Oppo has a launch event on November 9 in China, and the Watch 5 is on the invite list.
The company confirmed the date through its Reno 17 announcement, with the Watch 5 and the Pad Air 6 tablet arriving alongside the phones. Pre-orders are already live on Oppo's Chinese online store, and the store microsite shows a silhouette of the watch rather than a full render.
That silhouette lines up with what has leaked over the past few days. A real-world photo of the Watch 5 surfaced this week, and it shows a square case with a flat screen, a rotating crown on the right side and a purple band.
What the leak shows
The photo, first reported by Gadgets360 and picked up by Gizmochina, appears to show a silver metal case with a squared-off dial in the same family as the Oppo Watch 4 Pro from 2023. The band is a soft purple, and the crown sits at roughly two o'clock. It is also a reminder that Oppo and OnePlus share hardware and software teams, which is why the OnePlus Watch 4 leaks felt like such a small step forward.
The reported dimensions are the interesting part: about 27 grams on the wrist and 9.2mm thick, with an aerospace-grade aluminum alloy mid-frame. If those numbers hold, the Watch 5 would be one of the slimmest smartwatches on sale, and aluminum explains the weight.
Treat the numbers as reported rather than confirmed. They come from a leaker, not from Oppo, and the company has not published a spec sheet yet. Gizmochina also noted that the teaser hints at a SIM slot, which would mean standalone 5G on a watch. That is an expectation, not an announcement, so we would not count on it until Oppo says so on stage.
The price is the actual story
The reported starting price is CNY 1,000, which works out to somewhere near $140.
Put that next to the Watch 4 Pro, which launched in China in August 2023 at CNY 2,299. Same product line, roughly two and a half years apart, and the new watch is reported at less than half the money.
That is a real shift in strategy. Oppo used to sell its flagship watch as a premium object, with a curved LTPO AMOLED and a stainless steel case. The Watch 5 looks like a move down-market into the slot that Xiaomi and Huawei have been fighting over, where a watch has to be thin, light and cheap enough to buy on impulse. If you want to see how thin the premium end has already gotten, the current crop of square-faced watches on Amazon is a decent measuring stick.
It also makes more sense than it sounds. The premium Android watch segment is crowded, and a $300+ Oppo watch had to beat the Galaxy Watch 9 on software it does not control. A CNY 1,000 watch just has to look good and last a week.
What we still don't know
Oppo has not published battery capacity, display size, chipset, water resistance or health sensors for the Watch 5. The Watch 4 Pro used a 1.91-inch curved LTPO AMOLED at 378 x 496, a Snapdragon W5 paired with a Hengxuan 2700 co-processor, 2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, and there is no indication yet whether the Watch 5 keeps any of that.
The one hardware question that matters most is the chip. A Snapdragon W5 would put the Watch 5 in proper Wear OS territory. A cheaper chip plus a lighter platform would put it closer to the non-Wear OS watches that trade app support for two weeks of battery.
Oppo already has form on both sides of that line, and the price suggests it is not paying for a flagship chip.
Should you care if you don't live in China?
Probably not directly, and it is worth being blunt about that. Oppo does not sell its watches in the US, and its global watch presence has been thin for years. The Watch 5 is a China-first product and there is no announced plan to bring it west. If you are shopping for a square Android watch you can actually buy here, an Oppo Watch import is a grey-market gamble at best.
What makes it worth watching anyway is the pattern. A square, 9.2mm, 27-gram watch at CNY 1,000 is exactly the shape of device that undercuts everyone else if it turns out to be any good. If Oppo can build that at that price, the question of why a competing watch costs three times as much gets harder to answer, and that pressure eventually shows up in what gets shipped everywhere else.
Bottom line
The Oppo Watch 5 launches on November 9 in China, pre-orders are open, and the leaked photo is credible enough to take seriously: square case, rotating crown, purple band, and a body reported at 9.2mm and 27 grams.
The price is the headline. Half of what the Watch 4 Pro asked, in a market where thin and cheap is starting to beat thick and premium. Everything else, including whether it runs a real smartwatch platform, gets answered on stage in four days.
Sources: Oppo's China store pre-order listing and Reno 17 launch confirmation; Gadgets360 reporting on the November 9 date, the leaked photo and the reported CNY 1,000 price; Gizmochina's November launch confirmation and real-world photo report; ChannelNews and SmartHouse coverage of the same teaser; Watch 4 Pro specifications as reported at its 2023 launch. Leaked dimensions and pricing are attributed to reporting and have not been confirmed by Oppo.
