OnePlus Watch Harry Potter Edition

Always the stickler for details, OnePlus has ensured that for Potterheads, the experience begins from the unboxing process. A beautiful brick-wall box with the Hogwarts seal encases the Watch itself and it comes with an exclusive start-up screen, using a wand effect and even some cool watch faces to represent the four different houses of Hogwarts. There are a couple of bonus watch faces too, featuring the castle and the Hogwarts emblem but they are only active watch faces and cannot be selected as the Always-On watch face.

There’s another selection of specific dials only for that purpose and honestly, they are pretty smart too! The leather strap, embossed with an ‘H’ logo is of extremely high quality and feels supple on the skin and along with the bronzed dial and blackness of the AMOLED screen give it a really striking look that is both luxurious and avant-garde. The leather strap though isn’t suited well to workouts or water-based activities, even though the Watch is 5ATM and IP68 rated so you might want to keep a spare sports strap, although swapping isn’t as quick as an Apple Watch, you can potentially have a much wider pool to choose from.

As before, the design, materials and comfort on the OnePlus Watch are top notch. The large 46mm round display is bright and crisp with supreme touch response and feel. The haptic engine isn’t as nuanced as the Apple Watch and the platform has limited functionality too, but in terms of price, it also undercuts the Apple Watch or Samsung Galaxy Watch by a considerable margin. Some omissions have been fixed from the earlier edition, like the inclusion of a camera shutter control, but you don’t get a preview that acts as a viewfinder on the watch screen and the camera app on the phone has to be on for it to work, but it’s a start.

There are more than a 100 different exercise routines available but like before, there is no way to go back to the home screen while a workout is on and even to see the time, you have to go back one screen. This could’ve been an easy fix. A clear brownie point for the OnePlus Watch Harry Potter Edition is the outstanding battery life, just like the regular edition. Over a week between charges is easily possible even with the always-on display, packing in a mild workout everyday and listening to music with connected Bluetooth buds. The built-in storage allows you to use about 2GB for music from the available 4GB of total available space and it’s nice to go phoneless for a run but since it doesn’t have eSIM support, it can’t be used for phone-free voice calls. Presets let you respond to text messages and it’s a limited situation again.

For a deeper dive into the OnePlus Watch, read our full review here. Since this is just an “edition” update, the only real new features are the cosmetic and visual changes. OnePlus tries to bring some ecosystem integration to the table, so if you have a OnePlus TV or smartphone, there are advantages over another Android device, but it is strictly not compatible with iOS. The Harry Potter edition will serve as a great gift for Potterheads but it still bodes well as an amped-up fitness band instead of a full-blown smartwatch.