OnePlus is getting back into the smartwatch game

OnePlus is making another run at a smartwatch with its Watch 2. The company claims in an announcement that the new watch will have up to 100 hours of battery life and said it will come in black and silver colors. It says it will share more at Mobile World Congress this Sunday, February 25th.

The new watch has a stainless steel chassis and sapphire crystal watchface and will feature “meticulous health monitoring.” The 100-hour battery life claim requires what it’s calling “Smart Mode,” which presumably is just a weird way of saying “low-power mode.”

OnePlus wants to be an “ecosystem builder.”

Image: OnePlus

That’s actually less battery life than the first OnePlus smartwatch, which made it about 10 days during The Verge’s review back in 2021. But part of the reason that watch could go so far was because it just didn’t do much. The watch had no third-party app support, no voice assistant, and in our testing, bad fitness tracking. But it’s not like 100 hours is bad battery life — after all, the Apple Watch Ultra 2 is a battery champ, and the most it can do is 60 hours in low-power mode.

The Watch 2 has a lot to make up for. Our own Victoria Song suggested it was so bad that it ruined her birthday when she reviewed it for Gizmodo in 2021. OnePlus president Kinder Liu acknowledged its bad watch in the announcement, saying the company took a “reflective pause” afterward and that it’s now trying to “transform from ‘Flagship Killer’ to “Ecosystem builder.’” Given the shorter battery life, hopefully that means it’ll be much more of a, you know, smart watch.

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