If you’ve been eyeing the recently-announced OnePlus Watch 3 as your next smartwatch, you might need to wait a bit to get your hands on one. OnePlus is apparently delaying most shipments of its latest smartwatch, and it’s all thanks to an issue with the watch’s appearance that made it through all the way to production.
OnePlus has announced that its latest smartwatch, the OnePlus Watch 3, will be delayed until April 2025. It was originally scheduled to be released today, and thanks to OnePlus shipping units during the pre-order window, some people have already gotten their hands on theirs. Now, it will take a couple more months in the oven while OnePlus sorts things out with its remaining stock. How bad is this issue to warrant OnePlus holding shipments for an additional two months? Contrary to what you might think, it’s not something that’s an actual dealbreaker or that prevents users from using the watch as intended. Rather, it’s because of a typo in the rear part of the watch.
Instead of saying “Made in China,” whoever was in charge of typing the manufacturer text out for the watch’s rear part wrote “Meda in China.” The issue was initially noted by reviewers getting their hands on the watch early, and OnePlus was completely oblivious to the issue. Once it started to catch steam across news outlets, OnePlus jokingly acknowledged the issue on social media, saying that if you already got a watch with a typo, you could either keep it as a collector’s item or ship it back for a replacement. It looks like the company internally took the issue more seriously, though, to the point that it warranted a two-month release delay. We don’t have a concrete release date now, but we do know that the pre-order period continues from today until whatever’s the new release date sometime in April.
We don’t think this is an issue that would warrant having to actually pull the release of the smartwatch. OnePlus could’ve very well continued shipping out what’s left of its affected units and quietly fixed the issue on newer batches.
We can try and look at the legal side for some answers. As per existing Customs and Border Protection (CBP) norms and US law, imported goods must be marked with their country of origin. That marking must be “conspicuous,” “legible,” and “permanent,” and companies are generally expected to maintain accuracy in these markings. There’s a reason the markings are present on basically every item we’ve bought for the last few decades. As per law, then, this type of inaccuracy can technically be a violation, but also, it’s a minor typo that arguably still properly discloses where the watch was manufactured. “China” is not misspelled, and most people would probably still read “Made in China” at first glance unless they’re looking closely at it.
It’s very unlikely that it would be enforced in this situation, especially if OnePlus got to work promptly at fixing the typo in new batches of the watch. But OnePlus might’ve wanted to play it safe here, and understandably so. Still, this isn’t an issue that prevents the regular use of the watch, so it’d be otherwise weird for OnePlus to hold shipments until that specific typo is fixed.
We await OnePlus’ new release date for its latest smartwatch, with, hopefully, no typos this time around. It has been reported to be a pretty good improvement over the company’s previous watches in basically every department, and if OnePlus does things right here, the company could very well position it as one of the best Wear OS smartwatches around.
Source: 9to5Google
