The OPPO Watch S is a health-focused smartwatch that punches well above its weight.
It brings a stainless steel build, a bright AMOLED display, ECG monitoring, dual-band GPS, and up to 10 days of battery life, all in one of the slimmest packages on the market.
If you're after a serious daily wearable that looks premium, tracks your health comprehensively, and doesn't need charging every night, the Watch S is a great option.
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Price & Competition
At $399, the OPPO Watch S sits at the upper end of the mid-range smartwatch category.
It’s most direct competition are the $378 FitBit Versa 4 and the OnePlus Watch 2R which costs $399.
The Watch S offers ECG monitoring, dual-band GPS, a stainless steel build, and up to 10 days of battery life.
Design & Build
At just 8.9mm thick and weighing just 35g, it's one of the slimmest and lightest smartwatches out there. It’s comfortable, you can easily wear it all day, and it’s unobtrusive so it’s not annoying during workouts, and while sleeping. The best thing about the design though is it looks very premium, in fact it looks a lot more expensive than it is.
It comes in two colour options, Phantom Black and Silver Gleam and two strap options a black fluororubber that's water and sweat resistant and a breathable woven strap that's quick-drying and better suited to everyday wear. For this review I was given the Silver Gleam version with the woven strap and it’s very comfortable.
When it comes to durability, it’s tough in all the right areas. It has a 5 ATM water resistance rating, rated to 50 metres, and it also holds an IP68 rating for dust and water resistance. OPPO claims it has passed military-grade durability testing as well, so It’s built to handle everyday life, which is exactly what you want from a fitness oriented watch.
Display
The 1.46-inch round AMOLED display is one of the device's highlights. It’s one of the sharpest and brightest screens in this price range. Running at a 464 x 464 resolution and 317 PPI, it's crisp and detailed, and the AMOLED technology delivers deep blacks and vivid colour reproduction which makes it look really good.
The default brightness sits at 600 nits, which is clear and readable in most everyday conditions, and there’s a high brightness mode which pushes it up to 1,500 nits for stronger outdoor light.
The headline figure here is the 3,000 nits peak brightness capability. This activates automatically during workout modes when strong sunlight is detected. You can’t set this manually, but that puts the Watch S on par with the Apple Watch Ultra 3, which is excellent at this price point, it also means outdoor visibility during exercise is pretty much guaranteed.
It supports an always-on display mode as well, but like any watch, that does reduce battery life, more on that below.
Health & Wellness
This is where the Watch S is at its best. The sensor package here competes with the bst-of-the-best.. There’s an 8-channel optical heart rate sensor, a 16-channel optical blood oxygen sensor, ECG electrodes, and a wrist temperature sensor.
It delivers continuous heart rate monitoring, all-day SpO2 tracking, and wrist temperature trend data. And my favourite feature is the 60-Second Wellness Overview which pulls together your heart rate, blood oxygen, stress level, temperature, and sleep history into a single snapshot in under a minute. It’s a nice concise way to get an idea of how you’re doing.
While sleeping, it monitors deep, light, and REM sleep stages alongside respiratory rate, sleep SpO2, and it generates a sleep score with improvement suggestions. There's even a snoring risk assessment built in.
There’s also a Mind and Body Evaluation feature, which tracks stress levels and offers guided breathing exercises, alongside a cycle tracker and fall detection.
This is a lot, and they all work really well. It’s a great range of features that are useful and thanks to the impressive battery, you can actually use all of them, notably the sleep tracker, as it doesn’t require a daily charge, more on that below.
Fitness & Sports
For fitness tracking, it goes further than passive health monitoring. Over 100 sports modes are supported, with six, including running, cycling, swimming, and rowing, recognised automatically without needing to manually start a workout.
The watch uses dual-band L1+L5 GPS with support for GPS, BeiDou, Galileo, GLONASS, and QZSS satellite systems which makes it very accurate for tracking runs and exercise.
As is usually the case with these devices, running gets the most depth. During a run it tracks fat-burn zones, running posture, and, for more serious runners, estimates lactate threshold and VO2 max. These are metrics that typically require dedicated sports watches costing considerably more, so it’s very nice to have them here.
Racket sport players are also well catered for, with professional analytics available for tennis and badminton. Worn on the racket hand, the watch tracks shot distribution, swing speed, and heart rate zones throughout a match, giving you a performance breakdown that goes well beyond a simple calorie count.
Battery Life
Battery life is one of the best things about the Watch S. OPPO claims up to 10 days on a charge with standard settings, but a more realistic figure is around 7 days for active users doing regular GPS workouts.
In my time with it I had to charge it roughly once-a-week and that was with run tracking, health monitoring, notifications, and tracking my sleep each night all turned on. It’s really impressive and a genuine game changer not having to charge it overnight. If you enable the always-on display, that drops to around 4 days, which is still pretty good.
What really sets it apart though is VOOC 2.0 fast charging. Ten minutes on the charger delivers approximately a full day of use, and a complete charge takes under 90 minutes. In practice, it means running out of battery isn’t much of a problem, a quick charge while you get ready in the morning is all it takes to keep things topped up.
Smart Features & Connectivity
Beyond health and fitness, the Watch S handles the day-to-day smartwatch duties well. Bluetooth 5.2 keeps it connected to your phone, and Bluetooth calling means you can answer, dial, and take calls directly from your wrist. Notification mirroring brings calls, messages, emails, and app alerts from your phone as well. NFC is on board for contactless payments, and 4GB of onboard storage is available for offline music.
One genuinely useful feature is cross-OS dual-phone pairing, the Watch S can connect to two phones simultaneously, whether that's two Android devices or one Android and one iPhone, which makes it a strong option for anyone carrying a work and personal phone.
It’s important to know though that this doesn’t support Watch OS. Which means, you cannot install your own personal apps like Spotify, Strava (which is a big one) and Google Maps. OPPO has done its best to provide workarounds, like putting music on the device manually, using its own workout tracking system and more, but if you’re set on certain apps, you won’t be able to get them here which could be a problem.
Users pairing the Watch S with an OPPO or OnePlus device, running ColorOS 15 or OxygenOS 15, unlock a couple of additional features: short video playback control for scrolling through TikTok and YouTube Shorts from the wrist, and a camera remote. For everyone else, the full health, fitness, and connectivity experience is available through the OHealth companion app on both Android and iOS.
Verdict
The OPPO Watch S is one of the most impressive smartwatches you can buy at this price. The stainless steel build feels premium, the display is best-in-class, the health sensors rival devices costing twice as much, and the battery life is a game changer.
The one thing holding it back from being an outright slam dunk is the lack of WearOS. No Spotify, no Strava, no Google Maps on your wrist, and that will matter to some people. But for the vast majority of users, what OPPO has built in more than covers the bases.
If you want a premium daily wearable that takes health seriously, lasts the week, and looks great doing it, the OPPO Watch S is a great option.
