If you’re looking for a bulbous smartwatch with a long battery life, the OnePlus Watch 2R is a consideration for all it offers. This Android smartwatch runs Wear OS 4 and carries the traditions of its predecessor, the OnePlus Watch 2, including promising up to 100 hours of battery life on a single charge. The kicker is that it’s $70 cheaper.
I’ve had the OnePlus Watch 2R for two days. It’s still the same gargantuan 47mm around smartwatch with a 1.43-inch AMOLED screen. The aluminum build makes it more comfortable for my smaller wrist to don than the OnePlus Watch 2’s stainless steel and sapphire crystal. It’s much less dense, and I don’t feel it will fly off my hand when I gesture. OnePlus says the Watch 2R is nearly 25% lighter than the Watch 2.
OnePlus stuck with the gray or green colorway offerings for the OnePlus Watch 2R. I have an easier time wearing the 22mm sports band, and I prefer the band’s almost-perforated pattern texture to the plain straight lines on the OnePlus Watch 2’s default band. I also like the numbers around the smartwatch screen; it makes the OnePlus Watch 2R seem like the real thing from afar. The side buttons are also decidedly more watch-like, and OnePlus removed the exaggerated edge, which made it more comfortable to wear than the Watch 2.
The OnePlus Watch 2R’s specification sheet is near deja vu from the Watch 2. It relies on a dual-processor system with a primary Qualcomm Snapdragon W5 performance chipset and a secondary BES 2700 MCU chipset for efficiency tasks. If you remember from the Watch 2, the secondary chip runs RTOS and takes care of background activities and other simple tasks. This formula helped the OnePlus Watch 2 achieve 100 hours of battery life with the 500 mAh battery pack. OnePlus also promises an hour of charge time with its 7.5w VOOC fast charging.
OnePlus didn’t stray far from its Apple-like app launcher.
The OnePlus Watch 2R does all the requisite health and wellness aggregation, including heart rate tracking, stress level tracking, and sleep monitoring. If you like to work out, whether at the gym or outside with equipment, the Watch 2R offers over 100 types of fitness tracking. But if you ovulate, you’ll have to use a different app. Annoyingly, there’s still no period tracking in OHealth, which pairs with the Watch 2R.
I still haven’t figured out how to share data with third-party apps that could offer what the OnePlus Watch 2R doesn’t. I’m hoping the next update to Wear OS 5 will fix this issue. I wouldn’t buy into the OnePlus Watch ecosystem if you’re looking for sophisticated health metrics, at least not yet.
For $230, the OnePlus Watch 2R is an attractive deal if you like its enormous body and promise of a multi-day battery. After some time with the watch, I’ll have to report whether it’s just as capable of 100 hours of battery in Smart Mode. It’s been over 12 hours on the standard watch mode, and I’m already at 89%. OnePlus says you’ll get 48 hours of battery life with this usage.
The OnePlus Watch 2R is available now in the U.S. and Canada. It starts at $230 and comes in Forest Green and Gray.
