In this video we'll be looking at the TicWatch Pro, which was released last year in 2018
but could well see how the rest of 2019 - and possibly even 2020! - as one of, if not the,
best smartwatches that you can buy. As a premium SmartWatch it promises to be a great all-rounder
with elegant looks and great sports and fitness features as well as fantastic battery life.
They claim up to 30 days on a single full charge, which would be phenomenal for holidays
and long trips away... so with that in mind we’ve come to the beautiful and picturesque
island of Crete, to put it through its paces!
Hello! Welcome to another “Switched on Network” video, I'm @paulfp and if you’re new here
this channel covers technology, gadgets and the Internet etc., so if you haven't subscribed
already do think about clicking that Subscribe button and the notification bell so you won't
miss any great new videos! Now as devices, there are few things that are more polarizing
in the world of technology than smartwatches. Some people love them, whilst other people
- even techies and gadget nerds - can't really see the point! Well good smartwatches have
been around for quite a while now, and you can tell they're getting mainstream because
even Apple have done their usual thing of showing up late to the party, copying everyone
else's device and then pretending that they invented and pioneered the technology with
an inferior yet overpriced device!
Well I’m no expert in smartwatches, but I’ve been wearing this one for about 9 months
now so here are my thoughts and opinions on this premium wear OS SmartWatch!
So first impressions... I really like how it looks. I love the fact that it’s round
it doesn't immediately look like a Smartwatch. I think the strap that comes with it is really
nice as well, it's nice and smart and it matches it really well in terms of design. On the
outside, it's leather (genuine Italian leather, apparently!) and on the inside it's made of
silicon which is breathable and sweat-resistant, so that's really good if you're using it to
track runs and other fitness activities. As well as obvious touchscreen the other two
main inputs for the watch these two hardware buttons here. The top button there launches
the app drawer, or it takes you back to the home screen if you’re knees deep within
an app. The second button on here is customizable to launch an app of your choosing, so that
could be Strava another app if you use it for tracking fitness and runs etc., or it
could be something like the timer if you find yourself waiting 4 minutes for the perfect
brew in the kitchen! You can also obviously launch a lot of these things by using the
Google Assistant and there’ll be more on that later in the video.
As you'd expect from a Smartwatch you can choose from thousands of different style watch
faces and the ones that come with the Watch itself are pretty good, with widget-style
functionality in the complication. (That’s the term for the extra bit on the watch face
there by the way. I'd never heard that before. There you are - learn a new thing every day!)
For example these can take your heart rate, display battery status or the weather or the
current temperature etc. You can download new watch faces either on the watch itself
or you can download them from the comfort of your phone and then install them on the
watch via WearOS app.
On the underside of of the watch your see that heart rate monitor as well as the contacts
for charging. This is the charging dock which can sit on your bedside table and plugs into
any USB power source, and it’s magnetic which means placing the watch on it before
bed is a doddle! That USB end also means that when travelling you can charge it off, say,
a laptop if you want to.
As you’d hope from a watch, it’s waterproof up to 1.5 metres for 30 minutes, but they
don't recommend you wear it whilel swimming because it's not fully waterproof. However,
it's fine to wear in the shower if you want, and you don't need to worry about splashing
it when washing your hands or going out in the rain.
The main screen gives you for main swipe gestures. Swiping down give you access to quick settings
as well as a shortcut to get into the main settings, which will be familiar to anyone
who also has an Android phone. Another familiar gesture is swiping from the left with brings
up the Google assistant. Swiping Up gives you notifications and swiping up from the
right used to just give you fitness related information from either Mobvoi’s own fitness
application or from Google Fit, but a WearOS update a little while ago added in tiles so
you can now choose from a variety of different items to appear here. This is a nice place
to keep your goals on Google Fit... yeah, ok you might not be able to tell that I make
use of Google Fit but I do try!
While on the subject of my personal appearance, I'm a reasonably tall man with big-ish...
hands... and the TicWatch Pro doesn't look out-of-place on my wrist although if you’re
of a more petite persuasion then you might feel this is a little bit big for you. By
comparison with my old watch which I wore daily for about 10 years it’s slightly bigger
but nothing too major and I got used to it immediately.
A more important consideration perhaps is the battery life, and this is an area where
the TicWatch Pro does not disappoint! With a 415mAH battery, battery life is phenomenal!
I find for me that it generally only needs charging every other night, and I can get
two days of usage on it with no problems whatsoever! Sure, if I disabled a few features I could
probably get even more life out of it but I don't really see the point of diminishing
a device’s functionality for no real benefit. If it didn’t really get to the end of the
first day then sure I’d engage frugal mode, but the fact that it gets to the end of day
2 quite comfortably is a really pleasant surprise!
Having never owned a smartwatch before, I was expecting it to be a little bit of a pain
having to charge it all the time, and a lot of people do say, “oh yeah it’s yet another
thing to have to charge!” But to be honest it just feels perfectly normal and natural
popping it on charge in the evenings. I plug my phone into charge every night before bed
and the watch just clips into the magnetic stand. Easy!
So how do they achieve this phenomenal battery life? Well one of the standout features of
the TicWatch Pro, and one of the main reasons I chose this smartwatch over the competition
is it's got this clever design where they’ve layered 2 screens on top of each other. You’ve
got the colour touch screen AMOLED display on here but then they’ve also layered on
top of that a sort of retro black-and-white LCD-style display, which enables what they
call “Essential Mode”. In this mode it just displays the time, the date, a step count,
the battery level. So that's great if you go on holiday and forget your charger because
it’ll apparently last a full month! It's also great for looking at in bright sunlight,
like here in Crete where it's sunny pretty much all the time!
You can still take your heart rate when in Essential Mode by pressing the bottom hardware
button here, and as well as being useful for Ultra power-saving mode, that's also what
you’ll see when you turn off the always-on display.
The always-on display is actually quite nice, it doesn’t diminish battery life too much
so it’s up to you really which of the two you want to use. Either way, it’s great
that there's always something visible on your wrist so if you want to quickly flick your
wrist up to look at the time you never have to wait for the time to appear, which would
be really annoying over time - even if only for a fraction of a second!
When you consider the technical specifications of the TicWatch Pro it is slightly inferior
to its more expensive rival, the Samsung Galaxy Watch, and indeed the slight underpowering
of the TicWatch Pro is apparent in everyday use. Sometimes you do see a fair bit of lag,
for instance when you’re waiting for an app to load or for it to do something the
screen goes off and it goes to sleep. So you can definitely see the trade-off that you
have to make for the price of around £250 or €250. (Because they’re basically the
same thing these days, thanks to a SILLY BIG RED BUS!) So more ooomph here would definitely
be a benefit, like you see with the more expensive rival, the Samsung Galaxy Watch.
However for me, the Samsung Galaxy Watch has one major drawback and that's that it runs
Samsung’s own operating system, not WearOS by Google and that means it doesn't have access
to Google Play all the apps you get there. I suppose what we need is for these two watches
to mate and produce a mixture of the two, that would be ideal!
Now being a smartwatch this thing can obviously do an awful lot more than just tell the time,
so what have I found most useful in the time I feel wearing it? Well I spent the last 10
years wearing a very, very basic watch that literally just told the time and date and
nothing else. So it's nice to have some sort of “basic” advanced features like a stopwatch,
countdown timer, a calculator and other things like that, especially as I wore one of these
bad boys back in the ‘90s!
There are several apps that I wasn't even expecting to see on the small screen but they
actually work quite well! You can load Google Maps to have a look at the streets around
you and even navigate somewhere. You can load up Uber to book a taxi home and you can even
open up the Nest app to make sure your house is nice and warm when that actually gets you
home! Although actually between planning this video and recording it here today they've
just killed off the Nest App. Oh well!
The watch also has NFC so you can use it to pay for things just like you would with Google
Pay on your phone. Although, it's actually quite an awkward movement to sort of press
it up to the card machine terminal and the two or so times I’ve tried it (when no-one
was looking...) it didn't actually work straight away and I had to have several attempts...
and it's also a lot slower than just, y’know, doing on my phone which is always instantaneously
successful, even if I do have to go to the whole rigmarole of, y’know, taking my phone
out of my pocket! So I wouldn't bother using it for paying for stuff...
One thing I really like is being able to quickly look at my watch to see notifications that’ve
come in, and you can even control it with sort of flicking actions like this to do different
swipe actions, although probably when no one's looking! Another thing I really like is that
the notifications that come in on The Watch are in Reverse chronological order, when they’re
not on my phone, so it's really easy to see which notifications has just come in.
There are some things for which having a Smartwatch is a definite advantage. The step counter
for example no longer loses all hope of accuracy if you don't have your phone in your pocket
100% of the time, as it's much more likely that you have your watch on your wrist for
100% of the day. The “find my phone” feature is also very useful as you’re very unlikely
to lose your watch as you'll normally keep it on all day but if you put your phone down
somewhere and can't remember where, you can use your watch to tell your phone to ring.
I also found the media controls app on the watch to be quite useful, allowing you to
control the volume, pause, unpause and skip whatever Media your phone is playing. I run
the sound at my church and I often plug my phone into the sound desk behind my drums
after the service to play music, but then I want to go and mingle with folk and have
a coffee other side of the building. If I decide the volume is too loud I want to skip
a song I can just do that from my watch now, without having to walk all the way back the
sound desk each time, which is really useful!
One of the best things you can use a smartwatch for in my opinion is for fitness and tracking
runs and things. Now obviously you can use arm straps to keep your phone attached to
your arm and I've talked in a previous video about using the excellent QuadLock system
(click the i just up there if you want to see that) but because the TicWatch Pro has
GPS built-in you can leave your phone at home completely and of course it's got a heart
rate monitor as well underneath and that’s pressed right up to your scan so it can take
readings throughout your run.
It's also got Google Play Music built-in and it's got some limited storage so you can download
tracks off your phone onto the watch to play play over Bluetooth earphones like these ones
Mobvoi sent me (thanks very much for that, Mobvoi!) so it’s great when you’re going
for a run! See ya in a bit!
Now at this point it’s worth mentioning that while I do find my TicWatch Pro to be
really useful for tracking runs, the GPS sometimes takes a little while to find signal so you
have to stand around waiting for a minute or so before you run for the little location
icon on Strava to change to be filled-in white to avoid the first few hundred metres of your
run being missed. Music-wise, you can also play music out of watch’s built-in speaker...
but just no!
As I touched on before, the Google assistant is built in to the TicWatch Pro and it responds
to voice activation too, so it's kinda like having a “Google Home Micro” attached
to your wrists at all times!
OK Google. Sing Happy Birthday!
[Google:] Happy Birthday to you...!
You can of course do useful things as well like add things to your shopping list or turn
smart light bulbs and other devices on and off. Click the i in the top corner to see
a video on how to set that up.
And finally you *can* also make and receive phone calls on the watch... but just because
you can do something that doesn't always mean that you should!!
So a smartwatchis a really cool gadget or toy to have and the TicWatch Pro seems to
be an example of a really good smartwatch. It's useful for tracking runs and things and
hopefully it will spur me on do that a lot more! Would I spend £250 on it though? Possibly
hard to justify, but I really like it and this one will definitely staying on my wrist.
Is it an essential? No. Could I live without it? Definitely, yes! But it's a great gadget
to have and if I was more seriously into running then I’d obviously consider it a lot more
seriously. The wrist is a great location because it's just there and it's great being able
to do certain tasks and look at notifications on your watch without having to fumble around
in your pocket for your phone. Plus, there’s always Essential Mode if you want to take
a break and stop notifications disturbing the peace. Plus, that's really useful when
putting the kids to bed because they love the light on the watch!
I you like what you’ve seen and you’d like to buy one for yourself, there's a link
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