Mobile World Congress 2024: Here's what OnePlus Watch 2 does with its rotating button

Rotating buttons enable users to interact with interface and perform certain actions such as enabling or disabling certain features

Emily Martin - Feb 27, 2024

An undated image of OnePlus Watch 2. — OnePlus

During the first day of the Mobile World Congress 2024 (MWC 2024), OnePlus lifted the veil of some eye-catchy features of its OnePlus Watch 2 and a rotating button.

As reported by 9to5Google, there is an unavoidable downside of the rotating button: it's useless, yes! You read right. The button does not interact with the Wear OS even to a minute extent, not does it prompt to invoke any of the functionalities of the rotating button — such as launching Google Assistant or calling on the app drawer.

Nevertheless, what slightly compensates for this misery is that the wearable has now been bestowed with a considerable boost to its battery performance.

Rotating button on OnePlus Watch 2

Such sort of buttons, AKA Crown, are now commonly seen in smartwatches that enable users to interact with the interface and perform certain actions or enable or disable certain features. Even after its placementon the OnePlus Watch 2, there's no harm in saying that the watch doesn’t support a rotating button.

OnePlus says that the rotating motion of the Watch 2’s crown has nothing to do with “any function,” but has something to do with durability. If dropped, the company claims that a rotating button can bear more than the one that does not spin.

OnePlus Watch 2’s default app drawer is surely an imitation of the one you see on the Apple Watch, so it’s rather surprising to see OnePlus adopt that UI while only letting users zoom in and out using a pinch-to-zoom gesture.