OnePlus Nord Watch review: Will it be able to survive the competition?

The Indian smartwatches market is quite heated at this moment due to continuous launches from all major brands. While the budget section is filled with watches from Boat, Fire-Boltt, and others, OnePlus has taken its first step to highjack the segment with the launch of the first entry-level smartwatch from the Nord series, the OnePlus Nord Watch. The latest offering by OnePlus has a rectangular-shaped dial and designer straps. I have been using the OnePlus Nord watch for the last couple of weeks, and here is my review based on its performance, comfort, and durability.

OnePlus Nord Watch Review: Design & Fit

At the time of usage, I am already impressed with the smartwatch’s design; it offers a premium look. The smartphone’s rectangular dial fits just right on the wrist and doesn’t feel like a burden. On the right side, the smartwatch has a circular crown which is there for accessing the menu. However, there is no other use case for the same, which is quite disappointing. For example, you are not going to get any scrollable kind of feature while rotating it.

The rotating crown is more or less a simple addition to the watch for the enhancement of design. As for the weight, the Nord Watch weighs around 50 grams which makes it comfortable to carry all day. The case of the same is made of Zinc alloy, but a drawback of the same is that it is not fingerprint proof, and it can get smudged badly while using it regularly. For protection from dust and water, the smartwatch has IP68 water resistance.

OnePlus Nord Smartwatch Review: Display

Talking about the main stuff, the OnePlus Nord Watch comes with a 1.78-inch AMOLED display, and it has thick bezels. Nonetheless, the bezels are not that visible because of the pitch-black colour produced by the screen. The smartwatch has a 448×368 pixels resolution along with a peak refresh rate of 60Hz. The peak brightness of the smartwatch, 500 nits, allows you to easily view the content even in high sunlight.

Not only this, but the device also has smooth animations and offers snappy scrolling. It offers more than a hundred watch faces to choose from so that you can get a fresh look almost every day. If you are someone who likes to experiment with watch faces, then you are going to love this product as it also offers animation customization with these watch faces. Though you are going to miss out on the always-on display, still the rise-to-wake function of the smartwatch justifies the absence of an always-on display to an extent.

OnePlus Nord Watch Review: Performance and health feature

Here comes the main part, what about the features? Well, the watch is not going to completely disappoint in that. The device comes with Bluetooth 5.2 for connecting with Android and iOS smartphones. The watch doesn’t have a call support feature; still, you can get notifications for calls and messages.

The watch offers popular health tracking features like the stress monitor, steps counter, calorie counter, heart rate monitor, sleep tracker, and blood oxygen monitor. The best part about the watch is that it also offers alerts when the heartbeat goes too high or low. Another major highlight of the watch was that most of the features were delivering accurate results. The sleep tracker of the watch even records the deep and light sleep intervals.

Not only this, but the smartwatch also has more than 100 modes like walking, running, hiking, cycling, climbing, and more to choose from. You are surely going to miss the auto-detection feature for activity in the watch. Nonetheless, it easily detects activities like running and walking. The call and message notifications feature of the device is not that amazing as it doesn’t even short any display picture at the time of notification.

OnePlus Nord Watch Review: App Support and watch faces

The OnePlus Nord smartwatch has a companion named N Health connection application that can be downloaded from the Google Play Store. It can be used to change the watch faces and even customize them. The app also allows you to check all your activity stats and keep a check on your physical activity and intensity. The application has heart rate stats, SpO2, and even Sleep data graphs. With the companion app, it can set alarms along with reminders on it. It is compatible with Android 6.0 or above and iOS 11 or above.

The watch has five watch faces to choose from when not using the companion application. With the companion application, you can choose and customize more than a hundred watch faces. And if you want something completely different as a watch face, then you can also use an image as the watch face on the smartwatch.

OnePlus Nord Watch Review: Battery

The OnePlus Nord Smartwatch draws power from a 240mAh battery along with support for magnetic charging. The watch lacks the support of fast charging and is nothing less than a turn-off. At the time of testing, the device was able to deliver a battery life of 8 to 9 days. However, if you will not use the battery-consuming features like the heart rate monitor, SpO2, or sleep monitoring, then the battery can last for around ten days. It is safe to say that the battery life depends completely on the type of usage.

OnePlus Nord Watch Review: Should you buy it or not?

Critic rating: 3.8/5

The OnePlus Nord smartwatch is an affordable device that offers an ample amount of features. So, if you are looking for a smartwatch that is capable of tracking all physical activities and has a decent design along with a simple interface, then you can go for the OnePlus offering. If you are looking for Bluetooth calling features and other stuff, then the watch is going to disappoint you. So if you are looking for calling kind of features, then you can ditch this piece from OnePlus and go for some other watch under Rs 5,000.