OnePlus Watch 2 India launch has been confirmed.
OnePlus Watch 2 India launch has been confirmed. OnePlus has started teasing its next big smartwatch, successor to 2021’s OnePlus Watch, promising to do it right this time.
The OnePlus Watch, the brand’s first smartwatch boasted of a premium design and killer battery life, but the rest of the package was bordering decent at best. It wasn’t a proper smartwatch per se, to begin with, with functionality more akin to a fitness tracker (OnePlus has continued to make those under the Nord branding). But the real deal-breaker was the buggy software.
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Instead of going for something like a WearOS, OnePlus chose to build its Watch software on top of Real-time OS (RTOS), a bare bones skin you could call barely “smart” enough to do the basics and not just because it did not have any app store, but because it didn’t do enough to compete against the Apple Watch or Samsung’s Galaxy Watches (or even a Fossil).
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Speculation is rife that OnePlus may jump to WearOS with Watch 2, but that’s also a double-edged sword in the current scenario. With Google giving Samsung first dibs at new WearOS versions and features, for some time now, other brands have started to feel the heat. Look what happened to Fossil. It was probably the only legacy brand doing WearOS smartwatches religiously and doing them well enough, until it stopped making sense from a business point of view. You can read our detailed analysis here. But crux of the matter is, it won’t be easy.
The OnePlus Watch 2 was supposed to launch alongside the OnePlus 12 series phones, or at least that is what the expectation was for many people, but now, reports are pointing towards a release window around the upcoming Mobile World Congress 2024 (some say, it will be on February 26). The design has already leaked and what OnePlus is sharing now —however little— seems to corroborate that information. It’s sticking to a round dial with buttons that appear to be jutting out from one end.
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The OnePlus Watch was apparently the “most-requested device” from the OnePlus community, co-founder and CEO Pete Lau had said back in the day. It wasn’t a hit but at least it showed OnePlus’s intent to go beyond smartphones in a big, serious way (the OnePlus Band had come just before it) though, why it stopped doing it is a question for another day. The OnePlus Watch 2 is coming after a 3-year-long hiatus and so, all eyes will be on OnePlus to “do it right.” We’ll see.
