OnePlus Watch 3 Review: It’s Probably the Wear OS Watch to Beat

OnePlus is off to a pretty hot start in 2025, first releasing the excellent OnePlus 13 and now dropping an upgraded smartwatch on us. The OnePlus Watch 3 has been available for a few weeks now and we’ve been testing it for longer than that to try to get a true feel for this latest wearable.

The OnePlus Watch 3 launched as a $329 Wear OS smartwatch with all of the latest in smartwatch tech. That means the current Qualcomm Snapdragon W5 processor, Bluetooth 5.2, all of the health monitoring systems, an improved display with proper brightness for outdoor use, a stainless steel case with titanium bezel, dual-frequency GPS, access to Google’s Find My Device network, etc. This watch really has almost everything and is at a price that certainly would make you question Samsung and Google’s top watch offerings.

So, should you buy a OnePlus Watch 3 instead of Google or Samsung’s watches? I’d argue that it might be worth doing, depending on your needs. Here’s our OnePlus Watch 3 review.

What’s good about the OnePlus Watch 3?

Battery life is insane again, as is performance. Most smartwatches have horrible battery life and require that you charge them every one or two days. Few smartwatches last for multiple days, especially with all of the settings enabled. For the OnePlus Watch 2, you may recall how impressed I was with battery life. With the OnePlus Watch 3, I’m equally as happy with how long this thing can last on a single charge.

For me, wearing a smartwatch is so important because I love the data, knowing where my heart rate is at every day, how well I’m sleeping, and being able to track whatever fitness routine I’m obsessing over at the moment. But where I despise these smart gadgets the most is in the battery department. Charging them often sucks. The OnePlus Watch 3 so rarely needs you to charge it, that while wearing it over the past month+, I actually stopped caring about this typically obnoxious flaw in smartwatches.

My routines changed some as I tested it, so for the first week or so, I ran the OnePlus Watch 3 with the always-on display active, the standard Smart Mode turned on, tracked every workout I could, utilized sleep tracking, and monitored everything 24-7 (like heart, stress, etc.). I was seeing a full 3 days of battery life with this setup. After nodding in approval at that response to my usage, I then turned off the always-on display and was seeing between 4 and 5 days of battery life. Just that one setting added anywhere from 24-36 additional hours of usage.

Now, you might think that isn’t much, but it really is when you consider all that this watch is doing. Again, I was crushing workouts every single day with the screen active during those for 45 minutes at a time. I utilized sleep tracking with every setting it has activated. I even had to reset the device because I changed phones too many times during it and still squeaked out 4.5 days.

OnePlus is using their dual-architecture system again, where they power apps and bigger experiences on the watch using the Snapdragon W5 chip. The rest of the daily, simpler tasks are powered by a BES2800 low-power chip and an RTOS experience that sips battery. They are currently the only smartwatch maker doing this and it is awesome. There are no hiccups or performance issues here.

What you get is a powerful Wear OS watch that also sips power without you knowing. What I mean by that is that this device is tuned to smartly switch between the two processors depending on the task, but it doesn’t do this in a jarring way where you might get annoyed at a sluggish switch between. Instead, it just does it automatically and you wouldn’t know as it happens. If you open an app like Spotify or Messages or your Calendar, they open, you interact with them, and then go about your day. But notifications come through as they should, your heart rate is monitored in the background, and every other tasks just works as it should even as there are technically two chips and two operating systems going at all times to allow all of those activities to happen. It’s wild to think about.

OnePlus has given us this huge 631mAh battery inside that charges quite quickly using an official OnePlus charging brick, plus they produce insane performance and efficiency for a watch. You really can’t beat this setup and experience. In fact, the rest of the smartwatch industry should be looking to copy what OnePlus has done here for the 2nd year in a row.

Display, design. The design of the OnePlus Watch 3 hasn’t changed a ton, but you do get a handful of upgrades that are worth pointing out. First off, the display stretches closer to the edge now, with much less bezel. Here’s a comparison from OnePlus that really illustrates this. In addition to the smaller bezels, OnePlus has included a large 1.5″ display that’s AMOLED and LTPO, so it can really sip battery at 1Hz when it needs too, but it also looks stunning when you require it. It’s also covered in sapphire glass and can reach peak brightness of 2200 nits. It’s awesome outdoors or indoors.

OnePlus is once again giving us either a black stainless steel or silver stainless steel case. They’ve made the bezel titanium too, just to add some premium flair. The case has a unique shape to it, with top button that now acts as a rotating crown, along with a bottom button that can be mapped for various clicks or holds. This is a slick design, because it isn’t trying to be a Apple Watch Ultra knockoff and yet still manages to be unique, while retaining a classic watch shape.

At 47mm, it is indeed a massive watch that will look silly on a good chunk of human wrists. For some reason, on my non-large wrists, I actually think it looks OK. The way the included band blends into the lugs of the case helps it round nicely into position. By no means am I offended at this thing on the wrist, even though I probably should be. It wears smaller than it is, is what I’m trying to say.

Size in mind, I was worried it would be heavy, but it’s not that heavy. At 81g with the band, it’s certainly well above the Pixel Watch 3 and probably slightly heavier than the Galaxy Watch Ultra. Again, though, it wears nicer than the size and weight suggest. Maybe it’s the well-made included band that fits so nicely around my wrist or that I’m used to the footprint of it at this point, after all these weeks of wearing it, but my wrist hasn’t had fatigue from it, I’m not catching it on doorways, and it hasn’t bothered me while sleeping with it on every night.

Oh, and yes, as I just mentioned, the top button is indeed a rotating crown. I know people were weirdly upset at the OnePlus Watch 2’s top button not acting this way, so OnePlus corrected that here. It’s an OK rotating crown, with a slightly grinding feel to the haptics as you rotate. I do not love it, that’s for sure, but it does add to the navigation experience.

The OnePlus Watch 3 both feels and looks premium, probably far beyond its $329 price tag.

Health and fitness experience is improved. In a perfect wearable world, there would be a fitness service that all watches could attach to in order to let you keep a long-running history of your health no matter the device. But knowing that will likely never happen, we are instead presented with every device maker’s own health and fitness app. Should we ever change devices, that means changing fitness apps where we essentially start over on data tracking.

I bring that up because like everyone else, OnePlus has its own app called oHealth. It’s fine. It has gotten better over time, offers all of the health metrics you might need and that the OnePlus Watch 3 tracks. It even lets you track workouts from within the app, see health insights, and control all of the settings of the watch. In the past, this app felt a bit like some 3rd party software that was skinned and branded for OnePlus, but it now feels a lot more native, like an app they are actually pouring resources into. With the OnePlus Watch 3, that’s important because this watch wants to be your health companion.

OnePlus says they are using “pro-grade” sensors in this Watch 3, including new wrist temperature sensor, 8-channel optical heart rate sensor, and 16-channel optical pulse oximeter sensor. Those sensors will attempt to track enough metrics to provide you with health insights that might be worth keeping an eye on.

You can also now run a 60-second health check-in that will give you all sorts of fun stuff, like your arterial stiffness. It will attempt to discover breathing problems, rate your vascular age, analyze your stress score, and check your heart rate and SpO2. I can’t say I ran this regularly, but it is probably a task worth running from time to time. In fact, I hope OnePlus builds a notification reminder into this.

On a fitness side, this watch tracks 100+ sport modes and has an enhanced dual-frequency GPS inside. It’ll most definitely track your outdoor activities, like runs or cycling, plus you can connect it to a Peloton or fire up a pre-loaded workout mode.  It even has “professional workout modes” for things like running, where the watch can track fat and carbohydrate consumption based on your heart rate zones, vertical oscillation, stride length and running power, and more. It’s as advanced as some sports watches are in these pro modes.

I came away from testing this watch without the hesitations I’ve had in the past in the fitness and health areas. OnePlus is saying all of the right things about this stuff and is then backing it up with features on the watch. This OnePlus Watch 3 could easily be your go-to health and fitness companion.

Other notes. Those areas above are typically where I put my focus when wearing a smartwatch, but there are some other things here you should know about.

• Wear OS 5 out of the box: OnePlus is including Wear OS 5 out of the box, which is almost the current version of Wear OS. Google recently dropped Wear OS 5.1 on us and is likely to deliver Wear OS 6 here later this year. For now, the OnePlus Watch 3 is current and that’s a good thing. However, OnePlus has admitted to having a questionable wearable update policy that really only means you’ll get two more Wear OS version updates over the life of ownership. I’ll let you decide how much that matters for a $300 watch.
• Find My Device network: This watch is officially supported through Google’s Find My Device network. That means you’ll be able to track its location, play sounds on it to help find it, secure it if lost, etc.
• Connectivity is here: You have NFC on this watch for mobile payments, Bluetooth 5.2, WiFi, and the GPS we talked about earlier.
• It meets durability requirements: For a smartwatch, you shouldn’t have durability concerns here, since we have IP68 water and dust resistance, a 5ATM rating, and military grade durability of MIL-STD-810H.

Anything I don’t like about the OnePlus Watch 3?

For the most part, I have few complaints about this watch. Sure, the size won’t be for everyone, nor will the oHealth app experience, but overall, OnePlus has nailed the most important areas of battery life, performance, design, and fitness/health tracking.

That said, I do have a couple of items that have bugged me while testing. For one, the best charging experience for this watch is with the included charging plate (yes, it’s a PIN/plate system and not wireless) and a OnePlus charging adapter. My first charge wouldn’t even charge the watch when using an Anker desk station I have. I had to dig into a drawer for a OnePlus charger and then it charged in a matter of minutes. That seems like not the best situation if you don’t also own a OnePlus phone.

The vibration motor in this watch is far too soft. I constantly hear devices in my office or house ping or beep or vibrate as a notification comes in to them, yet I rarely feel the vibration on the watch. And yes, I have all of the settings enabled that would ping both, but the vibration motor here, even when cranked to its fullest, is simply not strong. I miss notifications and calls frequently on the watch. And to be honest, I don’t think this is fixable with software.

On a somewhat related note, I’m the type of person who wears a smartwatch to bed for the sleep tracking and also for alarms. I like smartwatches to vibrate on my wrist to wake me up, but this watch can’t really do that the way I like it to. Instead, the included alarm app has no options to turn off sound and will only activate with both sound and vibrations. I don’t like waking up my wife through noisy alarms, which is why I use vibrate-only on every other device. I also installed the Google Clock app, as I know it has options to disable sound for alarms, but then it wouldn’t vibrate at all or I simply missed it over and over because of the vibration softness I mentioned above. Is this a dealbreaker issue? Probably not for most people, but it might be for me.

The final issue is with the lack of cellular connectivity. OnePlus did not include cellular connectivity once again with the OnePlus Watch 3, so if you need a connected watch that can work without your smartphone nearby, you are out of luck here. They are potentially addressing this issue in a future watch, just not on this one.

Ready to buy a OnePlus Watch 3?

The OnePlus Watch 3 is an easy smartwatch to recommend for most people. The fact that its battery can last for close to a week is reason enough, but it excels in performance and its design, plus this is well-equipped in the health/fitness department. I may have some minor gripes with the watch, as I do with just about every product, but this would probably be the Wear OS watch I’d recommend for most people. If I were ranking them, it would probably be this, then the Galaxy Watch Ultra followed by Google’s Pixel Watch.

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