The problem with smartwatches is simple — if you want all the heavy-hitting features, the device needs charging each day (or 2.5 days if it’s the Apple Watch Ultra), or you will miss out on features by opting for better battery life. OnePlus deals with the problem sensibly on OnePlus Watch 2R. In fact, this is the watch that will make many move away from feature- and quality-deficient inexpensive smartwatches.

Everything there but…

Affordability meets a rich feature set on the watch, which also offers an impressive battery life. If that’s not all, you will notice how light it is, which is probably because there is an aluminium chassis rather than a stainless steel one but for the difference in price and weight, you won’t have second thoughts about choosing this device.

All the important sensors are present — accelerometer, gyroscope, optical heart rate sensor, optical pulse oximeter, geomagnetic sensor, light sensor and barometer. But the feature that wins my heart is dual frequency GPS — L1 and L5. Dual-frequency GPS was once a feature reserved for the best of the best but it is slowly becoming popular among other smartwatch categories. It offers you a high degree of GPS accuracy when you go on runs, especially in cities with too many tall buildings. If you are a runner or a cyclist, you would like the watch to read routes correctly. Having accurate distance tracking is very important. The feature also results in more consistent performance.

The watch face on OnePlus Watch 2R can be easily changed from the app.

The 1.43-inch AMOLED display is quite bright at 1,000 nits. The high resolution of 466x466 ensures everything on the screen is visible clearly. There is IP68 water and dust resistance, meaning you can take it for almost any activity.

The charging puck is on the larger side and the magnet is not among the best. But it supports fast charging and can juice up in just 60 minutes or 24 hours of power in only 10 minutes. That’s wild. For people who want to use the watch for sleep tracking, the latter mode helps.

Here’s a drawback: The watch has two buttons but neither has functions when rotated. If you want to scroll, touchscreen is the way forward. It’s not a big deal but why have two buttons without features attached to them? One of the buttons is for accessing Wear OS apps and the other is a dedicated fitness tracking button. Also, OnePlus could have done better when setting up the watch: There is an animation that reminds one of the Apple Watch but the animation doesn’t help with the pairing process.

Battery life and processing

The swiping process remains the same as on the previous OnePlus watch. The display looks fantastic for a smartwatch. Always-on display is not on by default but it is supported. OnePlus is saying you can get 100 hours out of the watch but much of that depends on how you use it — brightness, the number of hours GPS is used and so on. But the figure is not off by too much. You should stick to the more realistic figure of 48-55 hours for heavy usage.

OnePlus Watch 2R versus Apple Watch Ultra (right).

The watch comes with one of the biggest batteries in the market (we are not considering the Apple Watch Ultra when comparing) — 500mAH. So, that’s one way of achieving good battery life. Second method: There are two processors — one super-low (BES2700BP MCU) and the other Snapdragon W5 Gen 1. The Snapdragon chip comes into action when you work with Wear OS apps, like Google Maps. The other chip is for low-power tasks, like sleep monitoring in the background.

Should you buy it?

There is no wireless charging, which is a small compromise. There are a number of watch faces available through the app and you can make and receive calls from the watch. Notifications can be replied to. So how did OnePlus keep the price low? There is an aluminium body, there are no bioactive sensors and it doesn’t support ECG measurement. No wonder this is the smartwatch for most people, offering a well-rounded experience.

At a glance

Device: OnePlus Watch 2R

Price: ₹17,999

High notes

• Excellent battery life

• Bright display

• Good set of functions

• Perfect choice for the OnePlus ecosystem

Muffled notes

• No wireless charging or ECG measurement

• Comes in one size