Wearables vary wildly across different manufacturers and operating systems, but despite this, there’s one thing that remains consistent: they almost never have great battery life.
While “great” can mean a lot, for the purposes of considering a smartwatch with all the bells and whistles, great is typically longer than 3 days. Almost nothing lasts quite that long.
Huawei’s Fit 4 Pro did, albeit sacrificing features, while the Withings ScanWatch models manage to pull a good two weeks in testing thanks to the use of a small screen set inside of a large old school analogue display. Google’s latest Pixel Watch 4 fares better than most of the more obvious competition, but not a single Apple Watch model can comfortably hit beyond two days and still keep its feature set in tact.
That makes Oppo’s recent announcement of a WearOS smartwatch able to hit a good week of battery life a bit of a surprise, covering five days in “smart mode” and closer to two weeks with up to 16 days in the power saving equivalent.
The Oppo Watch X3 is no slouch and doesn’t ease back on the features, bringing a 1.5 inch OLED screen with sapphire glass protection and IP68 water resistance to a titanium body. There’s a Qualcomm Snapdragon inside, which could be where some of those battery life promises are coming from, but it could also be the 632mAh battery, which is almost 100mAh more than the Apple Watch Ultra 2.
There are quite a few sensors here for an assortment of health checks, as well, covering blood pressure, ECG, blood glucose, vascular health, sleep and sleep apnoea, and temperature on the wrist, to name a few.
The Oppo Watch X3 will come in for $699 in two colours, black and titanium grey, and it won’t be Oppo’s only wearable released locally.
You can also expect to see a pair of earphones designed like earrings in the Enco Clip2, a style that feels like it might take a page from what we’ve seen from Bose and Shokz with its earring-styled earbuds, but with some Oppo twists.
For starters, each earbud has two drivers and two digital-to-analogue converters (DACs), with Danish audio specialists Dynaudio tapped to do the fine-tuning of the hardware. We’ve seen Dynaudio’s expertise used in Oppo products previously, and it appears the collaboration is back.
Oppo’s style for the Clip2 is a little different, as well, with a metallic finish compared to the typical plastic look we’ve seen from open audio ear offerings in the past.
You won’t find noise cancellation here, but depending on the look you’re comfortable with, you mightn’t care, with a style that makes the $299 Clip2 more like jewellery than earphone.
