TicWatch Pro 3 Review and Fossil Gen 5 Review: Wear OS Smartwatch

For the past one month, I’ve been testing two of the most powerful Wear OS watches you can buy: the TicWatch Pro 3 from Mobvoi and the Fossil Gen 5 LTE. They are not similar-to-fantasy, but they share a basic shape: big, chunky, round and black. If you’re using Android and want a smartwatch, they top a consistently small list of top-flight smartwatches.

Despite the reputation of Wear OS, both watches are fully capable and can do the basics of many people out of smartwatches. Both also offer what I would describe as acceptable battery life: one full day most of the time, two at a stretch. The tickwatch can actually go very long, thanks to a clever second screen layered over the first one.

But Wear OS has that reputation: Over the years, the watches that drove it ran slow, ran out of battery life quickly, and suffered from a small ecosystem of applications. Some of those problems have been resolved, but this does not mean that these watches (or, honestly, any smartwatch available to Android owners) stay up to polish and that iPhone users can team up with the Apple Watch .

Comparing Apple Watch is not really useful for Android users – it is not and probably will never be an option. Instead, let’s look at both of these clocks on our own terms.

TicWatch Pro 3 Review

At $ 299.99, the TicWatch Pro 3 is not an impulse buy. But the price is what MobiOV has created. This has pushed the limits of wear OS in two ways.

First of all, this is the best crammed technology one can find for a Wear OS device in here. One major difference for the TicWatch Pro 3 is that it is the only watch to use the Snapdragon 4100, Qualcomm’s latest smartwatch processor. (More than Motorola and possibly OnePlus are rumored to be coming this year.

That processor makes the clock faster than other Wear OS devices – though it can still sometimes feel a step behind both Samsung’s Tizen-based watches and even Fitbit. It also includes the battery life of some TicWatch, which I have found can last two and three days with all the bells and whistles ringing.

The second thing Mobovi has done is to push Wear OS to play bells and whistles for the platform’s missing features. The main thing is that an LCD panel is mounted on top of a regular OLED screen. This allows the TicWatch to go into low power mode when it is on standby and super-low power mode, when you need to last longer than a few days on charge.

OS Fit offers its fitness with Google Fit, which has seen some updates but is far behind Apple’s fitness offerings. Mobvoi cannot fix this, but it has tried to fill the gaps with its suite of fitness apps on the watch. It also includes a blood oxygen sensor – although it is no more accurate than ideal for smartwatches, which is not very good.

However, to use them you need to have a large amount of trust in the Mobvoi company – as the watch makes it perfectly clear when trying to launch these apps, there is no way to do that with Mobvoi Without sharing a bunch of information together. I appreciate transparency, but it still wasn’t enough to make me comfortable with it.

Keep in mind one thing with TicWatch Pro 3: its aesthetics. It is a big, chunky watch. I don’t have a very big wrist and it completely dominates this thing. It is “honest” in its design, at least, in that it is not trying to look like a fanatical watch – it is fitting that the matte plastic lugs have replaceable straps at the bottom. I also wish there was a rotating crown to scroll it.

I used the TicWatch Pro 3 at the end like a bog standard Wear OS clock, turning off its extra screen and sticking to Google Fit for fitness data. It worked perfectly, but at $ 299 I think most people would be better off considering other options.

There is only one fantasy that ticks lack: LTE. For that, you will need to buy fossils.

Fossil Gen 5 LTE Review

I reviewed the original Fossil Gen 5 smartwatch in 2019, and I called it “Best Wear OS Status”. I think (doubtful) respect now goes to the Tikvik Pro 3, but if you need LTE, the $ 349 Fossil Gen5 is one of two options you’ve got on Android (the other being Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 3 LTE).

Fortunately, Fossil Gen 5 is essentially unchanged by the addition of LTE. If you are ready to pay an extra monthly fee to start your carrier, then using Gen 5 with LTE is actually the same as using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.

Even battery life was not a problem. I noticed that the clock was more likely to hit two all day with LTE turned off, but I usually didn’t dry it even in a day using mostly LTE. Sadly, Fossil also feels that it needs to address the drawbacks of Wear OS keeping in mind the complex battery saver features. A watch should sometimes not require users to dig into granular radio toggles.

It still uses the older Snapdragon 3100 processor, although it did not feel particularly slow as a result. Aesthetically, this is very different from the regular fossil gen 5 carlyle that I have and it is not That Much smaller than the TicWatch, but the subtle differences make it feel a bit more premium.

All in all, if you must have an LTE smartwatch and you use Android, then this is your best option if you really like Wear OS to Tigeon. If you’re agnostic, I think the Galaxy Watch 3 with LTE is probably a better option.

As I have been bothering for three years, every smartwatch for Android has some kind of compromise.

Samsung watches require a lot of apps and you need to install a lot of extra accessories on your phone to make them work.

Fitbits are great for fitness but not so good at integrating into Android. There is also little talk about a company owned by Google’s hardware division. The future of the entire Fitbit ecosystem is still in the air.

And honestly, the future of Wear OS is also up in the air. There has been very little movement in app support recently and although Google has done a great job of protecting the OS from decaying completely, it has not done much. It is overdue for an overhaul.

There are likely to be more wear OS watches that might be worth the wait, but the Samsung Galaxy Watch 3 is the best choice for traditional smartwatch accessories. At the end of the day, it is hard to recommend anyone spending three or four hundred dollars to board a boat without a thinner wear OS.

Both TicWatch Pro 3 and Fossil Gen 5 LTE are very good smartwatches. It is just what they are that is the best of an old stage that has a questionable future.

Photography by Dieter Bohn / The Reporter Door