A long-lasting Android watch that fails to keep pace with rivals
The OnePlus Watch 3 is a solid upgrade, offering outstanding battery life and smooth software. Yet, it fails to address the key shortcomings of its predecessor. The design remains bulky, LTE is absent, and health tracking—while much improved—is still largely behind Samsung and Google. At this price, it’s hard to justify over the Pixel Watch 3 or Galaxy Watch 7, which both offer better features for the same or lower cost. If battery life is your top priority, the Watch 3 is worth considering—otherwise, better options exist.
Pros
- Impressive three days of AOD time
- Helpful tweaks to the design
- Improved health features
Cons
- No LTE option remains baffling
- Only available in one case size
- Looks virtually identical to Watch 2
After lots of trademark drip-feeding and even more leaks, the OnePlus Watch 3 is here.
There is high hope for this OnePlus smartwatch generation. After regaining form with three solid releases in 2024, the brand seems poised to challenge Google and Samsung, the leading smartwatch manufacturers in the Android ecosystem.
Yet, despite a few minor improvements, the Watch 3 doesn’t propel OnePlus into the discussion for the best Wear OS smartwatch title. The battery life is stellar, the design has been slightly enhanced, and the software operates smoothly. However, this was also the case last year, and many of our major complaints from the previous generation persist.
This remains a solid choice for the right user, but there are many caveats (and competitors) to consider if you want to be truly satisfied with the OnePlus Watch 3. Here’s our review.
Price and competition
OnePlus has jumped on its key competition, Google and Samsung, by releasing its 2025 generation in Q1. We likely won’t see the riposte from those other two brands until this summer.
Even with this advantage, we aren’t entirely convinced that this is a superior choice compared to the previous generation of Samsung and Google watches. Priced at $329/£319, it’s certainly not a budget smartwatch.
It also skips many features that make the Pixel Watch 3 (now often priced between $299 and $349) and the Galaxy Watch 7 (currently available in deals for $239 to $300) excellent. As we’ll examine in this review, there’s a distinct lack of design choice, and essentials like LTE are also limited.
The battery life performance has helped the brand establish itself as a ‘best of the rest’ consideration, and this reputation continues with the Watch 3. However, it doesn’t surpass competing models in features, design, or performance—especially at this price point.
Design and display
- Functional, rotating crown debuts
- 2D sapphire crystal glass display covering
- IP68 rating and 5ATM water resistance
Even OnePlus evangelists would struggle to point out the significant differences in the design of this latest edition compared to the Watch 2.
Given the relatively premium price tag, it’s no surprise that stainless steel makes a return for the Watch 3. After struggling with the previous generation’s weight of 80g, we much preferred the Watch 2R with its aluminum case. Therefore, we hoped for significant improvements here to make it more wearable.
Yet, the Watch 3 is still the same size and rough overall shape, which means it weighed 80g again. This time around, it does at least boast a titanium bezel, and the indices are reminiscent of last year’s Huawei Watch GT 5 and GT 5 Pro.
This adds a much-needed touch of personality, but the overall change has done nothing to serve the practical challenges of sleeping and exercising with a watch this heavy. The watch must still be strapped tightly during gym or running workouts to prevent slipping down the wrist.
Design changes that don’t go far enough
This is partly why we remain miffed at the absence of a smaller case size or a full titanium option that could have reduced some weight.
While we recognize that keeping the size is crucial for OnePlus’ primary marketing approach—emphasizing long battery life—and that smaller Wear OS watches have struggled to provide more than a day’s worth of AOD life, this limitation is still frustrating. It also narrows the audience who might consider this watch.
The brand at least remembered to include a functional crown this time. Since this has been a standard feature on most Android watches for nearly a decade, you can forgive us for not getting too excited about its presence. However, it is here and works… like they all do.
Once again, as we noted with the Watch 2R, it’s hard to get excited about the design choices made by OnePlus here. It looks smart on the wrist for those (read: men) with medium to large wrists, but it seems like OnePlus is holding back. We’re not sure why.
Smart features
- Runs Wear OS 5 out of the box
- No option for LTE
- All-new BES2800 chipset
OnePlus has managed better than most Wear OS vendors when it comes to offering relatively up-to-date software. While it’s true that Google is likely to announce the next major iteration of the platform in just a couple of months, it seems that OnePlus is doing its best; it won’t receive the latest software before Samsung due to its strong relationship with Google.
Additionally, Wear OS updates have increasingly become less significant since the overhaul a few years back. Aside from the occasional feature such as cloud backups, it now revolves around how well a brand can promote what already exists. OnePlus performs reasonably well in this aspect.
However, it remains truly baffling that a brand with such a strong Android pedigree continues to ignore a fundamental smart feature like LTE. Still, the basics—such as watch syncing, app support through the Google Play Store, and contactless payments—are all managed without issue.
If you own a OnePlus phone, you’ll enjoy some exclusive features with the Watch 3, which can remotely control videos (like TikToks or YouTube Shorts) and the camera. While it’s nothing groundbreaking, it’s certainly a nice addition.
Doubling down on its strength
What OnePlus is promoting for this generation is the all-new chipset. It bombarded us with numerous technical terms during briefings, but the takeaway here is that the Watch 3 offers enhanced CPU and NPU performance compared to its predecessor.
Does it provide a significant real-world upgrade? Not by any eye-test measure – but that’s to be expected since the previous watch already operated very smoothly. Essentially, the main improvements in this area seem to be efficiency – and the impact this has on battery life. You can read more about that below.
Tracking features: Sleep, stress, and health
- ECG is a new addition
- A 60-second checkup for vital biometrics has been added
- Stress tracking now includes ‘Wellness Curve’
We were critical last year of the somewhat minimal tracking experience offered by OnePlus smartwatches. While the data was often accurate, it still felt quite basic. Essential health metrics were absent, and features like stress monitoring provided insights comparable to those found on $50 trackers.
The picture has improved for the Watch 3, especially regarding health tracking. OnePlus is promoting an enhanced PPG for better accuracy, which we were glad to observe after last year’s average performance. We’ll evaluate this in more detail below.
Also encouraging is the addition of ECG, which is essential at this price point. It works really well, too. We’ve tested it countless times during our time with the smartwatch, and the consistency of its readings has matched that of Apple and Google, rather than resembling an unreliable implementation like Huawei’s Watch GT 5 series.
While we usually oppose gimmicky health checkup features due to the excessive user activation they require, the new 60-second health checkup is a valuable addition. It provides a quick report on heart health, arterial stiffness, and breathing via ECG and PPG. The results are easy to understand and align with the benchmarks set by our test devices: the Whoop 4.0, Oura Ring 4, and Apple Watch Ultra 2.
Insights that still don’t go far enough
This also applies to stress and sleep features. A considerable amount of data is tracked, and stress has now improved to display a ‘wellness curve’ throughout the day that goes some way to improving the 0-100 stress score that brands often use.
Once again, there are still no significant insights in these two areas where Samsung and Google don’t match or surpass OnePlus. The brand still fails to provide a broader context for everything it tracks, as seen with leading wearable brands like Oura, but at least there’s now more data available to analyze.
If you’re content with isolated data and don’t mind sorting through daily, weekly, or monthly graphs, you likely won’t have much issue with what’s presented here. However, if you’re seeking more holistic, all-encompassing insights into what’s being monitored in the background or any aspect of women’s health tracking features, the accurate sleep detection/wake times and stress assessments likely won’t wow you.
Heart rate and GPS performance
- New dual-frequency GNSS chip
- Evaluates fat and carbohydrate consumption in HR zones
- Enhanced PPG sensor compared to Watch 2
OnePlus indicates that it has upgraded both the dual-frequency GNSS settings and the PPG sensor for this generation, so we were hopeful to see significant improvements.
Ultimately, the Watch 2 was capable of delivering consistent results only in very stable settings, like tracking on an indoor bike, but faced challenges in the swimming pool or during outdoor runs. It particularly had issues with latency, which led to missed readings at higher intensities.
Heart rate tracking accuracy
This issue has seen improvement in the Watch 3, but we still wouldn’t say the performance matches the industry’s top options—or even its Wear OS competitors.
Latency remains slightly behind competitors like Apple (and the Garmin chest strap used in the test below), leading to a general trend of slightly underreported maximum figures. This issue was evident during both outdoor runs and gym sessions, with the latter being especially troublesome.
Due to the typically short lifting intervals, latent watches often falter. In these sessions, the Watch 3 reported max figures as much as 10-15 BPM lower than those of the Apple Watch and chest strap.
It did naturally fare better in matching the session averages of those shown in steady-paced workouts on the indoor bike with no arm movement, but that’s expected at this price point.
It’s by no means a car crash, though. If you can stomach wearing a watch this heavy during workouts, it’ll capture the general theme of your zones and workout intensity. But, as ever, you can use a chest strap if you’re serious about this area.
GPS accuracy
This year, or in future OnePlus releases, we aim to revisit this section when we can test it in an urban setting. Only then will we be able to determine if the dual-frequency GNSS has genuinely improved compared to the Watch 2.
However, at least during our few outdoor sessions with the Watch 3, the GPS performance is generally accurate. It tends to overreport compared to Garmin and Apple, but this discrepancy is only about 50-100 meters per 6 miles.
It’s not particularly special, and certainly not step-for-step with those gold standard trackers like we’ve seen in some of Samsung’s latest watches. However, we appreciated that it’s at least consistent in its tracking. It was never more than the previously mentioned meterage off, even if it didn’t match the distance covered.
OnePlus also suggests that the lock-on should be faster this time around. In both OnePlus’s native workout mode and when using the Strava Wear OS app, we found that it aligns well with Garmin. This wasn’t a major issue with the previous generation, but it’s still encouraging to see improvements being made behind the scenes.
Battery life
- 120 hours of non-AOD battery life and 16 days in power-saving mode
- 631mAh battery – up from 500mAh in the previous generation
- Estimation slips to three days with AOD enabled
Similar to last year’s models, the main advantage of the Watch 3 over its Android competitors is its battery life. This battery estimate has increased from 100 hours in non-AOD mode to 120 hours, and this appears accurate based on our testing.
This jump remains consistent across all battery modes. With the always-on display activated, which we default to for all our smartwatch reviews, it lasted just a little under three days. Impressive.
This includes about two hours of tracked exercise each day, with some of that taking place outside and hammering the GPS. Blood oxygen monitoring was enabled, brightness was set to adaptive, and we activated the sleep mode/schedule during nighttime hours.
Regardless of how you look at it, getting around 70 hours in heavy use is impressive and keeps OnePlus ahead of the Pixel Watch 3 and the considerably pricier Galaxy Watch Ultra. These two generally last about 50-55 hours under similar conditions, so you certainly gain some extra time from the Watch 3 (at least until the 2025 models are released).
When we disabled the AOD and extrapolated the battery drain, we again found that OnePlus’ estimations hold up. This indicates that the Watch 3 is the Android watch to buy if battery life is your top priority. However, it’s still uncertain whether this will be true for very long.
