Mobvoi TicWatch Pro 5 review: Battery bliss
The past couple of years have been equal parts exciting and frustrating for Wear OS fans. While Samsung’s Wear OS-based Galaxy Watches and Google’s Pixel Watch have breathed new life into the platform, options from other players have stagnated, offering late and incomplete updates to the modern Wear OS 3.
The Mobvoi TicWatch Pro 5 marks another important step forward for the ecosystem. It’s both the first wearable to launch with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1 chipset, and a much-needed new option running the up-to-date (and all-too-rare) Wear OS 3.5. It’s a very good smartwatch, offering spectacular battery life and snappy performance — but some key missteps hold it back from being an unqualified success.
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Source: Mobvoi Mobvoi TicWatch Pro 5 7.5 / 10 Mobvoi's TicWatch Pro 5 comes with the latest Wear OS 3.5 and can several last days on a single charge. There's no Google Assistant, and the Mobvoi Health companion app isn't anything special, but the TicWatch Pro 5 delivers on most of the fundamentals. Battery Life Rated for 80 hours Operating System Wear OS 3.5 Onboard GPS GPS + Beidou + Glonass + Galileo + QZSS Case Material Aluminum Display 1.43" 466 x 466 60Hz OLED + 'Ultra-low-power display' CPU Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear RAM 2 GB Storage 32 GB Battery 628 mAh Connectivity Bluetooth 5.2; 2.4GHz Wi-Fi Durability Waterproof 5ATM, MILD-STD-810H compliant Health sensors PPG heart rate sensor, SpO2 sensor, skin temperature sensor Price $350 Strap Standard 24mm Dimensions 50.15 x 48 x 12.2 mm Weight 44.35g Mobile payments Yes Workout detection Yes Exercise modes 100+ Color options Obsidian Pros Incredible battery life
Fast performance
Rotating crown is a good addition
Dual-layer display is as neat as ever Cons No Google Assistant at launch, no time frame for when to expect it
Mobvoi Health app could use some polish
Dubious sleep tracking See at Amazon $350 at Mobvoi
Price and availability
The TicWatch Pro 5 is available now direct from Mobvoi and on Amazon for $350. The watch itself only comes in black, but there are five different bands to choose from: silicone in green, orange, or blue, and leather in black or blue.
Design and hardware
The TicWatch Pro 5 looks a lot like Mobvoi’s previous premium smartwatch, the TicWatch Pro 3 Ultra GPS. It’s got the same substantial shape, with chunky lugs and a textured bezel around its 1.4-inch display. The button layout is different, though, with the Pro 5 sporting a centered, rotating crown plus one low-profile button above it. The rotating crown is a welcome addition; I always miss it in smartwatches that don’t have it. The watch takes standard 24mm bands, so you have lots of customization options if none of Mobvoi’s bands speak to you.
The watch’s crown offers a satisfying amount of resistance when scrolling, the secondary hardware button is firm and clicky, and the Pro 5’s vibration motor is satisfyingly strong — I always know when I’m getting a notification. Overall, the hardware feels sturdy and high-quality.
The Pro 5 is both MIL-STD-810H compliant and water-resistant to 5ATM, which means it’s safe for water exposure up to and including wearing the thing to swim. And unlike the Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 and the Google Pixel Watch, the TicWatch Pro 5’s display is protected by a raised bezel. It might not have a titanium case or sapphire crystal protecting its screen, but the TicWatch Pro 5 should still be more durable than most smartwatches.
Displays
We’re several generations into Mobvoi’s dual-layer display setup, and I’m as big of a fan of it now as I’ve ever been. On top of the TicWatch Pro 5’s OLED display sits a low-power LCD panel that handles always-on functionality when you’re not interacting with the watch. It shows the time, date, and day of the week, plus your step count and heart rate, approximate battery level, and whether you currently have any notifications.
New for this generation, the TicWatch Pro 5’s ultra-low-power display can cycle through several “tiles” that show basic health info like your current heart rate and estimated daily calorie burn, plus a compass. I can’t imagine myself using most of these features on the low-power LCD layer, but it’s nice that they’re accessible without firing up the watch’s OLED screen.
Mobvoi managed to pack a lot of useful information onto the very limited top screen, which helps preempt the need to turn on the watch’s more power-hungry OLED panel. When you are using the watch’s OLED screen, the LCD layer is invisible. The primary display is great; it’s a 60 Hz panel with colors that are plenty vibrant, and it gets bright enough to be visible outdoors.
Software and performance
The TicWatch Pro 5 is running the latest Wear OS 3.5, making it functionally similar to Google’s Pixel Watch and the latest Wear OS devices from Samsung. As the first smartwatch to launch with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1 chipset, the TicWatch Pro 5 is very snappy, and Wear OS 3.5’s animations look very smooth here.
I’m a little annoyed on principle Wear OS 3.5 doesn’t let you remap hardware buttons; pressing the crown on the TicWatch Pro 5 opens the app drawer, and the other button your recent apps. Double-tapping either opens Google Wallet. That’s all good with me, but if you wanted to, say, map a different app to a double-tap, you don’t have the option.
The TicWatch Pro 5 doesn’t currently have access to the Google Assistant.
Possibly worse, despite shipping with the latest version of Wear OS, the TicWatch Pro 5 doesn’t currently have access to the Google Assistant — it’s not pre-installed, and you can’t download it from the Play Store. I asked about this, and there’s no timeframe for getting Assistant on the Pro 5. Considering Wear OS 3.5 watches from Google and Samsung offer Assistant access, this is a notable flaw.
Software quirks aside, the performance of the TicWatch Pro 5 has been great for me. Qualcomm’s talked a big game about the W5+ Gen 1 that’s making its debut here, saying it’s not only twice as fast as the company’s Wear 4100+ chipset that you can find in watches like the Fossil Gen 6, but more power efficient, too. The Pro 5 performs very well, with apps opening quickly and animations playing out smoothly, but it’s hard to say the horsepower gains make the watch feel notably quicker than other Wear OS devices. Performance is smooth, but it doesn’t feel much faster than, say, the Pixel Watch — which is using a chipset from 2018. Battery life is in another league, though; more on that later.
Health and fitness
Mobvoi’s introduced a new wearable app, Mobvoi Health, to manage the TicWatch Pro 5. The app is, as you might guess, health-forward, opening to a Statistics tab that shows the health info you’d expect out of any modern wearable.
On the Statistics tab, there are large cards for Activity, Exercise, and Sleep, and smaller ones with info about your heart rate, SpO2 levels, stress, and VO2 max. Activity tracking is as you’ve come to expect it: the TicWatch Pro 5 can identify when you’ve been walking, running, or cycling for 10 minutes, at which point it’ll vibrate and ask you which you’re doing.
Most exercises have to be started manually from the TicExercise app on the watch. There are more than 100 workouts available to track, but that figure includes a bunch of niche activities I wouldn’t necessarily think of as exercise, like off-road driving, standing on one leg, and even skydiving. During exercise, the watch’s low-power display shows how long you’ve been working out, and changes color to correspond to different heart rate ranges, so you can gauge at a glance whether you need to pick up the pace.
Sleep tracking is also a standard experience, tracking how long you spend in each stage of sleep and generating a graph charting your sleep patterns for each night. By default, the watch also enters a power-saving mode during sleep that more or less turns off all its non-sleep-related functions until morning, which gives the battery a little overnight boost.
I’m not sold on the accuracy of the sleep tracking, though. Compared to both the third-gen Oura ring and the Withings Sleep, the TicWatch Pro 5 tends to overestimate both the duration of my sleep, regularly crediting me with more time asleep than Oura does, and the quality: Mobvoi Health consistently rates my sleep as more restful than either of the other platforms, saying I spent more time in deep and REM sleep stages.
Other health features are less useful still. The watch can approximate your stress levels by monitoring your heart rate during guided breathing exercises, rating the results out of 100 (lower is better). But nothing on the watch or in the Mobvoi Health app explains how your score is calculated, or even what it really means. VO2 max tracking is theoretically interesting for athletic types, but tapping the VO2 Max card in the Mobvoi Health app currently crashes the whole thing, leaving historical data inaccessible.
Overall, the health tracking experience here is mediocre. You can elect to use Google Fit for activity tracking instead, but the TicWatch’s sleep data is only accessible through Mobvoi Health.
Battery life and charging
Battery life is typically a sore spot in smartwatches, with even some flagship models from big-name companies struggling to make it past a full day away from a charger. Thanks largely to its dual-layer display, the TicWatch Pro 5 easily outperforms most of the competition here. Mobvoi quotes the watch’s battery life at 80 hours between charges, and I’m finding that’s a pretty conservative estimate: it’s not unusual to see the watch last four full days between charges.
Constantly interacting with the watch or using its built-in GPS will tap the 628 mAh cell faster, of course, but this kind of battery life is excellent for a smartwatch. Coming from the Pixel Watch, which requires daily charging, only needing to top up a couple of times a week is game-changing. I’ll sometimes leave smartwatches at home when I take trips, not wanting to deal with charging yet another device each day while traveling. That’s much less of a concern here.
It’s not unusual to see the watch last four full days between charges.
The watch charges with a proprietary pin charger with USB-A on the other end. Considering some wearables have already transitioned to USB-C, that’s a bit of a pain. It charges relatively quickly, though, going from empty to full in just about an hour.
Competition
At $350, the Mobvoi TicWatch Pro 5 is competing in the thick of the premium Wear OS space. Our favorite Wear OS watch right now, the Samsung Galaxy Watch 5, starts at $280 and offers similar performance to the TicWatch Pro 5, plus access to Google Assistant. Samsung’s watch isn’t as durable as Mobvoi’s, though, and it doesn’t have the TicWatch’s slick dual-layer display. The Galaxy Watch also needs to be charged every day or so while the TicWatch Pro 5 can make it three or four days on a charge.
Google’s Pixel Watch also retails for $350 and comes with Fitbit integration where the TicWatch uses the much less robust Mobvoi Health. It also offers a more modern, unique look than Mobvoi’s watch, and of course, comes with the Google Assistant. But the TicWatch has the Pixel Watch handily beat on battery life, and Mobvoi’s wearable is much more durable than Google’s.
Should you buy it?
For the most part, I really like the TicWatch Pro 5. Performance here is top-notch in the Wear OS world, and battery life is class-leading. Mobvoi’s trademark dual-layer display is more useful than ever, and the rotating crown is a great addition.
Mobvoi Health is nothing special, though, and the TicWatch Pro 5’s sleep tracking seems less accurate than what you’ll get in other devices. There’s also no Google Assistant here, and we don’t know when (or even if) we can expect it.
If what you see here aligns with your priorities, if you’re after a quick, long-lasting smartwatch and don’t care much about sleep tracking or on-wrist Assistant access, you’ll love the TicWatch Pro 5. If you can live with charging every day, though, you might want to consider other options — many of which you can get for less.
Source: Android Police
