When I reviewed the OnePlus Watch 2 last month, I said it had a digital crown. I do this because it has a grooved button that you twist and press. I didn’t think much of it, but some readers questioned it crown. They say it’s just a button.
I frowned at this.
The problem is, twisting the OnePlus Watch 2’s Digital Crown does nothing. It breaks the unspoken nerdy contract that smartwatch crowns must roll. Pressing the button brings up an application menu, but what about reversing it? Zippers, zilch, nothing. On other smartwatches, twisting the crown usually lets you scroll through menus and notifications – regardless of what’s shown on the display. It was thought that since the button didn’t do that, it couldn’t be a Digital Crown, regardless of style.
When I typed “what is a digital crown?” into Google, the top results told me it was a large, protruding dial on the Apple Watch that was based on the crown of a mechanical watch. This is a way to navigate and activate features. This is a deeply unsatisfying answer.
First of all, the Digital Crown isn’t limited to the Apple Watch. I’m not denying that the first Apple Watch popularized the digital crown: if you look at smartwatches and fitness trackers before 2015, buttons and buttons were a more common design choice. (Some watches, like the LG G Watch R, have a crown button that rotates, but the OnePlus Watch 2, for example, doesn’t have a scrolling feature.) But these days, digital crowns are fairly common outside of Apple’s walled garden. Both the Pixel Watch and Pixel Watch 2 have one. The same goes for some of my Withings, Mobvoi and Fossil watches.
Second, the Digital Crown has never been the primary way to navigate smartwatch menus. The vast majority of people use touch screens, where swipes and clicks dominate. (Some smartwatches don’t even have a button!) Smartwatches without touch screens, such as some multisport watches from Garmin or Polar, rely primarily on a five-button system for navigation and selection. Athletes rely on these buttons because they are impervious to sweat and gloves.
Out of curiosity, I dug through four drawers filled with smartwatches I’ve reviewed over the years. A trend emerged. Most watches with a digital crown—from brands big and small—imitate the feel of an analog mechanical watch.
This in turn makes me wonder why the watch has a crown. Before the 1800s, winding a pocket watch or clock often required a special key, which could be very annoying. The “crown” appears to have appeared in the 1830s, allowing the wearer to turn a decorative part of the watch to wind the mainspring, thereby powering the device’s internal workings. They achieve this by using a dial with ribbed grooves that look like a king or queen’s crown.
But early inventors called it a “knob,” or simply a way to wind a watch without a key, and enthusiasts have been using keyless winding devices as far back as 1686.
In short, the traditional crown is both the primary way to interact with the watch and Essential to the functionality of the watch. But it was always more of a knob than a button.
That’s when. Technically speaking, since Seiko made the first quartz watch, the Astron 35SQ, in 1969, watch wearers have no longer needed to use a crown to wind their watches. Nowadays, analog knobs are used in most cases to set the time. modern digital You don’t even need a crown for this, so really, it’s all about interacting with the smartwatch.
Every smartwatch manufacturer is different, but I have a hard time remembering the Digital Crown only reel. Typically, it acts as a selection button, a shortcut, or a way to bring up your voice assistant. Some people don’t even use the crown at all to scroll through menus. (You do use it mainly to adjust the volume.) So when did scrolling become definition What are the standards for a digital crown?
For this, I might point the finger at former Apple design director Sir Jony Ive. during an interview Hour, Ive noted that the crown is “a great solution for scrolling and making selections.” Ive mentioned scrolling first, and Apple itself touted the Digital Crown as a groundbreaking input method in its marketing for the first-generation Apple Watch. But again, he refers to it primarily as an input mechanism, a method of interaction—a “panacea” replacement, he calls it, for “direct manipulation,” also known as touch screens.
In typical Ive rhetoric, he said implementing the Digital Crown “took a little courage” and that it would allow Apple to “provide a ‘second button’ on the device.”
But you heard the man say: this is a button.
Today, Apple no longer uses scrolling as part of its digital crown definition. It calls it an “important hardware input” to the Apple Watch and Vision Pro. On the Vision Pro, turning the crown doesn’t scroll through the menu at all. However, rotation does have a purpose. When you turn the crown, it lets you adjust your immersion in the virtual environment — It’s like fine-tuning your connection to reality. It can also be used as a way to adjust the volume, and as an alternative to pinching your finger when you want to select a button.
So even Apple – which famously popularized the digital crown – doesn’t seem to have hard and fast rules for crowns. Just rotation should be an intuitive part of the UI.
After much thought, it’s clear that the OnePlus Watch 2 definitely has a crown. Whether it is digital It comes down to whether this rotation actually makes a difference. should have Some An intentional purpose. Otherwise, why not just use plain old buttons?
Out of curiosity, I contacted OnePlus.
“The crown has no function on the device. The crown that rotates when moving makes the buttons more durable than rigid buttons, especially when exposed to impact,” OnePlus spokesperson Spenser Blank said. “Additionally, Wear OS 4’s intuitive interface coupled with OnePlus Watch 2’s large screen makes it easy to swipe and interact without the adjustments provided by the Digital Crown.”
There you have it. I’m right: even OnePlus says it’s not a digital crown. Spin has a mechanical purpose—it’s just that no one is particularly excited about it. (I know some glove-wearing athletes will bristle at the suggestion that the Blank’s touchscreen is sufficient.) So let’s leave it at that: The OnePlus Watch 2 has a crown. It’s just not a particularly good one, and it’s definitely not digital.
