Oppo Watch X Review: The Battery King

The Oppo Watch X’s standout feature amongst a sea of WearOS devices is its long-lasting battery.

Pros	Cons
Great Battery Life	Custom charging rather than USB-C or Qi
Lots of WearOS apps and customisations available	Few are specific just to the Oppo Watch X
Simple and easy to use design	Only one size option

Score: 4/5

In this review

Oppo Watch X Specifications
Oppo Watch X Design
Oppo Watch X Performance
Oppo Watch X Battery
Oppo Watch X Conclusion

I’m a big fan of smart wearables, and have been for some years. The reality here is that this is a well-established category where large scale changes really aren’t happening all that much. What tends to happen is that new models are iterations on what’s gone before, and that’s absolutely the case for most WearOS devices, where Google’s control over the OS means that there’s a number of watches that can and do all essentially act alike.

The Oppo Watch X doesn’t avoid that particular issue – and of course in some ways it’s a strength of the model if you want to move from one WearOS device to another – instead standing out partially due to its size, and mostly due to its genuinely good battery life.

Also read:
Fitbit Charge 6 Review
Pixel Watch 2 Review
Samsung Galaxy Watch6 Classic Review

Design

You can’t really miss the Oppo Watch X, because as smartwatches go, it’s a big critter.

Available in either “Platinum Black” or “Mars Brown” – the core differences there being strap colour and whether the side bezels are black or silver – the Oppo Watch only ships in the one size, with a 1.43 inch AMOLED display ringed with a fairly minimal bezel. It’s a big timepiece, and that may be an issue for some users. On my own (admittedly thin) wrists, it does feel like it stands out quite a lot.

The display being that large does allow for a lot of space for a variety of watch faces, including a number that bear specific Oppo branding. I’m not crash hot on that as an idea – why carry around advertising with you? – but of course you’re not stuck with just Oppo’s watch faces, as this is a wearOS device, and there’s pretty much a watch face to suit every style available to download.

Screen brightness tops out at 600 nits – with a future software update promising a high brightness mode available “within” 2024. This isn’t the brightest of smartwatches, although given that your interactions with smart wearables tend to be measured more in seconds than minutes, it’s not a super critical issue in most circumstances that I encountered during my review period.

In terms of controls, it’s touchscreen enabled as you’d expect, as well as incorporating a dial/button on the right for opening the app drawer, above a customisable button that by default takes you to workouts. The actions of either buttons are configurable in settings, though oddly while the dial rotates, it won’t scroll through the app drawer list, which is an odd choice.

Performance

The Oppo Watch X runs on a Snapdragon W5 Gen 1 processor with 2GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage, a recipe that’s not particularly unique to Oppo to speak of.

The benefit here is that for essential smartwatch functions, the Snapdragon W5 Gen 1 is more than powerful enough, and the use of WearOS as distinct from any custom smartwatch OS means that there’s plenty of Android apps that have WearOS companion apps available, or in some cases outright smartwatch apps.

The reality here is that if you’ve used one WearOS device at a software level it’s going to feel largely identical across the board. Great for switching up devices over time, naturally, but not a factor that “sells” the Oppo Watch X as the one to buy.

Oppo’s pitch here is that the Oppo Watch X will stand out thanks to the many sports and health tracking features built into it. The claim here is that over 100 sports are tracked, with the option for automatic tracking for selected workouts.

No, I haven’t tested all 100 out – I’m mostly a street runner, so that’s what I personally focused on – but if you did want to track your badminton or rugby games, it’s theoretically possible to do so.

Some of the metrics are a tad limited, however; while I didn’t play a game of cricket (a sport within that list of more than 100) during my review period, firing it up as a workout showed that it’s only tracking heart rate and estimated calorie burn, not whether your bowling action is on point or if you were in fact outside the crease or anything like that.

For my own running activities, the Oppo Watch X performed well once it had worked out its GPS lock. The claim here is that it should be able to automatically detect that I’m working out, and that did work once I’d done one run where I manually started, though GPS tracking wasn’t quite as sharp as with other devices. As always the benefit here is really around constant metrics, so accuracy does matter.

On the more direct health tracking front, the basics are covered such as heart rate, sleep tracking and blood oxygen, but more advanced sensors for tracking features like ECG – which you can get on (for example) Samsung’s Galaxy Wear devices – is notably absent.

The Oppo Watch X is a WearOS device, which means you’re in Android-only territory. Oppo does have its own health tracking app, OHealth, which gives you a basic rundown of activity – but again I’m using the term basic because it doesn’t include much in the way of integration with other fitness apps or services, or gamification by way of challenging you against other users.

Battery

The Oppo Watch X packs in a 500mAh battery behind its frame. While that number might seem small in the sense of smartwatches, where you’d expect maybe 10x that much, for wearables it puts it in the upper tier of battery capacities… and that has some very positive effects when it comes to overall battery life.

On average during my review period of a couple of weeks with the Oppo Watch X, it’s managed at least 4-5 days with an always-on display and with me deliberately ignoring its pleas to enter battery saving states when it got low on power. For a feature-poor sports wearables – your hiking watches and the like – that’s not a good figure, but for a full WearOS device, it’s exceptional.

While I love the Oppo Watch X’s battery life, I don’t love its charging solution, which relies on a custom charger with pogo pins that connects up to a USB-C cable, both of which you’ll find in the box. What you won’t find there is any included charger, so you’ll have to provide your own. It’s a pity that the Oppo Watch X doesn’t use inductive Qi charging, or for that matter direct USB-C connectivity, because if you do mislay or break the custom charger, you’re not going to be able to charge it up again.

Despite not including a charger, the Oppo Watch X claims to support Oppo’s faster “VOOC” charging, though not its “SuperVOOC” variant. That feels to me more like a marketing claim than a real world one, given the lack of charger means you could plug it into some quite variable rate chargers or USB sockets for that matter.

Oppo’s claim is that 10 minutes of charging is good for around 24 hours of usage, which has mostly tracked during my review period. A full charge, as per Oppo will take 60 minutes – but again that’s going to depend on the rate that the charger it’s plugged into can supply.

Oppo Watch X: Alex’s Verdict

The Oppo Watch X’s best selling point is its battery life. That’s crucial for any smart wearable, because the longer you can keep it on your wrist rather than on a charger, the longer you can use and enjoy it.

It gets the WearOS basics right, and while it’s not a standout in those areas – especially if you need more advanced health tracking metrics – for most users it’s going to be enough of a smartwatch to fill their needs.