The newly-unveiled Oppo Watch borrows heavily from the Apple Watch. But this China-based company nevertheless built in some features that fans of Apple’s wearable can appreciate.
1. Bigger screen
One version of the first Oppo Watch has a 1.91-inch (48.5mm) screen. That tops the largest Apple Watch Series 5 model, which is 1.78 inches (44mm).
And Oppo didn’t accomplish this by making a gargantuan wrist computer. Instead, it uses slimmer bezels, giving the device a 72.76% screen-to-body ratio. Apple’s offering is approximately 60.0%.
Also, the newer wearable has a curved glass crystal.
2. Thinner
Speaking of not making the Oppo Watch unwieldy, it is a slender 0.18 inches (4.5mm) thick.
That makes the 0.42 inch (10.7mm) thickness of the latest Apple model seem chunky.
3. Longer battery life
One way to shave off the size of any mobile device is put in an inadequate battery. But apparently not in this case — Oppo claims its wrist computer can go for 40 hours on a single charge. And a switch to Power Saver Mode and use time supposedly reaches 21 days.
It manages this with two processors: a Snapdragon chip and an Apollo chip. Just keep in mind that low-power mode offers only basic functions such as notifications.
Apple promises 18 hours of use with its wearable, less than half as long as Oppo’s Smart Mode.
4. Sleep monitoring
Oppo‘s wrist computer can “monitor sleep quality, generating a sleep report of the user’s duration of deep sleep, light sleep, and awake time,” according to its manufacturer.
This isn’t a built-in feature of the rival Apple Watch. Yet. But there‘s evidence it’ll be coming in the future. In the mean time, there are third-party sleep-tracking applications aplenty.
5. Style-matching AI
This is more of a nifty feature than anything world shaking but Oppo promises that its “style-matching AI watch face can generate a wallpaper that matches a photo of the user’s outfit, inventing a stylish new look every day.”
There are many Apple Watch faces, and the colors for many of these can be modified to match the user’s preferences. But none are as sophisticated as an artificial intelligence helping to choose the best hues.
Theory vs.reality
The Oppo Watch is scheduled to launch in China on March 24 for 1,499 Chinese Yuan (about $216), but won‘t be available in the rest of the world until later in the year. That means all that’s known about it is what its maker announced today. Whether this wearable will live up to these promises is anyone’s guess.
Plus, it has some features Apple definitely shouldn‘t steal. The most obvious of these is that the first generation models use the Android-based ColorOS Watch system. That’s not even Google’s struggling Wear OS; it’s even more obscure.
And the product faces very tough competition. Apple Watch makes up about half of all smartwatch shipments, with shipments up 36% last year to 30.7 million units.
Source: Oppo
