My 3-Week Review

It’s almost been a month since I started daily driving one of Mobvoi’s latest smartwatches, the Mobvoi TicWatch Pro 5, and what a few weeks it’s been!

To set the scene, I am currently using the Sandstone version which is a combination of gold and light brown which makes the watch look very natural. 

I don’t know why but I wasn’t really a fan of this colour combination to begin with, but it grew on me and I’m happy to say that I really like it.

For those of you who are new to my blog, since late December last year, I’ve been using the Google Pixel Watch as my everyday smartwatch, and I think that it’s a brilliant watch, so naturally, the TicWatch Pro 5 has a lot to compete with.

The TicWatch Pro 5 is not the first smartwatch I’ve had from Mobvoi, in fact, my first one was the Mobvoi TicWatch C2 and later the TicWatch Pro 3 Ultra, both of which were great watches.

On a side note, I am aware of the whole WearOS 3 situation, but after doing some research it turns out that Samsung may have had an exclusivity window for WearOS 3 which caused delays for other brands. I hope this won’t happen this time around, especially since we now have more smartwatches using the platform including Google’s own Pixel Watch. It’s also the reason I decided to give Mobvoi a second chance.

But without any further ado, here are my initial impressions after daily driving the watch for almost a month…

How does it perform in everyday life?

Many of you may disagree with me on this, but I feel that WearOS smartwatches are still relatively new to the market, mainly because I feel that Google hasn’t been taking the platform seriously until the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 was released.

Having used many WearOS smartwatches including the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 and 5, the TicWatch C2, Pro 3 Ultra and the Pro 5, the Pixel Watch as well as a handful of early Android Wear smartwatches, I believe that the WearOS platform is only just getting started, especially with the release of the Pixel Watch.

I also believe that in a few year’s time, the platform will be incredibly well-supported with many apps and with some excellent watches.
Back to the topic at hand, having used the watch in my everyday life for a number of weeks, I think it’s a brilliant watch, especially due to the excellent battery life I am seeing!

Battery Life

When it comes to battery life on smartwatches, you don’t want them to be short, afterall it is supposed to be a watch!

I was pretty happy with the battery performance on my Google Pixel Watch, mainly because of my battery charging routine. I would wake up, put the watch on the charger and go about my morning routine. 

This would usually give me around 1 and a half days’ worth of battery life, which was enough for everyday use. But when it came to doing long activities such as hiking in the Tatra mountains this summer, I switched to the Garmin Instinct as I didn’t think the Pixel Watch would cope with tracking a 10-mile hike.

On the other hand, the TicWatch Pro 5 surprised me with its battery life. On average I manage to get around 3 days out of it with normal everyday use, which is extremely impressive! 

The manufacturer states that you can get 80 hours of battery life on a single charge, this obviously depends on the configuration and how you use the smartwatch, but I feel that I am getting exactly what’s advertised with the 3 full days I’m seeing.

As of yet, I haven’t had a chance to try the watch on a longer activity, but it is something I’m planning to do in the near future.

How does it perform?

As with the last couple of smartwatches I used, the TicWatch Pro 5 performs well and I haven’t noticed any noticeable lag.

I would even go as far as saying that the watch performs better than any other WearOS watch I ever used. That’s thanks to the Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1 chip.

In all seriousness, I haven’t had any serious issues with lag or freezes on the Pixel Watch, but the TicWatch Pro 5 does feel a lot snappier and responsive.

This tends to be noticeable in many apps, especially the ones that are heavier on the platform.

Speaking about performance, I love the fact that this watch charges incredibly fast. You can get up to 65% worth of battery after just 30 minutes of charging. I feel that that is important especially when out traveling or hiking. When I can see the battery getting low, I can simply connect it to a power bank during a rest break and have more life out of the watch.

Let’s talk about some of the features…

Not only does the TicWatch Pro 5 perform extremely well, but it’s also packed with some incredible features!

Like with the TicWatch Pro 3 Ultra, the Pro 5 has two watch faces in 1! You have the standard OLED smartwatch face and also the ultra-low-power display.

I’m a huge fan of the dual display, I mean not only does it help extend the battery life, it’s also great for using the watch in bright conditions such as a sunny day.

To make things even better, you can customise the ultra-low-power display by choosing colours from 18 bright colours. To make things even better, the colours can actually track your beat when exercising. 

In this scenario, the backlight will change colours to the beat of your heart, to give you some examples, blue is for resting, Teal is for warm-up, orange is for cardio and red is for danger. I know it’s a small thing, but I think it’s pretty cool and easy to see the colour of the screen in average daylight. 

The watch is also rugged and tested to meet US-MIL-STD 810H standards. This essentially means that the watch has been tested to withstand a wide variety of environmental scenarios including rain, sand, ice, shock and vibrations. This, combined with the excellent battery life and accurate GPS makes this a great watch for people like me who love the outdoors!

The watch comes packed with some really good apps by Mobvoi, one of the main apps I missed from the TicWatch Pro 3 Ultra was the health apps and activity tracker which showed a lot of useful detail as well as graphs and even a mini-map during GPS activity which I thought was awesome. The same app is available on the TicWatch Pro 5 and I am over the moon because of it. 

Speaking about the health app, I am glad to say that it syncs effortlessly with Strava and provides correct details!

The smartphone app

Before we get any further, I feel that it’s important to mention that I’m using the watch with the Google Pixel 7 Pro and they work incredibly well together.

The TicWatch Pro 5 uses the Mobvoi Health app for managing the watch as well as the health features. In summary, I think it’s a pretty good app that features all of the information you may need. 

I find it easy to use and navigate and just like it the watch app, it provides you with a lot of useful information, graphs and maps. Something I wish FitBit could learn from.

The app also features a “Device” tab where you can find all the required settings and options as well as some pretty awesome free watch faces!

As a whole, I’m very satisfied with the app.

Final Thoughts

I haven’t had the watch for long, but I am seriously impressed with it so far. It performs really well and has some incredibly useful features, particularly for those who love the great outdoors.

My only complaint about the watch is that as of yet, it doesn’t have Google Assistant integration, which isn’t something I use often on the Pixel Watch, but it’s one of those cases of not knowing what you have until you don’t have it anymore. But with that in mind, it’s not a deal breaker in my opinion. Hopefully, it’s something we see in a future update!

Speaking about updates, I was thrilled to see that I received an update during my first couple of hours of using the watch, hopefully, there will be more of them to come!

But overall, I think that it’s a brilliant smartwatch and I will be making more content about it on my blog and YouTube channel, so stay tuned!

While you’re here, check out my 1-Week Review on YouTube…