Watch FE.

The screen is of OLED type and has bright colors and is sufficiently bright to be readable even in direct sunlight. You can enable the setting for the screen to always show the time even when it is otherwise off, known as the standby screen in the settings, but this will consume a lot of battery life.

A bit slower

OnePlus is somewhat handicapped by not being Samsung, partly because they do not have access to Samsung's latest and significantly faster watch chipset, and partly because they have not yet gained access to the latest version of the system and have to settle for Wear OS 4. This does not significantly affect the functions but perhaps how fast the watch feels.

The watch syncs with an Android phone (Wear OS does not support iPhone) via the Ohealth app, which primarily focuses on health features. You can also access some of the watch's settings in the app, but not all.

The health measurement in the watch is quite typical for smartwatches, which should be interpreted positively. You get continuous heart rate monitoring, detailed data about your runs, various health metrics that help you perform throughout the day, and prompts to move if you've been sitting still for too long. The watch does a good job of automatically detecting exercise sessions if you've enabled it, and the measurement pauses when you do. Or to put it differently, you don't need to feel like you're risking downgrading by opting out of some of the more well-known brands for measuring health and fitness.

As mentioned, you can receive app notifications on the watch, and if it's a messaging app, you can reply from the watch, either with emoji, by dictating a response, or with the very tiny on-screen keyboard. The option to choose from pre-written response options is therefore missing here.

No esim

You can also answer calls and use the watch as a Bluetooth headset. However, there is no variant with esim, so you cannot use the watch for communication without the phone. But you can tap payments with Google Wallet and download music in advance and listen from a connected Bluetooth headset on your run without having your phone with you. These are features that come with Wear OS, and it also allows the installation of apps, but the advantage of this should not be exaggerated. The watch is limited when the phone is not with you, and if you have the phone with you, there are few functions where it is more convenient to do things on the watch than to take out the phone. One of the apps I still like to use is Google's note-taking app Keep, where I can bring up the shopping list on my arm or quickly dictate a memo.

With the Oneplus Watch 2R, you get everything you expect from a modern smartwatch and double the battery life compared to the alternatives. You also get a cheaper and lighter watch than the Oneplus Watch 2. An excellent alternative.