OnePlus Watch 2R – Review

OnePlus has been in the smartwatch game for a few years now but they only came onto my radar with the release of the OnePlus Watch 2 at the beginning of this year at MWC 24. The reason for this is that they released their first smartwatch with Wear OS at its core. previously they had been using proprietary watch software which was not able to take advantage of any of the functionality afforded by the implementation of a proper smart watch OS. I have previously reviewed the OnePlus Watch 2 and I enjoyed my time with it but now is the time to look at its slightly more affordable sibling the OnePlus Watch 2R. Have they gone too far with the cost-cutting or are the changes to get under budget sensible choices?

The only way to find out is to get into the nitty gritty of a Coolsmartphone review!
Hardware and Design

A lot of what we are seeing here in terms of design is very similar to what we have seen previously with the Watch 2. In fact the internals are nearly the same. I have done an unboxing for the Watch 2R and I would encourage you to take a look at this to acclimatise yourself with the specs and refresh your memory.

For the more specifications inclined, here is a comparison of the specs for you.

Spec’s comparison table

So as we can see above there are a lot of similarities between the two watches particularly on the internal hardware. I will just spend a bit of time reviewing the key changes between the two devices.

First up is the most obvious and that is the design, the Watch 2 used an asymmetric design with the right-hand side of the watch having a bulge to it that was reminiscent of the OnePlus 12 camera design. This is where we could find the Home buttons and the lower shortcut buttons. These buttons could be changed in terms of long press functionality as well. There was a lot of speculation that the home button was also going to be opened up to be an actionable rotating crown. This has not happened at the time of writing, and I doubt it will be based on the lack of any new speculation online

The Watch 2R uses a very similar design in that it also uses the dual button setup but it drops the asymmetric design in favour of a more traditional watch style design. This means that the two side buttons now protrude slightly from the watch side. This makes it easier to locate and press. The Home button this time gives no aspirations of being any other than a button which is good to see We also have a slightly differently designed watch band but as this is normally something that is swapped out by the user I am not too concerned by this as both watch straps where comfortable to use long term. The last bit I want to mention is the finish that the casing uses, the Watch 2 has a very shiny and glossy finish which was very prone to be smudged up easily by usage of the watch. On the Watch 2R the casing is now a more matte affair which does make it easier to keep smudge-free. With that, we can actually now move onto a key area of differences and that is the materials used to build the watches