OnePlus Watch 3 review: is this the best smartwatch for under £300?

I have a confession to make. When it comes to fitness watches, I’ve only ever worn Garmin. I mean, cut me and I’ll bleed all number of Garmin Connect statistics. I’ve never worn a modern-day smartwatch, like an Apple, and never really felt the need to.

And, so, the OnePlus Watch 3 arrived at Men’s Fitness Towers and sat pristine in its box on my desk. Busyness and a mixture of technophobia and/or apathy meant it stayed in situ for several weeks. Finally, I had a window of opportunity and decided to put the OnePlus Watch 3 through its paces – oh, if only I had opened that window earlier.

I’m sure one of the reasons why people put off trying new tech is fear of change and the feeling that it will be painful to get up and running. I’m delighted to say that the OnePlus Watch 3 was so easy to set up that my-almost-octogenarian mother could do it. Download the OnePlus app, turn the watch on, connect to phone and you’re up and running. It was super simple.

I should also add that I recently moved from an Apple phone to a Samsung Galaxy Fold Z. If you run an Android smartphone and you want to run a Wear OS watch, then the OnePlus Watch 3 is hard to beat for a number of reasons, that I’ll explain in more detail below. Let’s just say that, at £299, you get a lot of watch for your money.

For the uninformed, OnePlus was founded by Pete Lau and Carl Pei in December 2013 to develop a high-end flagship smartphone running Cyanogen OS that would come to be known as the OnePlus One And, just like OnePlus is doing with its smartphones, it is building on its success. The OnePlus Watch 3 is an excellent piece of kit, and, despite a couple of negatives, deserves to be sitting at the table with the big boys.

Design

I have the OnePlus Watch 3 in the ‘Emerald Titanium’ colourway, ironic when several friends enviously commented on the watch’s sleek design. And their comments are not unwarranted – this watch looks fantastic. It feels beautiful with its titanium bezel and sapphire crystal glass on the display.

 I have been known to buy the odd prestige watch and I wouldn’t be ashamed to have this on my wrist – which is a strong compliment. OnePlus has also upgraded the screen so the AMOLED is now a 2200 peak-brightness display that makes it significantly more readable outdoors in direct sunlight.

Thanks to military-grade testing certification, the watch is IP68-rated and can handle most of the dirt, sweat, stress and strain that comes from an active lifestyle. Its usability is also vastly improved by the addition of a rotating digital crown, which allows for easier scrolling and navigation. It’s also waterproof to 50m which means swimming, running, cycling are all good – in fact, whatever sport you want to do with, this watch should be fine.

By switching from Wear OS to the low-power RTOS, the OnePlus Watch 3 is able to extend its battery life. In conjunction with the new chip, a bigger 631mAh battery means the Watch 3 lasts up to 120 hours, compared with the older model’s 100 hours.

One gripe is the size: at 46.6mm x 47.6mm x 11mm, not including the thickness of the sensor, the OnePlus Watch 3 is a hefty model at 81g. Those of us not blessed with chunky wrists might find it a big watch to wear 24/7. 

Features

As well as the rotating digital crown, tougher new screen and bezel, and longer battery life, there are loads of software features – some new, some repeated. It comes pre-loaded with several apps – Strava and Spotify were on my list – and you can add from your Android device. You can also access plenty of watch faces too – choose the one you like and simply synch your watch.

One new feature is the 60-second health check-in. When you press your finger on the all-in-one sensor button, the OnePlus Watch 3 measures heart rate, conducts an electrocardiograph scan (which will be available later in the year), tracks blood oxygen levels, mental wellness, wrist temperature, sleep quality, and a new metric called ‘vascular age’, which is similar to Garmin’s Fitness Age but specifically tailored to heart health.

A big emphasis is placed on heart health, with vascular elasticity metrics and the new ECG functionality working together to create benchmarks based on age. In essence, the OnePlus Watch 3 can give you a rough idea of how “old” your heart is in comparison to the rest of your body.

GPS is now dual-frequency for additional accuracy. The Watch’s basic workout app supports over 100 different sports modes, but only 11 of these offer ‘professional modes’ or unique metrics, such as running. The rest are nice-to-haves for instant input into your digital training diary.

Performance

The watch was super easy to use. The snap-on, snap-off band attachment mechanism was easy – a welcome change from many other mainstream smartwatches. The watch was bigger and heavier than I was used to (I usually wear a Garmin Epix) but it looked fantastic on my wrist (I’ve previously mentioned the several jealous comments).

I have a pacemaker which I often thinks skews my nightly metrics. But the OnePlus Watch 3 tracked my sleep stages admirably. My Garmin constantly reports that I’m not getting enough sleep and that the quality is poor.

When I check it, I realise that my artificially-held heart-rate has tricked it into believing that I was awake when I was actually asleep. The Watch 3 seemed to do a better job, reporting fewer restless moments and better quality of sleep. But I’ll need to do further tests to see just how accurate this really is.

One small bone of contention was the swim tracking. The OnePlus Watch 3 only had a minimum pool size of 20 metres on the Pool Swim workout profile (the hotel pool I used on my business trip was a tiny 10m). It tracked my front crawl strokes very well, but didn’t map my breaststroke particularly well at all.

Out on the road, and it did a much better job, mapping my runs very well, with as much accuracy as the Apple Watch Ultra or my Garmin Epix with plenty of granular information and some lovely graphical displays. It’s a really solid running watch, and I’ve used enough of them to know.

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