The OnePlus Nord Watch is the company’s second smartwatch and the first to be branded under the affordable Nord line. A rebranded version of another Chinese smartwatch – the Haylou RS4 Plus – the Nord Watch is meant to be an entry-level product for the Indian market, coming in at just ₹4,999.
Visually, the Nord Watch is nearly identical to the RS4 Plus, aside from a different “crown” and strap design. The design appears to be inspired by the Apple Watch, which is not uncommon for entry-level Chinese smartwatches.
The watch case is made of zinc alloy but the back is made of plastic. The display glass is scratch resistant and has slightly curved edges. The straps are attached to the protruding flaps with easy to remove sliding spring bars. The straps are similar to those on the more expensive OnePlus Watch, but with a traditional buckle design. The watch comes in two colors, Deep Blue and Midnight Black (pictured here).
The design of the Nord Watch is rather banal. While not necessarily ugly, it’s completely bland and boring to look at, especially in black.
The clock display is a 1.78-inch AMOLED panel, 368×448 resolution with a 60Hz refresh rate. It’s a good-looking screen with sufficient resolution and adequate brightness outdoors. However, the display lacks automatic brightness adjustment, so you’ll have to do it manually. You also can’t just place your palm on the screen to turn it off like you can on most other wearables and instead have to wait for it to turn itself off.
Another missing feature is an always-on display, at least the kind you normally find on other devices. However, the watch lets you keep the display on for up to 30 minutes. This isn’t the same low-power version you find on other devices, but rather just the regular clock face lit at whatever brightness you set. It somehow achieves its purpose but in an incredibly awkward way.
This is probably a good time to delve into the software. On the watch itself, the device runs something called RTOS. It’s the same kind of glorified fitness device UI we find on other budget “smartwatches,” but with a heavy watchOS inspiration. Regardless, it’s easy enough to navigate, and the watch has good UI performance.
Since this is the rebranded Haylou watch, the companion phone app is also a rebranded Haylou app called N Health. This would be frustrating for existing OnePlus wearable users as the OnePlus Health app used for the OnePlus Watch and OnePlus Band cannot be used for the Nord Watch. The N Health app also forces you to create an account, which, as far as I know, has no reason to. The installation process is also frustrating with a dozen different permissions that need to be enabled before the app is usable.
No health app
Once set up, the app is easy enough to use. There are also a good number of the usual fitness features, including heart rate, sleep, SpO2 and step tracking, although SpO2 tracking only works automatically when you sleep and not during the day. There’s also an option to track women’s health, something that was missing on other OnePlus wearables.
The app also comes with a bunch of watch faces, some of which are even animated. There’s quite a bit of variety here, and more is added via updates, but there’s no way to customize any part of a watch face.
All the inspirations and idiosyncrasies would have been tolerable if at least the software had worked well, but the Nord Watch was extremely buggy in testing. Other than the raise to wake feature not working, the heart rate sensor also stopped working at some point and the fix for both was to reset and reconfigure the watch. In the early days of testing, the map view in the Exercise section of the N Health app was also broken. Workout detection also never seemed to detect anything.
But by far the worst problem was that the Nord Watch wouldn’t track time correctly, something you’d assume a thing with the watch in its name would be able to do. It was consistently 30 minutes behind the current time, and no matter how much the time changed from the paired phone (because there’s no way to change the time on the watch itself or through its app), the time difference has been maintained.
Luckily, I received a second review unit, which didn’t have this problem, and the first watch was eventually fixed with a software update. However, the first time I experienced it, it really blew my mind because I thought I was somehow losing track of time.
The watch also has hardware issues. You can see in the video above that pressing the crown often does nothing as the pusher is apparently broken on one of the watches. The watch also initially had trouble re-pairing with the phone if one of them went out of range. In the end, it just stopped pairing with the phone completely and the app just showed an error saying “The network connection is abnormal, please check and try again”.
After a while, I lost all interest in testing the product. I’m not sure how accurate the fitness features are as apparently you can’t even rely on this watch to show the time correctly. And while the battery life seemed pretty good, it doesn’t matter how long it lasts when it often doesn’t seem to work very well. I also have two, but they both take turns messing up and at no point does it work properly.
In the end, the Nord Watch is a strong rebuttal to the adage “There are no bad products, only bad prices.” Some products are bad regardless of their price, and the Nord Watch is one of them.
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