Battery life is a huge point of contention among smartwatch users right now, especially given that it’s such a hassle to have to constantly charge an ambient device that’s meant to track lifestyle patterns in the background and provide quick information cues while posing as a timepiece. After one full week of testing the OnePlus Watch 3 against my older-model Apple Watch Series 6, I’ve found the OnePlus Watch 3 to be a fashionable little Andoid device that excels in several big areas while stumbling in others. But even with a battery that seems to keep a charge for several days in Smart Mode, its moment-to-moment tracking capabilities didn’t quite live up to the polish of its exterior… until I manually activated its workout mode, after which it held its own against the Series 6 when I tracked workout performance side-by-side.
OnePlus Watch 3 – Design and Features
The OnePlus Watch 3 makes a strong first impression with its big and bright 1.5-inch LTPO AMOLED display and stainless steel frame. The crown and touchscreen offer precise navigation through menus, while the dedicated workout button provides quick access to fitness functions – a thoughtful touch for active users who want to quickly jump into their routine, and it isn’t too different or unfamiliar for a longtime Apple Watch user to figure out intuitively. However, the included fluoro rubber wrist strap is a major disappointment that immediately gave me trouble upon first setup; it’s ugly and cheap-feeling, and the lugs detach too easily, making it difficult to wear securely without randomly snapping off. And that undermines the premium feel of the watch itself.
The 466 x 466-resolution AMOLED screen offers bright and crisp visuals with vibrant colors that pop even under direct sunlight, thanks to excellent contrast at 2,200 peak nits. Its bigger size and brighter screen make it easy to read notifications and workout metrics at a glance. Touch responsiveness is also snappy and precise, with smooth animations that make the interface feel fluid and slick. My Apple Watch Series 6 doesn’t have this same internal slickness anymore, and upon first setting up the Watch 3, I felt a little bit of new tech euphoria from how fast its Snapdragon W5 and BES2800 chips make it feel, even with Power Mode turned on. The haptic feedback deserves special mention: each vibration feels refined and intentional rather than buzzy or jarring.
The watch’s crown is shaped in a sharp-looking pyramid pattern designed for precise control. Once I put the watch on my wrist for the first time, it immediately felt way more sophisticated than what I’m used to, and I kept coming back to this distinction whenever I reached for words to explain why the OnePlus Watch 3 feels so premium. The pancake-shaped crown of the Series 6 is such a small detail (literally), and yet it makes the watch feel small by comparison. Like a toy rather than a timepiece. The only downside to the OnePlus Watch 3’s outward aesthetic design, aside from its wristband, is that it’s only available in Emerald Titanium and Obsidian Titanium colorways. Both of these are boring in comparison to its competitors – both the Google Pixel Watch 3 and Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 can be customized a bit, while the Apple Watch Series 10 has a much larger collection of aluminum and titanium colorways. Even the Series 6 had way more customizability in terms of size and color.
Water resistance is rated at 50 meters, which should theoretically make it shower and swim-friendly. However, I encountered issues with water on the screen triggering false inputs and causing erratic behavior, forcing me to remove it during showers – something I’ve never had to do with my Apple Watch. This raises questions about its practical water resistance in daily use. Of course, the Apple Watch isn’t perfect in such conditions either, but it usually stops being interactive (as in, none of my inputs or presses do anything) rather than invasive, as the OnePlus Watch 3’s touchscreen became when I tested it during a short ten-minute shower.
Battery life is where the OnePlus Watch 3 truly shines. After the average full day of use, including casually moving around my apartment and doing chores, receiving daily notifications, and tracking a light workout or two (typically walking for an hour or playing the VR fitness game Supernatural), the battery dropped by only around 15% on average. For the record, my Apple Watch was left at around 20% by the end of each day, without fail, no matter what I was doing. Given the age of my Apple Watch, its shorter battery life is somewhat expected due to predictable battery degradation over the years. Even so, the difference between what I was previously used to (only having to charge the Apple Watch every two or three days) is still remarkable when the OnePlus Watch 3 could easily last five days on a single charge. Smart Mode needs to be enabled to get the most out of this, but it’s simple to set up in the watch’s onboard interface.
The Watch 3 includes standard smartwatch sensors for heart rate, blood oxygen (SPO2), and movement tracking. It also features wrist temperature tracking, though this requires five days to establish a baseline before providing meaningful data. Wrist temperature may seem unconventional at first glance, but that data stream is incredibly useful for things like the Watch 3’s 60 Second Health Check-In feature, which gives an all-in-one contextual summary of my overall well-being. It’s a little frustrating that I need to get on the OHealth phone app to make that happen instead of doing it all on the watch – it’s decently easy to set up, but I don’t want to have to pull my phone out for something that feels like it should run easily on the watch alone. At least the results are comprehensive thanks to the Watch 3’s onboard PPG (photoplethysmography) sensor and ECG (electrocardiography) sensor working in tandem. Unlike the Apple Watch, it lacks AFib detection capabilities in the United States and Canada, which could be deal-breakers for users with specific health concerns.
For fitness enthusiasts, the OnePlus Watch 3 offers detailed workout tracking for various activities. During walks, it captures metrics like heart rate zones, pace, calorie burn, and distance traveled. Of course, not all walks count as outdoor activities – when your workouts take you outdoors, whether you’re walking or running, the Watch 3’s excellent GPS tracking creates route maps with elevation data. The GPS-routed maps look bright and detailed on the watch’s screen, and don’t seem to be reliant on proximity to the Android phone that the Watch 3 is paired to. In fact, Bluetooth connectivity between the Watch 3 and my Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra has been nothing short of excellent, seamlessly reconnecting whenever I returned home and the devices were together again.
OnePlus Watch 3 – Software
Setup is not particularly intuitive for someone coming from the Apple ecosystem. Getting in requires downloading the OHealth companion app, and its interface feels more complex and requires deeper familiarity with Google services and Android structure that I’m still getting the hang of. Mainly because I am not the primary user of the phone – and especially since an additional OnePlus account is required to even begin pairing the watch to the phone, it was difficult to get things aligned properly. It’s not a huge deal as I was able to sort everything out in less than 20 minutes, but YMMV.
For the record, I understand that the vast majority of people who will be interested in the OnePlus Watch 3 aren’t going to feel these concerns – they’re already Android-savvy, they already know what they’re doing, and (as I imagine what the pushback in the comments section will look like) they don’t want to hear some Apple fanatic complain about complicated interface structure. Totally fair! Still, the companion app layout is organized in ways that caused me some extra frustration and took time to learn, and that probably isn’t going to attract non-core users into Android’s ecosystem if they’re not already in the mix.
Onboard UI navigation is straightforward once you learn the basics – swipe down for quick settings, up for notifications, and use the crown to scroll through menus or apps. The user interface is responsive with minimal lag when moving between screens. Using apps like Spotify and Google Calendar is also seamless, sleek, and highly responsive.
The OnePlus Watch 3 runs on Wear OS, which is basically the same thing as Apple’s watchOS by any other name. Of course, instead of tying into the Apple ecosystem it instead grants direct access to Google’s ecosystem of apps and services. For example, giving the user the option to store health data in Google Fit, pushing data via notifications from Gmail, and granting access to Google-specific applets (Google Play Store, Google Maps, etc) found directly in the watch’s central menu. This is no different from any other Android smartwatch in practice, but I’d like to imagine the Watch 3 simply does a better job of running its services than all the others, due in part to its powerful battery and advanced Snapdragon 5 chipset. Upon this foundation, OnePlus has added its own layer of customization with attractive-looking exclusive watch faces and health features – like its Vascular Health check-in feature that uses several sensors to determine how close the user is to being at risk of developing severe heart disease. Fortunately, I’m still over the green line of what is considered “Normal” vascular health for a 31 year old, but I wouldn’t have known this if I hadn’t reviewed the Watch 3. It could be a powerful warning tool that informs long-term health decisions, even without Afib detection.
Sleep tracking on the OnePlus Watch 3 provides detailed breakdowns of sleep stages, including deep sleep, light sleep, REM, and awake time. It also offers a sleep score and breathing quality assessment. While these metrics seem comprehensive, I’m still evaluating their accuracy compared to other dedicated sleep trackers. For the most part, the Watch 3 seems to track closely to my Apple Watch Series 6’s readouts. Additionally, the automatic sleep mode activation is a nice touch that dims the display and reduces notifications when it detects the user has fallen asleep.
The watch’s fitness interface provides impressively detailed data visualizations. After workouts, it breaks down heart rate zones with time spent in each zone, shows pace variations throughout routes, and offers insights that Apple doesn’t surface as clearly. The «Wellness Curve» is a proprietary metric that attempts to measure your overall physical state based on various health parameters, though I’m still learning how to interpret its fluctuations meaningfully as someone who is still only just breaking in the Watch 3.
Notification handling is pretty standard compared to my experiences. Text messages, emails, and app alerts appear promptly, and you can respond with quick replies or voice dictation. Additionally, the watch does offer Google Assistant integration, which performs well for basic tasks like setting timers or checking weather forecasts, but at this moment it’s not all that perceptibly different from Siri.
OnePlus Watch 3 – Performance
Fitness tracking is where the OnePlus Watch 3 shows its most significant weaknesses. Step counting consistently lagged behind the Apple Watch, sometimes by dramatic margins. During one VR fitness session, the Apple Watch recorded 5,255 steps while the OnePlus only registered 1,612 – a massive discrepancy that I’m still trying to wrap my head around, as this was a pretty consistent occurrence. On one hand, I use Supernatural for my primary VR workouts, which is attuned to my Series 6 and (from my understanding) feeds in extra contextual data to Apple Health. But on the other hand, this pattern continued throughout testing, with the OnePlus Watch typically recording about 25-30% fewer steps than the Apple Watch whether I was working out in Supernatural, doing a core workout, or playing some other high-intensity VR game like The Thrill of the Fight. When not in workout mode, the Watch 3 also seems to update step counts in bursts rather than in real-time, sometimes missing passive movement entirely.
At one point I saw the number of recorded steps suddenly drop from around 2,500 to 1,700, only for the step count to level out later in the day and become nearly equal to the Series 6’s step count after recording an outdoor walk. This is bizarre, considering that I wore both watches at the same time, at all times. It’s highly possible that the Watch 3’s fitness tracking mechanisms need time to calibrate to the user, but it seems like the only way to get the Watch 3 to accurately track daily steps is by taking it on long stretches of outdoor activity where it can deliberately track movement over a longer period of time.
In fact, workout tracking showed way more consistency with calories burned and heart rate measurements generally aligning with the Apple Watch’s readings. During a brief core training session, both watches reported similar calorie burns (30 vs. 27 active calories) and average heart rates (120 vs. 115 BPM). The OnePlus Watch did provide more detailed heart rate zone analysis than I’m typically used to, breaking down time spent in warm-up, fat burning, and endurance zones.
GPS accuracy during outdoor activities was pretty good, with the OnePlus Watch recording slightly longer distances than the Apple Watch (4.04 vs. 3.94 miles on one walk). This could be due to different sampling rates or algorithms, but the difference wasn’t significant enough to be concerning. What was impressive was the battery efficiency during GPS tracking, with minimal drain even after stacking a longer outdoor session together with a full VR workout routine on the same day, dealing with notifications, and so forth. All of that activity still rounded up to no more than 16% battery drain on that day, which is exceptional.
