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After bringing in a few fitness trackers over the past few years, smartphone manufacturer OPPO has decided to introduce a full fledged smartwatch locally. Called the Watch X, this smartwatch runs on Google’s Wear OS, one of the few watches in South Africa to do so. Wear OS allows users to stay connected to their Google apps through the Watch X, meaning you get to navigate with Google Maps, pay with Google Pay and get all the extras benefits from Google Assistant and Google Play.

The Watch X is available for R 5999 right now in SA. For that price you receive a large 1.43-inch AMOLED display with 326 PPI resolution and up to 60 Hz refresh rate, protected by a 2.5D sapphire crystal cover for greater scratch and fingerprint resistance. It’s housed in a rugged stainless steel chassis while the buttons and the middle frame are integrated to give the watch its sturdy yet lightweight structure, OPPO states. 

The use of two separate antennas for each GPS signal (L1 and L5) further improves the precision and reliability of positioning for users when running, cycling, hiking or exercising in environments with poor GPS coverage.

There’s also automatic sports recognition onboard, with the ability to identify when the wearer is walking, running, cycling, swimming or using a rowing machine. And for runners, the Watch X adds running posture recognition, detecting a runner's ground contact time (GCT), balance between the left and right foot GCT, step frequency, stride length, in real time and in both indoor and outdoor environments.

Also health features

On the health side, OPPO Watch X includes sleep tracking, which takes care of tracking sleep breathing rate, sleep blood oxygen level, baseline heart rate, snoring, body movement and other sleep behaviour, even if it’s just a nap.

OPPO notes underlying improvements in data measurement on the Watch X are a more accurate 8-channel heart rate sensor and a 16-channel blood oxygen sensor, through which users can monitor their heart rate, blood oxygen saturation levels and other information. Watch X can also monitor stress levels over a given time period by calculating heart rate variability (HRV). 

The Watch X features a large 500mAh battery and VOOC Flash Charging, able to fully charge the device in just 60 minutes or provide an additional 24 hours of use in as little as 10 minutes, according to the company.

Driving the high endurance on Watch X is OPPO’s proprietary dual-engine architecture with two separate chipsets: the Snapdragon W5 Gen 1 SOC and the BES2700 MCU, which works in tandem with Wear OS’s hybrid interface. Doing so, Watch X is able to provide up to 100 hours of fully active battery life when in the full-featured Smart Mode, and up to 12 days of standby time in Power Saver Mode, according to OPPO.

Talking about the launch of the OPPO Watch X, Bradley Young, Training Manager at OPPO South Africa states, “I’m super excited that we’re bringing in the fully-fledged Watch X smartwatch to South Africa. it's going to be one of the few, if any, smartwatches in the country running Google's Wear OS, meaning much cleaner integration with the Google ecosystem.

Further new products coming to South Africa…

Talking about upcoming releases, Young notes OPPO South Africa might hold back on the recently introduced Enco Air3 Pro noise cancellation earbuds, and so too on the new N3 range of foldables. Similarly, the latest Reno11 smartphone will be skipped, instead OPPO South Africa is opting for the next Reno model (supposedly the Reno12), to be released locally in the second half of the year.  

However, coming soon to South Africa is the OPPO Pad Neo, a 11.4” tablet that supports 4G LTE. This tablet makes for an interesting option, offering a 2.4K (2408x1720) ReadFit screen with a 90 Hz refresh rate, quad speakers, a substantial 8000mAh battery and the MediaTek Helio G99 chipset, all housed in a 538g Space Grey body. Young notes the OPPO Pad Neo tablet will arrive in South Africa still during the first half of the year, with a tentative price of just below R7 000.