The new smartwatch arrives next month and provides Android users with a much-needed budget option

OnePlus has officially announced the OnePlus Watch Lite, confirming the identity of the ‘New Watch’ teased last week.

The new smartwatch is positioned as the brand’s first entry-level option, promising flagship health and fitness features at an even more affordable price.

The Watch Lite will debut alongside the OnePlus 15R smartphone at a global event scheduled for December 17th, and it’s set to go on sale in Europe initially in a single silver steel finish.

Aside from this, though, the full details are still unknown—and that means we don’t know exactly how cheap the budget-friendly smartwatch will be. Or, really, what it will even look like.

An unexpected arrival

This new model seems to offer an interesting twist on what we expected from the initial teaser. At first, we speculated that the ‘New Watch’ would be a global version of the ultra-slim Oppo Watch S, which measures just 8.9mm thick.

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However, given the focus on affordability rather than specs in this initial announcement, it now feels very unlikely that the Watch Lite will arrive with a sleek profile.

If anything, it’ll likely be a slightly inferior design to the company’s flagship OnePlus Watch 3.

But, again, with so little to go on in this initial announcement—and only a zoomed-out shot of the device shown above—it’s anybody’s guess what the Watch Lite will really look like on the wrist.

The go-to pick for those on a budget?

Whatever the case, an entry-level Watch Lite fills a significant void in the modern Android smartwatch ecosystem.

After all, Wear OS has long suffered from a scarcity of good, affordable options, with consumers often forced to choose between older-generation flagships (like the Galaxy Watch 6 or Pixel Watch 2).

Instead, this could become the de facto budget smartwatch for Android; a true competitor to the Apple Watch SE 3 on the iOS side, and the natural successor to aging budget devices like the Xiaomi Watch 2.

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We’ll know more on 17 December, so stay tuned for the full details and our review.