Ticwatch Pro review

It’s unlikely you would have heard of Mobvoi or Ticwatch products until last year, and it’s quite possible that you’ve never heard of either before.

The Ticwatch is a relatively new line of products. We loved last year’s Ticwatch S and Ticwatch E, and the company has now followed up with a new product called the Ticwatch Pro.

Mobvoi is the company that makes the Ticwatch devices, having expanded from artificial intelligence voice technology into wearables, headphones and smart home devices.

The Ticwatch Pro is the company’s most premium product yet – although that’s not such a difficult task, as it’s previously focused on making smartwatches that come on a budget with top-end specs but less premium designs to keep the price low.

The Ticwatch Pro features a new high-end design and revolutionary dual-screen technology, one of the advantages of which is battery life of weeks rather than days on a Wear OS smartwatch.

Ticwatch Pro price and release date

• Available to buy now for $249.99 / £219.99 / AU$369.99
• Amazon Prime subscription is required to buy it from Amazon 
• In the US and Australia you can buy the watch directly from Mobvoi

You can buy the Ticwatch Pro right now from Amazon (Mobvoi’s main partner for this release, for now) if you live in the US or UK. Annoyingly, though, you’ll need to be an Amazon Prime member to buy the watch in either of those countries before August 15. After that it will remain an Amazon exclusive until September 30, after which it will be available from other retailers as well.

If you live in the US and Australia, you can buy the watch now from the official Mobvoi website.

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Much like Mobvoi’s other products, the Ticwatch Pro sits at the more affordable end of the smartwatch scale. Although it’s the company’s most expensive product so far, but this doesn’t reach the launch price of say the Apple Watch 3 or LG Watch Style.

The pricing is set at $249.99 / £219.99 / AU$369.99, which is impressive considering the amount of spec, and the fact that it’s packed into a premium design.

Design

• More premium, high-end design that previous Ticwatch products
• IP68 waterproof, but not recommended for the pool
• Strange but useful strap design that combines leather and silicone

Unlike the Ticwatch E and Ticwatch S, Mobvoi has opted for a more premium design for the Ticwatch Pro.

The body of the watch is large and has some weight to it, but it doesn’t feel too heavy on your wrist, and it sits comfortably too. It’s a touch thicker than some may like, but it’s not significantly thicker than other top-end smartwatches.

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The watch itself is made of hard nylon combined with glass fiber, and the two materials  combine to deliver a premium look and feel, and solid build quality.

There two buttons on the right side of the watch are adjacent to the 2 and 4 positions on the watch face. Both of these buttons are the exact right size and feel tactile when you push them in, which means pressing them without looking down at the watch is easy.

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The top button can be used to open the main menu of the watch to see your list of available apps, and can also be used to exit apps when you’re navigating around the watch. 

The bottom button is used as a shortcut for your most-used app. By default this is set as the Ticwatch Fitness app, but you can change this to any other app you have installed in the settings.

For example, if you often find yourself making mobile payments with you watch you could set it to launch Google Pay, so that it’s only a button press away.

You’ll be interacting with the watch through the touchscreen, as there’s no rotating bezel here like on the Samsung Gear Sport, so this shortcut button is especially useful.

The bezel is quite thick, and the inner edge is chamfered, with the watch face slightly recessed. It’s marked with numerals in five minute/second increments,, which may not be to everyone’s design taste.

That said, the watch looks stylish, and it garnered a lot of compliments when we were wearing it. This is a device you’d be equally happy to wear to work or on a night out.

As for the strap, you’ve got eight different choices. You can buy silicone straps in either orange or black, and there’s a brown leather strap as well as five straps that combine those two materials.

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We used one of those latter five with the Ticwatch Pro, and we liked the fact it was leather on the outside but silicone on the inside, as it meant we didn’t have to swap out the strap if we wanted to exercise wearing the watch.

We used a black strap, but there are a variety of color options that you’ll want to check out if you’re thinking of buying this watch. 

We found that the inside of the strap did get dirty after a few runs, but that’s a small price to pay for not having to change the strap, and it feels just comfortable feel when you’re exercising as when you’re sitting at a desk. 

The watch is waterproof to IP68, so you should be able to take it in the shower or bathroom without worrying about it getting damaged. That said, Mobvoi doesn’t recommend that you wear it when swimming.

Display

• Dual-screen technology that combines an OLED and an LCD
• Intended to save battery, and means the watch can last up to a month
• Normal OLED is bright and impactful with a good resolution

The screen – or rather screens – is the key feature of the Ticwatch Pro, and it’s a feature that helps it stand out compared to any other smartwatch on the market right now.

It combines two screens within the same face. Rather than being separate these are layered one on top of the other, with both using different screen tech so that only one is visible at any time.

On the top sits a transparent LCD display that’s used for the low-power consumption mode, which Ticwatch calls Essential mode. It’s technically what the company calls an FSTN LCD screen, which stands for Film compensated Super Twisted Nematic tech.

The screen is transparent, but can also be read easily in direct sunlight, so it’s the perfect choice for displaying elements in the low-power mode. Essential mode can be activated at any time, or it’ll automatically kick in when the battery is running low.

In this mode the screen displays info such as the time, date, your step count and your heart rate. It means that, even though the normal smartwatch features of the watch aren’t available when the battery is low, you can still get some functionality for up to five days without charging it up.

Below the LCD screen sits the round 1.39-inch OLED display. When this is activated it looks similar to most other smartwatches you’ll have seen. This is where all the Wear OS features are accessed, and when you turn the watch on this screen lights up and is visible through the LCD display.

This is a touchscreen, and Mobvoi has managed to implement its dual-screen design without compromising the touchscreen functionality and losing the benefits of a normal smartwatch.

The OLED screen is bright, colorful, high-resolution at 400 x 400 pixels, and responsive to the touch. You can tell it’s recessed further than on a lot of other smartwatches in order to fit the LCD display on top, but we didn’t find that to be an issue during our testing.

The dual-screen technology here is genuinely a great idea, and we love that it allows us to keep using the watch to access key stats and time information even when the watch is low on battery.

At the moment, the features on offer with the Essential mode are a little limited, but Mobvoi has confirmed that it plans to bring extra elements to the screen tech in the future – we’d like it, for example, if you could see your notifications or other stats directly without having to turn on the watch face.