OnePlus CEO Pete Lau took to the OnePlus forums (opens in new tab) to make the reveal himself, writing “we’ve been talking about it for a while, and this time, it is really coming: the OnePlus Watch.”
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Rumors of OnePlus making its own watch go all the way back to 2016, so he’s not wrong — this has been a long time coming. While Lau offered limited details on the company’s fledgling wearable effort, he did respond to one important question from the community, saying that it will not run Wear OS, it will be using a presumably custom real-time operating system (RTOS). This isn’t a shock given the state of Wear OS, but it will mean OnePlus has to sell customers on its entire vision for the wearable from the hardware to the software. The rest of the details were much more nebulous, including “seamless connectivity between OnePlus smartphones, audio peripherals, smartwear devices, and even OnePlus TVs.” None of that really tells us much about the device that one couldn’t naturally assume for any smartwatch being released in 2021. Of course, Lau also touts an “affordable price point,” something one would expect from OnePlus but with the range of pricing on smartwatches today, it doesn’t narrow things down too much. It’s safe to assume the watch will come in less than the $399 price point for the Apple Watch Series 6, but anywhere in the range from $199 to $299 could plausibly be considered affordable. We’ll, of course, be covering the entire OnePlus launch event on March 23, so watch along live starting at 10:00 a.m. EDT (7:00 a.m. PDT) on the OnePlus launch (opens in new tab) site, or if you can’t catch it live we’ll have all of the latest as it’s announced.
