I wish this OnePlus Watch 3 feature was on every smartwatch

I’ve been wearing the OnePlus Watch 3 for about three weeks, and throughout that time, I’ve been impressed with it. OnePlus’s newest smartwatch looks fantastic, has an excellent display, and has a rotating crown that interacts with the UI — fixing one of my main complaints about the OnePlus Watch 2.

What’s really surprised me about the OnePlus Watch 3, though, is its health/fitness suite. Thanks to vastly improved heart rate accuracy, more detailed workout stats, and more reliable sleep tracking, the OnePlus Watch 3 is a far better health wearable than I’d anticipated.

Another reason for this is the watch’s Mind and Body feature. In addition to tracking your daily activity, sleep, etc., the OnePlus Watch 3 monitors your overall wellness and rates it as a score. It’s similar to readiness scores we’ve seen on recent Samsung and Google smartwatches but with one significant advantage over them. And it’s become one of my favorite things about the OnePlus Watch 3.

As the name suggests, Mind and Body aims to be a glanceable metric for your … mind and body. It’s rated as a score between 1 and 100, with your score falling into one of four levels:

• Excellent (76-100)
• Good (51-75)
• Moderate (26-50)
• Poor (1-25)

The score is calculated based on your heart rate variability (HRV), resting heart rate, and activity intensity. You get a Mind and Body score as soon as you start wearing the OnePlus Watch 3, but OnePlus notes that the feature improves and gets more accurate the more you wear the watch.

We’ve seen similar features from many other wearables. The Oura Ring has long offered a Readiness score; the Pixel Watch got an updated daily readiness score this past fall, and Samsung launched its Energy Score feature alongside the Galaxy Watch 7 and Galaxy Watch Ultra.

The Mind and Body score on the OnePlus Watch 3 is similar to all of those, though it has a crucial difference that drastically changes how I’ve interacted with it.

Oura, Google, and Samsung all take the same approach to these readiness scores. The score is generated each morning after you wake up, giving you an idea of how ready you are to take on the day.

There’s nothing wrong with this approach, and as someone who’s worn an Oura Ring plus Google and Samsung watches, I find these features quite helpful. However, these scores all have one annoying thing in common: they’re static. The score you get in the morning is the same one you have for the entire day. It’s not meant to tell you how you’re doing at the moment but more to suggest how much your body is capable of for the whole day.

Comparatively, the OnePlus Watch 3’s Mind and Body score does change with you as the day progresses. I wear my OnePlus Watch 3 to bed, and each morning, I have a relatively high score — as would be expected following a full night’s sleep. But that score changes and fluctuates all day long, and I’ve found this approach to be significantly more valuable than those other static scores.

For example, after waking up one morning, I had a respectable 64 score. I then got dressed, walked the dog, unloaded the dishwasher, and did some laundry. My score dipped to 47 and then 40. After doing some chores around my apartment and making dinner one evening, my Mind and Body score was 46. While relaxing on the couch afterward, watching TV and playing some Balatro, my score increased to 55, 64, and then 78.

If you check in on your Mind and Body score regularly and pay attention to how it changes based on what you’re doing, you can actively see how your body is responding. It might seem obvious that running around doing errands would decrease your energy and that taking it easy would improve it, but I like being able to put a number to how I’m feeling.

It also adds some validity to those feelings. I know I feel good having my nightly cup of tea while watching an episode of House Hunters before bed, but it’s encouraging to see my Mind and Body score shoot up into the high 70s when I do. I’ve also realized that losing back-to-back competitive matches of Marvel Rivals can send me below a score of 20.

As much as I’ve enjoyed using the OnePlus Watch 3’s Mind and Body feature, parts of it do feel a little undercooked.

That’s primarily seen with its consistency. Some days, I get regular readings/score updates all day long. Other times, the OnePlus Watch 3 will go hours without updating my score at all. There’s no apparent rhyme or reason for why this happens, and it’s easily the biggest downside of the feature right now.

Additionally, I’d like to see OnePlus offer better insights into how my sleep, activity levels, etc., affect my score. Garmin does a great job in this regard with the Body Battery feature on its watches — clearly indicating how exercises, sleep, and other activities change your Body Battery level. The OnePlus Watch 3 shows how your score changes, but it could do a better job of explaining the cause behind score increases and decreases.

Similarly, I would love better notifications. The OnePlus Watch 3 alerts me if my Mind and Body score drops too low, but that’s the only type of guidance I’ve received. I’d love to get notifications when my score improves or if it’s staying consistent — and to see explanations for why that is.

Although OnePlus didn’t invent the idea of an actively changing body/readiness score (Garmin’s been doing it for years), Mind and Body on the OnePlus Watch 3 is the first such feature I’ve used outside of Garmin’s wearables. I’ve liked seeing Google, Samsung, and other companies take a stab at their own readiness scores, but in practice, those static ones just aren’t as helpful — at least not in my experience.

Because of its ever-changing design, Mind and Body has quickly become one of my favorite health features on the OnePlus Watch 3. It makes me think about my overall well-being in a way that Samsung’s Energy Score does not, and that alone has been a big reason why the OnePlus Watch 3 has stayed on my wrist as long as it has. It’s not perfect, but it’s off to a great start, and I can’t wait to see where it goes from here.