The TicWatch series started off on a variable note but picked up steam with the Pro series. The 2020 model being a fantastic model with a lot of power a good battery life. Absolutely proving to be a competitive option against names like Samsung.
It seems that success continues thanks to the improvements found in the TicWatch Pro 3 Ultra GPS smartwatch. This model takes everything that was great about the Pro 2020 model and builds upon it with enhanced tracking and battery life to brag about.
The latter of which is one of its strongest talking points, boasting up to 72 hours of use or up to 45 days worth of Essential Mode. Essential Mode being Wear OS is dropped and only the top screen is on with the basics (ie, time, date, etc). This is thanks to the fact that it has two 1.4″ displays (Mobvoi’s Dual Display 2.0), including a low-energy top LCD which is layered onto an AMOLED display. The AMOLED handles all of the Wear OS stuff (full color and great resolution), while the LCD display on top is for the always-on display or the just-mentioned Essential Mode.
This is a boost of around 15 additional days from the original Pro model (which lasted up to 30 days in Essential Mode). Now factor in the fact that is has the Qualcomm Snapdragon 4100 + Mobvoi dual-processor system to drive everything with (its plenty fast).
It is absolutely a sports-style watch. Meaning it isn’t the thinnest profile when it comes to smartwatch designs. At the same time, it has gotten a tad thinner than the 2020 and a little lighter too. However, if you aren’t a fan of sport-style watches, you might find it to be a little big. If you do prefer this style, it isn’t larger than the average watch. I find that it matches up to a number of other non-smart watches of the same style, like one I have from Citizen as well as a Rolex Submariner knock-off (I won’t mention where I got that one).
Like the other TicWatch Pro models, it only has two buttons. The top is your trigger for the app list and the bottom one is customizable within settings to open whatever app you’d like. Trigger the compass, stopwatch, favorite fitness app, or anything else you commonly use.
It has a built-in speaker and microphone, which allows you to take calls with it. In the sense of a Bluetooth device, as it doesn’t have a sim card slot (not this model at least). So if you have an incoming call to your phone, you can take it from the watch without ever having to reach into your pocket.
The glass is Gorilla Glass to help protect from scratches (and minor impacts) as well as fingerprints. And yes, it really does reduce most of the fingerprints you’d normally find left behind from poking at it and sliding things around all day.
It is also IP68 rated for water resistance. This means you could take it for a swim without having to worry about it. As long as you don’t go deeper than 5 feet or stay submerged for more than 30 minutes (based on the rating, at least).
Mobvoi used a flouro rubber to design the band this round. There have always been some form of rubber material in the bands of each model, including the leather one (since it wasn’t real leather). However, this is a nice one. Feels good on the wrist, even after wearing it for a long while.
Sensors
It has a number of sensors to track your daily activities and health with, including your sleep. this is another strength of this model. Most smartwatches will track your daily fitness and sleep, but not all of them offer much beyond that. The number of models that do are slowly growing, but they are all flagship options (like this one).
That being said, you also have 24-hour heart rate monitoring with IHB (irregular heart beat) detection, SPO2 blood oxygen monitoring, and fatigue assessment. So it can help you keep an eye on your well-being as well (it is a rough window into any of it, but better than nothing).
It even has a built-in barometer to help track your altitude. Something to help dial in your tracking with since it also has access to all five of the global satellite systems for GPS tracking. So daily fitness, sleep quality, heart health, and positional data are all covered.
Connectivity
Like the other Pro models, this one comes with all of the connectivity outside of cellular (which they have another model for). It supports Bluetooth 5.0 as well as Wi-Fi.
It also has NFC, which opens up support for Google Pay. Allowing you to tap your watch (or get it close to) payment terminals like you would your phone (if you’ve ever used that on your phone before). It’s a great way to pay for your purchases without having to fill your wallet with cards or take it out of your pocket–or bring one at all if you don’t carry cash or other things that you’d require a wallet for (just where to put that drivers license…).
Resources
We mentioned the dual-processor setup using the snappy Snapdragon 4100, which helps it to speed around and keep up with you all day. To go along with that, there is 16GB of RAM on board. I still know a few people that don’t have that much in their desktop (although that number is lessoning by each year). This helps it to keep your multi-tasking needs balanced.
There is 8GB of space/capacity for storing everything, including the OS. So you have enough for most of the apps you’d find yourself installing (which normally aren’t too many). It’s 2x the capacity of the TicWatch Pro 2020, which is good as we actually accomplished filling the (4GB) storage on that one relatively quickly thanks to all of the garbage that some of the popular apps install (ie, Messenger, contacts, etc).
Setup
It doesn’t take much time to get up and going as long as you already have a Google account/login. When you first turn on the watch, it asks you to break out your phone to add it using the Wear OS app. The app finds the watch and runs you through a few screens to connect it to your Wi-Fi and to add whatever Google accounts to it that you’d like.
From there, you can already call it done and start using it for your daily needs. Unless, of course, you want to install additional apps to the watch like Facebook Messenger, Skype, WeChat, or anything else you like to use to communicate.
Between Google’s apps and Mobvoi’s own fitness/tracking apps, you don’t really need much else. Although, you may want to play around with some other sleep tracking options as Mobvoi’s isn’t all that dependable for this. We are a bit up in the air about this one, which means our opinion may change as we continue to use it.
You may find you prefer to use other tracking apps for everything else. In which case, you may find all sorts of fun stuff in the Play Store to download to the watch. You can also download your favorite music apps to it as well (and store tracks offline using services like Spotify).
Charging
We aren’t a big fan of proprietary connections. So we will almost always complain about them when they exist. This is the case with the charging cable. To its defense, it is a water-resistant watch and the cable is, at least, magnetic. So it is easy to connect or disconnect.
It just would have been nice to have wireless charging. This would make it easy to buy a stand for it to hang off of instead of laying it flat somewhere.
We would recommend using a 3D printer (or finding someone who has one) to print a stand for the watch. This allows you to slide/integrate the charging cable into it o that the watch slaps on and off it with ease using the magnets of the cable, while allowing the watch to be viewable as a small clock. Thus taking advantage of that always-on screen.
The one in the image above was printed by us using a design that was already created by someone else (it can be found here on Thingiverse).
Our Conclusion
Thus far, the watch has been one of the best in the realm of battery life. You can use it all day and then sleep with it, allowing you to track your sleep patterns overnight without having to worry about it dying on you. After a few nights, you’ll have to finally put it on a charger, but that is fantastic.
There is a lot of analytical data that can be collected using this watch, including some data that can help you get a better look at your heart health. It has all of the sensors (Accelerometer, Gyro Sensor, HD PPG Heart Rate Sensor, SpO2 Sensor, Low Latency Off-Body Sensor, and Barometer) and it is plenty fast thanks to the chipset.
It will be getting the new Wear OS 3.0 update some time this year. Wear OS 3.0 is currently available but hasn’t rolled out yet to most manufacturers and models. This model is one of only two that Mobvoi confirmed will be getting it. No exact date has been confirmed yet (at the time of writing this), but it is expected to happen no latter than mid-2022. We can’t wait to see how well it performs with the new OS update when the time comes.
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Specifications:
- Model: TicWatch Pro 3 Ultra GPS
- Dimensions (mm): 47 x 48 x 12.3
- Weight: 41g
- Color: Shadow Black
- Watch case: Stainless steel and high-strength nylon with fiberglass
- Screen: Corning Gorilla Anti-fingerprint Cover Glass
- Watch strap: Fluoro Rubber (interchangeable), 22mm
- Operating System: Wear OS by Google
- Chipset: Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 4100 Platform and Mobvoi dual processor system
- Memory: RAM: 1GB / ROM: 8GB
- Display: 1.4“ 454*454 326ppi Full Color Always On Display AMOLED + FSTN
- Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.0, Wi-Fi:802.11b/g/n
- GNSS: GPS+Beidou+Glonass+Galileo+QZSS
- NFC Payments: Google Pay
- Speaker: Yes
- Mic: Yes
- Vibrator: Yes
- PPG: Yes
- Barometer: Yes
- Sensors: Accelerometer, Gyro Sensor, HD PPG Heart Rate Sensor, SpO2 Sensor, Low Latency Off-Body Sensor, Barometer
- Battery capacity: 577mAh
- Durability: IP68, Pool Swim/MIL-STD-810G
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