Oppo Watch Free Review: Fitness Tracker And Smartwatch Combine To Create A Fierce Contender
Oppo is a Chinese company known for manufacturing Android smartphones and accessories. Most of the top products are budget or mid-range devices, and the Oppo Watch Free fits well into this niche, sitting in the middle of three products in Oppo's lineup.
Oppo Watch and Oppo Band are on either side and priced accordingly. However, the Oppo Watch Free costs £89, putting it in the region of the Fitbit Inspire 3, probably its closest competitor in the fitness tracker market.
It's also around £40 cheaper than the Huawei Watch Fit 2 and has no real peer in the world of smartwatches, which typically cost under £60 or over £100.
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opposite)Design-wise, the watch looks like a cross between a smartwatch and a fitness tracker, which is fitting given how it works.
It's available in vanilla or black, weighs just 33 grams, and has a breathable silicone strap that's comfortable for everyday use, sleep, and sports.
The screen is a bright AMOLED display with a resolution of 280 x 456 and a size of 1.64 inches. It's buttonless, which is both a plus and a minus: you can't accidentally press something that's not there, but sometimes you can lose a button if your hands get wet.
It comes with a 230mAh battery, which I think will last around 10 days with average use, and is charged with a dedicated 500mA charging station included.
You'll have to hand it over to Oppo, the Watch Free looks sleek and stylish, and is surprisingly comfortable. Although it's almost entirely plastic, it doesn't feel cheap or plastic.
The screen has variable brightness, but is bright enough to see even on a sunny day. Additionally, the watch can monitor heart rate, blood oxygen levels, and sleep. It also has a feature that analyzes your sleep disturbances.
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opposite)The watch is waterproof up to 5 atm and does not have NFC but Bluetooth 5.0. The lack of NFC is unfortunate, as it enables things like contactless payments, easy device pairing, and getting on and off public transport (like the London Underground).
Since there are no buttons, rely on the wake-up function to turn on the screen or touch the screen.
The alarm clock function works perfectly: raise your wrist to look at the watch face and it will wake you up almost instantly. This is disabled when you put the watch to sleep, meaning you have to tap the screen to wake the watch.
Oppo Watch Free as a smartwatch
Navigating the watch is quite easy. Swiping right takes you to the menu, and swiping left lets you scroll through things like sleep reports and heart rate. You can swipe up to accept notifications or swipe down to access settings.
It's actually very user-friendly and follows a similar system to Apple Watch and Fitbit, making it easy to migrate from those models.
The watch is pretty customisable, you can change the obvious things like light and vibration settings, but you can also completely customize the watch face.
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Stefan Miesz)Oppo has a good selection of faces, but you can't download new faces directly from the watch; You must use the Hey Tap Health app to download and sync your watch.
The synchronization process not only for watch faces but also for sleep reports and health data is one of the areas where the Oppo Watch Free falls behind other devices. It's slow and clunky and sometimes it completely fails. The watch face can take about three minutes to sync and will stop completely on most devices when you exit the app.
Other than that, the app works as expected. It doesn't look great, but it gives you all the information you need at a glance and offers customization for displaying devices.
The watch also offers Find My Phone and weather updates, as well as alarms, a flashlight (which makes the screen extra bright) and the ability to take photos remotely from your phone.
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opposite)Oppo Watch Free as a fitness tracker
As for the fitness features, I was very impressed with the accuracy of the step count and heart rate monitor.
Fitness watches have a bad reputation when it comes to counting steps, early versions of watches like the Fitbit are easily tricked into waving your hand up and down.
This wasn't the case with the Oppo Watch Free - try as I might, I couldn't fool the watch. Also, I went for a walk and counted 500 steps (surprisingly cathartic to be honest) and saw that the watch counted 503, less than 1% error.
It was also important for me to measure my heart independently and compare it with the clock.
The watch did a good job: I measured my resting heart rate at 64, where the watch read 67. I measured 86 going fast and the clock read 84.
But when I clicked, it wasn't very accurate: I counted my heart rate around 150 when I was exercising hard, where the clock was between 130 and 160.
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Stefan Miesz)While that might sound negative, it's actually better than I expected: I've never really thought about heart rate watches, but the Oppo Watch Free certainly comes close to the ballpark in most normal uses.
Sleep was another story as the watch did not live up to expectations.
For starters, the watch seems to rely on you to tell you when you're sleeping and when you're awake: I once put the watch to sleep at 10 p.m. because a group chat was particularly heated, and I noticed that was taken into account. the day after the hour. 10:00 p.m. to 11:00 a.m. to be a "light sleeper", in fact I was sitting quietly playing video games during this time.
On the other hand, it's a little better: when I woke up at 7 a.m., but stayed in bed and didn't fall asleep, the watch vaguely recognized that I was awake, exception of a gap between "awake" and "awakened". Recorded in "Light Sleep".
I can't vouch for its accuracy throughout the night, but it makes the difference between light sleep, deep sleep, and REM sleep.
However, REM sleep tracking is not enabled by default because it uses more battery. But you can easily enable it in the settings.
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opposite)Oppo Watch Free offers a workout menu with different options like walking, running, free exercise, swimming, and cycling.
The watch also offers run assistance, which means you can choose between interval runs and endurance runs and guide you through your ride.
Plus, it does the obvious: calories burned, heart rate, SpO2, and more. summarizes the session during and after the training.
Free Oppo Watch Verdict - 3/5
The Oppo Watch Free is a great little smartwatch - it looks great and has decent battery life. It's also lightweight, comfortable, and has many of the features you'd expect from a watch like this.
Unfortunately, it does have some downsides, particularly the accuracy of sleep tracking and high-intensity heart rate tracking. The app is also clunky and somewhat basic, with many features turned off by default to save battery life.
It doesn't break the mould, but it's smart, stylish and functional, making it a decent, if a bit plain, smartwatch that fits in well in any price range.
The Oppo Watch Free is available now from Argos for £89.00
