At the time of writing, Mobvoi’s TicWatch Pro 3 Ultra just sneaks onto our list of the best smartwatches you can buy. Now, we have an idea of how its successor is shaping up.
And it's all thanks to a listing on Amazon’s Canadian site spotted by an eagle-eyed Redditor. The listing is still up as of now, but the Mobvoi TicWatch Pro 5 is labelled as “currently unavailable.” No, you didn’t miss the TicWatch Pro 4 — Mobvoi is a Chinese company, and in China, the number four is considered unlucky due to it sounding a lot like the word for “death”. It’s the reason there was no OnePlus 4, too.
The next generation of TicWatch comes with a big design change. While previous models came with two buttons and a touchscreen, the 1.43-inch TicWatch Pro 5 comes with a rotating crown (an Apple Watch standard) for finer control.
It’s not the first smartwatch to do this — again, every Apple Watch to date has had it, and the Pixel Watch brought the input method to Wear OS last year — but it’s a welcome improvement all the same.
The Amazon listing says this rotating crown comes with “satisfying haptic feedback” and can be used to “switch tiles, increase or decrease volume, and even zoom in and out on maps at ease.”
Past TicWatches have suffered from occasionally laggy performance, but Mobvoi is aiming to tackle this head-on with a new chipset and more RAM. While the TicWatch Pro 3 Ultra came with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 4100 platform and 1GB RAM, the TicWatch Pro 5 is listed as doubling the RAM to 2GB while embracing the new Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1 chipset.
When that chipset was announced, Qualcomm made a big showing of its benefits to battery life — an area where Mobvoi wearables already excel thanks to its use of dual-display tech to jump between regular AMOLED smartwatch mode and its battery-saving FSTN ‘Essential Mode’. The TicWatch Pro 5 would take advantage of that, as the listing promising that the 611mAh battery will last for 80 hours in Smart Mode and 45 days in Essential Mode.
While existing TicWatch wearers are still awaiting the long-promised upgrade to Wear OS 3, this listing says that it will come with “the latest version of Wear OS by Google."
For connectivity, there’s Bluetooth 5.2, 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, GPS, Beidou, GLONASS, Galileo and QZSS support. “More than 100 professional workout modes” are supported, and it comes with VO2 Max, heart rate and sleep tracking, as you would expect from a wearable extolling its fitness credentials.
It offers a 5ATM water resistance rating and comes with US-MIL-STD 810H certification, so it should be good at dealing with the bumps and knocks of everyday life.
The listing is pretty comprehensive, but two things are still a mystery: price and release date. If Amazon is accidentally putting promo imagery live, we should know both very soon.
