To strap or not to strap?

The OnePlus band is nothing fancy It looks very simple and nondescript especially when the screen is turned off In the box you get the device a charging cradle and some documentation The default band is black and the material used is a matt textured silicone which feels very nice to touch If black is not your colour you can pick up the blue or orange strap for around Rs 400 Bands are easy to swap and the entire unit can be removed as a whole and placed into the replacement strapThe main unit of the band doesnrsquot have any buttons and you have to plug it in to turn it on I guess not having a button has its advantages when it comes to dust and water resistance It has an IP68 rating and is rated for 5ATM which means the watch is waterresistant till around five atmospheres of pressure which is approximately 50 metres underwater for 10 minutes You can wear this to the pool and monitor your laps or probably take it to the desert thanks to the IP dust ratingThe health band monitors a couple of things including heart rate blood oxygen levels sleep and activity With everything turned on to monitor continuously the device extracts more than seven days of life from the 100mAh battery With the recommended settings I am sure it can easily go more than the 14 days of battery life claimed by OnePlusThe 11inch AMOLED colour display is bright and offers flexibility with its watch faces You can also make a custom one if you have a picture at hand The watch face limit stored within the phone is set at five so every time you add one you will have to delete one of the older faces You can always add more faces from the phone applicationAs with any activity band the most important thing here is the software that helps makes sense of all the metrics collected The OnePlus Health app does a good job here It collects data and represents it in an understandable format With sleep monitoring it also gives you tips on how you can improve your sleep quality The continuous blood oxygen monitoring is also very useful and something I havenrsquot seen in this price rangeThere are also a few other software features I liked The camera shutter controls were very useful I liked the meditative breathing function as well but the best function by far is Find Your Phone It lets you remotely trigger the ringer on your phone from your band in case you canrsquot find itThe charging for the band is a little odd you have to remove the entire device from the band and stick it in the cradle The cradle is tiny and has a custom design So if you lose it chances are you will have to buy an entirely new device since I donrsquot see the cradle for sale separately It is also annoying to have yet another thing to care for Fortunately the great battery life here means that you donrsquot have to charge it often and for too long At the very least I would have preferred a cradle that didnrsquot have a preattached USB cable on it as it reduces the chance of failure At just Rs 2499 the OnePlus Health band offers a lot of functionality If you are looking for something cheap to monitor your health and donrsquot mind the cradle you canrsquot go wrong with this