Review of Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro 5
Our Verdict
The Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro 5 makes great use of powerful hardware and clever design choices to deliver the best fitness-tracking experience on the market.
- Great for workouts
- Excellent battery life
- Simple-but-classy design
- Pricey
- Not compatible with iPhones
- No Google Assistant
It might be challenging for a lesser-known business to make a reputation for itself in a market full of well-known rivals like Apple and Google. Mobvoi, which has been in the smartwatch business for less than ten years, is known for producing reliable wristwatches with respectable performance and build quality. The newest model in the Ticwatch Pro series, the Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro 5, emphasizes all the features that Mobvoi smartwatches are known for while experiencing fewer blips than before.
The Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro 5 utilizes Wear OS, although the most recent 3.5 version, much like the majority of its Ticwatch siblings and many of the best smartwatches. It has faithfully followed the path set by earlier models, offering even longer battery life, a more elegant appearance, and a somewhat higher price than the Ticwatch Pro 3. There's a lot to talk about, so read on for our comprehensive assessment of this outstanding wristwatch.
Why you can trust our advice ✔ At SmartRead, our experts spend days testing games, phones, tech, and services. We always share honest opinions to help you buy the best. Find out how we test.
Cost and accessibility
The Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro 5 costs $349.99 / £329.99 and can be bought on a number of online retailers, including Amazon and the Mobvoi website. There are two hues available: sandstone and obsidian. rather, for the average person, gray and black. The obsidian variant, which is elegant but a touch plain—something that could turn off others—is the subject of our assessment. Although it is more visually striking, not everyone will like the sandstone variant.
It costs a significant amount more than the Ticwatch Pro 3, which is available for $299 / £279. The Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro 5's abundance of features, in my opinion, justifies this increase from Mobvoi, but it may be too expensive for certain people. Why does it cost the same as smartwatches from more well-known manufacturers may be a mystery to some. That's a legitimate worry, but Mobvoi has made some very astute design decisions to help it stand out among the industry veterans.
Features
Specs
With the addition of a few neat enhancements, the Mobvoi Ticwatch 5 Pro has almost all the capabilities we've become used to seeing in contemporary smartwatches. The standard suspects are all accessible via Wear OS, including Google Wallet, YouTube Music, Maps, Play Store, and other wonderful apps.
The Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro 5 excels in the field of health and fitness, as do many other smartwatches. First of all, it offers extremely precise GPS tracking—a useful feature in situations when cellular internet service is unavailable. Being able to depend on accurate GNSS-based location is comforting to me as an avid walker, and the Mobvoi Ticwatch 5 Pro also has an integrated compass to aid with navigating.
Then there are a ton of features for working out in the gym. From commonplace exercises like swimming or running to specialized ones like the Arnold press or the intriguingly called "high traveling bear crawl," TicExercise provides specialized monitoring for a variety of activities. All the typical applications for general health, like blood oxygen saturation, sleep tracking, and stress monitoring, are now available on the Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro 5.
But as I already said, not every preloaded software is helpful, and the majority of them cannot be removed. TicBreathe, TicCare (a tool for sharing health information with others via QR code), Mobvoi Privacy, and Mobvoi Treadmill are examples of useless bloatware that clutter up the UI and make it more difficult than necessary to scroll to the app you want.
There are more uses for the Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro 5 than just the watch itself. The associated smartphone app, Mobvoi Health, is useful if you want to examine your long-term health and fitness patterns or get a more detailed look at a specific exercise. Data from the wristwatch is immediately sent to the app, allowing you more control over how to display things like tables and graphs. It's not the most advanced companion app I've seen, and the idea of having another app on your phone surely doesn't excite you, but it gets the job done.
It's time to discuss the few things that the Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro 5 is missing now. Google Assistant is the most conspicuous missing feature from the feature list. Though marking it down for this may sound churlish, you would expect this smartwatch to have almost everything for its high price tag, given that although many don't have it, others do. Additionally, there is no LTE option, so you are out of luck if your Bluetooth-connected mobile device is having trouble receiving cellular data. You must instead depend on single-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.2. Additionally, you cannot use this wristwatch with your iPhone since it is only compatible with Android.
Create and exhibit
Though its design won't win any accolades for ingenuity or creative thinking, the Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro 5 does have a decent appearance. Although the sandstone version is a little more noticeable, the black version on my wrist feels classy without being too ostentatious or gaudy. I love my smartwatches to look just like this—the focus is definitely on what's beneath the hood.
The Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro 5 has a conventional circular watch face encircled by a bezel with crosshatching. It is controlled via a button on the top right corner of the screen, conventional touch screen swiping, and a haptic rotating crown that makes it easy to navigate among applications. This is helpful, given that the smartwatch contains a significant amount of bloatware—a topic we'll cover in the review's features section.
The Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro 5 has two faces, very literally, much like its predecessors. The 1.43-inch AMOLED screen, which illuminates when you push the side button or crown, is the major draw. Although I'm not sure how bright it is in terms of nits, it appears to be enough for any situation, whether you're at home or out and about in bright sunshine.
Depending on your preferences, you may choose from a large selection of free and premium watch faces for the AMOLED screen. For the most part, I went with a conventional analog display since I like more classic designs. But you can customize this one to fit your style, whether you want a personalized Reddit design or a bright neon design that displays all the information from the many applications, including heart rate, steps, and more.In other words,Frequently, the watch falls back to its ultra-low-power (ULP) display, which is a simplified digital watch face that indicates the time, date, battery life, steps taken each day, and heart rate right now. Although not as impressive as its AMOLED face, this greatly extends the battery life of the Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro 5. I'll go into more detail about it below.
Considering that the watch and screen are MIL-STD 810H approved, they ought to withstand some damage. Because of this certification, it should be able to withstand sand, high altitude, extreme heat and cold, mild impacts, and more—unlike some other high-end smartwatches. It is also 5ATM water resistant, so you can immerse it up to 164 feet without it breaking, and swimming pools and the ocean should not harm it.
Electricity
The battery of the Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro 5 is an incredible powerhouse that doesn't need to be charged for days. Despite its lack of flashiness, the 628mAh battery of this wristwatch has endless power. In fact, I thought the battery life of eighty hours was understated. The AMOLED interface will probably need more frequent adjustments, which may significantly shorten the battery's lifespan. However, even with all the sensors constantly tracking your health, I only needed to charge my watch around every four days when I used it sparingly.
Additionally, charging it takes little time. When hooked into a USB port on my wall, it charges from low to around 80% in less than an hour, in my experience. Since this usually doesn't give as much electricity as a regular connector, charging it using a genuine plug would probably cause it to charge even quicker. The two-pin charging cable may seem complicated when inserted into the watch's port, but it fits snugly.
Achievement
The first wristwatch to use Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon W5+ processor is the Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro 5. The Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro 5's CPU strength is apparent in everything it does, and navigating between menus and applications is very quick. Not once did I find myself waiting for things to load while gazing at the watch display.
It also does a really good job of tracking workouts accurately. TicExercise's calorie tracking feature is still helpful if you're trying to keep a close eye on your caloric intake, even though it appears to just assign a calorie-burning rate to each type of workout and compute your total caloric burn using that rate along with how long you've been exercising and your heart rate during the workout.
In relation to the heart rate monitor, the results match those of the specialized wristband monitor I use at home. It obtains a heart rate measurement about every five to ten minutes while in use. Turning on TicExercise on your Ticwatch Pro 5 will allow the heart rate monitor to update in real time, giving you the most recent measurements while you're working out.
However, Mobvoi has unveiled a sophisticated solution if you'd want to quickly find out your heart rate. Your heart rate zone determines the color the watch's illumination is in when you activate a workout on TicExercise. Although this user interface is adjustable, I didn't see any need to alter the sensible default colors, which range from blue for relaxing to red for hazardous.
Seeing whether I'm in the "resting" zone while out for a walk is very helpful to me since it tells me when to pick up the pace. In a similar vein, I should definitely dial things down if I'm trying to hit a deadlift personal best and veer into the aerobic realm. It's only a sensible and basic function that exemplifies Mobvoi's skill in smartwatch design; nothing revolutionary.
The TicSleep sleep monitoring app measures your heart rate, blood oxygen saturation, skin temperature, and respiration rate on a regular basis. It also assesses the quality of your sleep by displaying various colored portions that indicate whether you are awake, deep sleep, light sleep, or REM. I thought the app was accurate enough to be useful in establishing good sleeping patterns, even if it sometimes had trouble telling the difference between light sleep and awake.
Is the Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro 5 something you should buy?
What you want to use this wristwatch for will determine whether or not I suggest it. The Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro 5 is hard to top if you like working out, walking, jogging, swimming, or doing any other fitness-related activity with a reliable wristwatch on your wrist. With its dual-display design and large battery capacity, it can operate for days on end. Whether you're halfway up a mountain, navigating a turbulent sea, or just taking a leisurely, sun-kissed stroll through the woods, it will be there to give you with precise data.
You may undoubtedly find better exercise elsewhere, however, if you have no interest in fitness or are content to work out without tracking your heart rate, distance traveled, or number of calories burnt. There are more fashionable watches available, even if the Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro 5 is quite elegant. This is a decent enough gadget for time management, but you'll probably want something that can connect with Google Assistant. Nevertheless, there's no better smartwatch for fitness than this one.
Replacements
In case our evaluation of the Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro 5 doesn't satisfy your needs, here are a few recommendations for other smartwatches.
Watch Samsung Galaxy 6
The Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 is an excellent choice if you're looking for a smartwatch that has the handy Google Assistant with you at all times. It has an amazing display, a ton of customizing choices, and all the fitness tracking features you could ask for. In addition, it gives the comfort of the dependable Samsung brand and is somewhat less expensive than the Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro 5.
Series 9 Apple Watch
If you're a fan of Apple design, you'll probably be looking elsewhere for a watch than the Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro 5. It is incompatible with iPhones. If so, the Apple Watch Series 9 is the only option to consider. Apple's most recent wristwatch is among the finest available because to its excellent display, smooth iOS connection, and powerful CPU. Furthermore, compared to even the greatest Android-compatible smartphones available, its operating system is more user-friendly.