OnePlus has now jumped on to the health band wagon. But, should you wrap it on your wrist?
One plus watch
The OnePlus band is nothing fancy. It looks very simple and non-descript, especially when the screen is turned off. In the box, you get the device, a charging cradle and some documentation. The default band is black and the material used is a matt textured silicone, which feels very nice to touch. If black is not your colour, you can pick up the blue or orange strap for around Rs 400. Bands are easy to swap and the entire unit can be removed as a whole and placed into the replacement strap.
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The main unit of the band doesn’t have any buttons and you have to plug it in to turn it on. I guess, not having a button has its advantages when it comes to dust and water resistance. It has an IP68 rating and is rated for 5ATM, which means the watch is water-resistant till around five atmospheres of pressure, which is approximately 50 metres underwater for 10 minutes. You can wear this to the pool and monitor your laps or probably take it to the desert, thanks to the IP dust rating.
The health band monitors a couple of things including heart rate, blood oxygen levels, sleep and activity. With everything turned on to monitor continuously, the device extracts more than seven days of life from the 100mAh battery. With the recommended settings, I am sure it can easily go more than the 14 days of battery life claimed by OnePlus.
The 1.1-inch AMOLED colour display is bright and offers flexibility with its watch faces. You can also make a custom one if you have a picture at hand. The watch face limit stored within the phone is set at five, so every time you add one, you will have to delete one of the older faces. You can always add more faces from the phone application.
As with any activity band, the most important thing here is the software that helps makes sense of all the metrics collected. The OnePlus Health app does a good job here. It collects data and represents it in an understandable format. With sleep monitoring, it also gives you tips on how you can improve your sleep quality. The continuous blood oxygen monitoring is also very useful and something I haven’t seen in this price range.
There are also a few other software features I liked. The camera shutter controls were very useful. I liked the meditative breathing function as well, but the best function by far is Find Your Phone. It lets you remotely trigger the ringer on your phone from your band, in case you can’t find it.
The charging for the band is a little odd, you have to remove the entire device from the band and stick it in the cradle. The cradle is tiny and has a custom design. So, if you lose it, chances are you will have to buy an entirely new device since I don’t see the cradle for sale separately. It is also annoying to have yet another thing to care for. Fortunately, the great battery life here means that you don’t have to charge it often and for too long. At the very least, I would have preferred a cradle that didn’t have a pre-attached USB cable on it, as it reduces the chance of failure. At just Rs 2,499, the OnePlus Health band offers a lot of functionality. If you are looking for something cheap to monitor your health and don’t mind the cradle, you can’t go wrong with this.
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