What you need to know
- Oppo Watch is now official.
- It'll be available globally eventually, but it is China-only from March 24.
- And it's very much an Apple Watch for Android.
We've been waiting for Oppo to announce its Oppo Watch and now it's here. Oppo officially announced (opens in new tab) it today, and now we know much more about what it is and what it can do. And as expected, it very much resembles Apple Watch.
As I mentioned earlier this week, this does look very Apple Watch-like, sans a Digital Crown on the side. There are two buttons there instead, but even they manage to look like Apple Watch's Side button.
In terms of similarities, Oppo Watch has an AMOLED screen that's married to an aluminum frame. The glass curves ever-so-slightly with the rear of the watch featuring a ceramic design that houses all of the sensors we'd expect to see from a modern smartwatch. And there are two screen sizes to choose from.
OPPO Watch's flexible hyperboloid display is an innovative design typically reserved for smartphones. The 46mm version features a 1.91-inch AMOLED screen with a 72.76% screen-to-body ratio, 402x476 resolution, and 326ppi density for extra detail. An "ultra-frameless" design makes the most of every millimeter of space, packing in an impressive amount of information.
You get cellular connectivity and heart rate tracking, but you also get something Apple Watch can't boast just yet – sleep tracking. Users can install third-party apps on their Apple Watch and do something similar, but there's no official Apple-built solution. That's a win for Oppo, then.
Ultimately this is as close as Android users have gotten to having something that looks and feels like Apple Watch. Many of the screenshots that have been shown off also look very similar to watchOS. That's a good thing because Android-toting watches haven't had the best interfaces in recent years.
Right now Oppo Watch is set to go on sale in China on March 24. The rest of the world will be getting it, but we don't know when. Or what it will cost. Oddly, that international version of the watch will run Wear OS, so it should work with iPhones. But the Chinese version announced today? That runs ColorOS, so it won't work with your Apple kit.
Fragmentation. You've gotta love it.
Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.
Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.
