The OnePlus Watch 3 Is A Good Smartwatch With Superb Battery Life

It’s always fascinating to watch a company learn from its mistakes in real time. Four years ago, OnePlus attempted a half-hearted entry into the wearables market. The original OnePlus Watch had consistently strong battery life, but that was about all it had going for it — everything that made it a smartwatch was practically unusable. After a multi-year hiatus, though, 2024’s back-to-back launches for the OnePlus Watch 2 and Watch 2R made it all too obvious that the brand had taken some of that feedback to heart.

The OnePlus Watch 3 is the culmination of several generations of attempts, some good and some bad. The result is a wearable that takes everything that worked about its direct predecessors and makes just enough improvements to leap ahead. I don’t know if the OnePlus Watch 3 is good enough to persuade would-be Pixel Watch buyers to leave a smaller, more subtle gadget behind, but for plenty of Android fans, this might just be the multi-day wearable they’ve been waiting for.

OnePlus Watch 3

The OnePlus Watch 3 might be too big for some wrists, but if you can get past its size, the battery life alone makes this wearable unbeatable. And hey, the rest of the experience ain’t half bad either.

Pros & Cons

• Best-in-class battery life for a Wear OS watch.
• Big, bright display.
• Rotating crown finally does something other than spin.
• Solid health and fitness tracking.

• OHealth can feel a little confusing or complicated to navigate.
• No LTE or smaller model (yet).
• Update policy falls short of its rivals.
• Feels a little too large to comfortably wear to bed.

Price, availability, and specs

Although it faced a temporary delay thanks to a minor typo on the back of the device, the OnePlus Watch 3 is now available to order directly from OnePlus. It’s available in Emerald Titanium (silver with a green band) or Obsidian Titanium (dark silver with a black band).

Pricing is a little complicated. The OnePlus Watch 3 was originally set to launch for $330 with a limited-time $30 coupon code. After the relaunch, this watch now costs $500, though that $30 discount is still active. That’s a 52 percent price increase, and while OnePlus isn’t saying why the cost changed, it’s hard to imagine it has to do with anything but the ongoing trade war between the US and China.

What’s good about the OnePlus Watch 3?

Although I don’t think the OnePlus Watch 3’s design is going to be for everyone, if you like big, beefy smartwatches strapped to your wrist, this is the wearable for you. The same core design has been kept from this watch’s predecessors, but with a handful of minor changes — all for the better. It’s a touch slimmer, though still relatively thick for a wearable, and the weight’s been kept practically unchanged. The display is about a tenth of an inch larger, while the surrounding black bezel has been replaced with a more traditional seconds-based frame.

Otherwise, though, the OnePlus Watch 3 looks virtually unchanged at first glance, and I don’t know if that’s necessarily a bad thing. It’s a perfectly round watch, save for the protruding flat edge that gives this lineup a distinct look. It’s not going to be for everyone — and again, the size plays a major factor here, too — but it’s for me, and that’s good enough. And hey, despite the size, I’ve found this watch to be relatively comfortable on my wrist. Your mileage may vary, of course.

There’s one other big design change this time, although it’s not immediately apparent when you’re taking the device out of the box. After two successive wearables with non-functioning crowns, the rotating home button finally syncs with Wear OS. I always thought it was a downright bizarre decision to include a rotating crown that effectively served as a fidget toy and not much else, and thankfully, OnePlus has finally solved this problem.

In fact, the Watch 3 really nailed all the essentials this time around. The 1.5-inch display is bright and vivid indoors and out — I’ve had zero problems seeing the display regardless of conditions. It runs Wear OS 5 with some OnePlus-based enhancements, alongside the RTOS, which was first launched on the Watch 2 one year ago. That’s designed to improve battery life, and as we’ve seen on the Watch 2 and 2R last year, it does make a difference. More on that in a moment, though.

Wear OS is perfectly fine — I have no strong feelings either way about it as a platform — and likewise, I find myself pretty indifferent about the changes OnePlus made to its software. Some of the preloaded watch faces look great, and others don’t. That might be an odd thought to place in this “What’s good” section, but frankly, watch faces are so specifically tuned to individual tastes that I don’t feel like I can make a judgment call here. Faces that I consider ugly might be your favorite, and vice versa. The good news comes in the form of a fairly wide variety of options, and the Play Store allows you to add even more to your selection.

It’s been difficult, living in Buffalo, to truly put the fitness-tracking capabilities of this watch through the wringer, but I’ve done my best anyway. For the most part, metrics align with what I’d expect from a wearable. Heart rate measurements matched the larger hand-based sensors on a treadmill nearly perfectly. Step tracking can be a little inconsistent compared to other wearables — though it’s usually difficult to tell who’s right in the first place — but tracking both indoor and outdoor runs worked fine.

In fact, while running on a treadmill, the Watch 3’s distance was more accurate than the Apple Watch I wore on my other wrist. Unlike Apple’s gadget, you can adjust your final treadmill distance should the measurement be incorrect. Things were a little more even while running outdoors, and while I missed having an LTE connection (more on that below), it worked well enough.

OHealth isn’t the prettiest app I’ve ever seen, but I appreciate some of the metrics thrown at me here. Things like average ground contact time — which, apparently, I’m either terrible at or the watch is bad at tracking — offer clear ways to improve your fitness, though you’ll need to really dig into the app to find a lot of those measurements.

All of this makes the OnePlus Watch 3 a great wearable, but the battery life makes it shine. I’ve found the company’s estimates to be too conservative. Despite enabling the always-on display, which should reduce overall longevity, I had no issue getting five days out of this watch on a single charge. That’s without sleep tracking but with fitness tracking, and either way, it’s an incredibly comfortable amount of time to go without needing to power up. It’s great knowing I could attend a multi-day work trip, forget my charger, and come back without any issues.

OnePlus offers a more extreme battery saver mode that disables most of what makes this watch “smart” and able to go through a full month. While I think campers, backpackers, and other similar outdoor enthusiasts might love this mode, I’m not sure how much use I’d personally get out of it. The charger, by the way, is another highlight. Like previous models, it’s a small brick that plugs into any USB-C cable, meaning you don’t need to dedicate a full charger cable to your overnight bag. When it was time to charge, I could power up from dead to full in about an hour.

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What’s bad about the OnePlus Watch 3?

Let’s start with the obvious: This is a big smartwatch. That’s not a negative for everyone, but if you happen to have a smaller wrist, the OnePlus Watch 3 might look or feel uncomfortable while you’re wearing it. For context, the Watch 3 is about seven millimeters taller and wider than the 41mm Pixel Watch (all three generations) and two millimeters taller and wider than the 45mm Pixel Watch 3. The Galaxy Watch Ultra offers a more favorable comparison point, though; the OnePlus Watch 3 is a touch narrower and thinner, although the two are more similar in size than you might expect.

As I’ve already laid out, a larger size gets you plenty of benefits — big screen, long battery life — you won’t get that on smaller, thinner watches. But it does mean that this wearable is destined to skew towards men rather than offering a more gender-neutral approach like the Pixel Watch 3 or Galaxy Watch 7. Likewise, sleeping with the Watch 3 on your wrist is just…not comfortable. I’m already a sleep-tracking skeptic — I feel like I already know when I’ve had a bad night’s sleep — and cuffing yourself with this gadget doesn’t help matters much.

OnePlus has floated that it’s considering both a smaller Watch 3 and an LTE-supported one, which isn’t an option at launch. I love cellular-connected wearables — they make leaving your phone behind a much more appealing option, whether you’re looking for a phone-free evening or just heading out on a run — and I hope it’s not too long before an eSIM-equipped model becomes available.

As smartwatches have evolved into a less experimental, more stable form factor, we’ve watched companies like Apple and Google launch subscription-based fitness services like Apple Fitness+ or Fitbit Premium. I’m not surprised to see OnePlus hasn’t followed suit — it costs a lot of money to keep a Peloton-like studio afloat — but considering I do like those offerings from the Watch 3’s rivals, it’s worth noting OHealth doesn’t include anything like those programs. On the plus side, though, there’s nothing locked behind a paywall here.

Speaking of OHealth, I do find it a bit of a confusing app to navigate. It’s essentially a fitness tracking app and a settings app for the Watch 3 in one place, making it feel busier than I’d really like. I suppose it’s better than the alternative — having to download two apps rather than one — but that doesn’t solve the problem. If you’re looking for a specific piece of data in OHealth, there’s a good chance you’ll find it, but you might have to dig around first.

At launch, OnePlus confused potential buyers with a misguided update policy that initially limited the Watch 3 to just two years of updates. While that’s been clarified — the Watch 3 will receive two OS upgrades to Wear OS 7 and three years of bimonthly patches — it’s still not a particularly exceptional update policy. Factor in that the OnePlus Watch 2 has yet to receive Wear OS 5 and that OnePlus itself has said that an upgrade is months away, and it’s clear that Samsung and Google are the obvious winners when judging wearables by planned support.

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Should you buy the OnePlus Watch 3?

It’s not going to be the smartwatch for everyone, but if you’re after a big Wear OS device — or you simply want the best battery life possible, no matter the watch size — the OnePlus Watch 3 is the wearable you want. Short of, say, those relaunched Pebble watches or a running-focused wearable from Garmin, I can’t think of a smartwatch that delivers better battery, regardless of which mode you operate in. More than anything else, I’m wildly impressed by what OnePlus delivered here.

And hey, the rest of the watch is pretty good, too. Fitness tracking seems about on par with this watch’s rivals, the design looks unique — if a little big — and some of the problems with previous OnePlus wearables, like the useless rotating crown, have been totally fixed here. While I don’t think the overall experience feels quite as polished as what you’ll find from Google or Samsung (or Apple, for that matter), as an alternative to the status quo, the OnePlus Watch 3 feels like a long-last breath of fresh air.

There is, of course, the matter of the price. The bulk of this review was written assuming the OnePlus Watch 3 would cost $330, a similar price point to rivals like the Pixel Watch 3 or Galaxy Watch 7, neither of which have faced recent price hikes. At $500, it’s a harder sell, though I imagine those who have had their hearts set on this watch since its unveiling in February will pony up regardless. It’s unclear if or when this price will drop, but I’d imagine that, for as long as this trade war continues, $500 is the floor for this particular device.

OnePlus Watch 3

The OnePlus Watch 3 takes everything great about last year’s watch and ramps it up to the next level. With up to five days on a single charge, 16 days of battery life in power saving mode, and a refreshed chassis, this could be your next wearable.