This is the Oppo Watch Free, and while it has "Watch" in the name, it's more like a fitness band that comes with a larger than average screen and offers plenty of smart features at a price of ₹5,999.
Design & Display
The Oppo Watch Free is only available in one colour--Black, which makes it look pretty simple and similar to most other fitness bands out there. Build quality is solid, and the materials used for the strap are also soft to the touch and quite flexible.
The display unit is encased in a matte finish housing, and if you flip it over, you'll see the various sensors for measuring things like heart rate and blood oxygen levels, along with the pins for charging the device.
The Oppo Watch Free is 5ATM Water-proof, which means it can be taken to a swimming pool without an issue. It's also really lightweight, measuring in at around 33g, so you'll barely notice it on your wrist.
The display itself is a large 1.64-inch AMOLED screen, even bigger than rivals like the Huawei Band 6 and Honor Band 6, and records a better pixels-per-inch ratio of around 326. The screen also gets an ambient light sensor, so it can manage its brightness automatically--a very handy feature.
It supports both touch and swipe gestures, which is good, because there's absolutely no buttons anywhere on the Oppo Watch Free. How that affects daily operation is something I'll talk about a bit later.
Features & Functions
The Oppo Watch Free is packed to the hilt with useful features at this price point. It can track your heart rate in real-time, and charts it for you on a day-to-day basis. You can also track your Blood Oxygen levels in real-time, but unfortunately that's only available for when you're asleep.
Speaking of sleeping, you can measure your sleep with the Watch Free, and it can automatically detect whether you're asleep or awake.
You can also track over 100 different kinds of workouts, including exercises like Rowing Machine, Strength Training, and much, much more. It's worth noting though, that the Oppo Watch Free doesn't get GPS, so it'll rely on your connected smartphone to get its GPS data for tracking outdoor runs.
The device runs on a proprietary operating system, so there's no support for third-party apps, and the lack of a speaker and mic means there's no support for calling on the Oppo Watch Free.
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Performance & Battery Life
The Watch Free was quite surprising in terms of performance, mostly due to its extremely touch responsive screen. Any touch or swipe gesture was smooth and quick, with UI animations responding very quickly. Accidental touches were few and far between, thanks to the large screen size.
In terms of accuracy, the step counter was pretty spot on with my daily count every time I decided to test it. The heart rate monitor was also mostly accurate, although the device does recommend you wear it lower than your wrist bone for better results. I will admit, though, that while it seemed to record sedentary heart levels just fine, it wasn't all that quick at keeping up with fluctuating heart rates during a workout session.
The SpO2 monitor was also somewhat similar, with mostly parallel readings as a pulse oximeter, but subject to fluctuation based on things like how much arm hair you have. It's a useful feature to have in a pinch, sure, but I'd still recommend using specialised equipment for such measurements.
On the other hand, Sleep Tracking was far more accurate. Not only was the automatic sleep detection feature consistently able to recognise when I dozed off, it correctly detected when I woke and stopped sleep tracking on every occasion. I also like that apart from tracking just your regular sleep, the Watch Free can also track REM sleep cycles and your snoring habits.
In terms of Battery Life, the Oppo Watch Free is rated to last 14 days, but if you turn on real-time heart rate tracking and constant SpO2 monitoring, you're likely to eat into that battery life much faster. In my usage, the Watch easily lasted me over a week, even with all possible functions turned on.
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User Interface
As I mentioned before, the Oppo Watch Free runs on a proprietary OS, and misses out on physical buttons. This makes navigating the user interface a bit clunky, because it's all a series of swipe and touch gestures, and no quick way to return home from any function.
While the screen is super responsive to use and offers smooth animations, but a home button, whether physical or capacitive would have certainly helped make it easier to navigate the user interface.
Navigation aside, you can spruce up your experience of the Oppo Watch Free by choosing from a wide selection of Watch Faces, some of which have complications for activity tracking. It is worth mentioning though, that the device only holds space for seven Watch Faces at any given time, so you're going to have to pick carefully, or change things using the partner app.
App Connect - HeyTap Health
Oppo's HeyTap Health app is available for both iOS and Android, and helps monitor all the various metrics the Watch Free can track.
The main dashboard holds all of your important information like Daily Activity, Heart Rate history, SpO2 history and Workout Records.
You can also use the Fitness tab to trigger a run and track your route using the connected device. Watch Faces can be changed from the Manage tab, where you can also update the band, change notification settings and modify the frequency of heart-rate and SpO2 monitoring.
In the interest of transparency, I have to admit that the app didn't always give me a great experience, and I faced frequent disconnections from the band. At times, the device would be connected to my smartphone, but the app would still say it wasn't connected, and refuse to update my information or let me control the band.
Now Oppo has said this problem can be addressed differently on different devices, and on the smartphone I used, it required me to keep the app locked at all times, and remove all background restrictions. This did seem to help, but the disconnection issue didn't go away completely during my usage.
I'm hoping that this is an issue with just the app that Oppo can fix with a future update.
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Price & Verdict
At ₹5,999, there's not a lot more you can ask for from a fitness tracker, and on most counts, the Oppo Watch Free delivers. While there is room for improvement in some areas, I still think it offers a promising feature set if all you need is a smart wearable with a lightweight form-factor, plenty of functions and a large display.
