TicWatch Pro 3 vs. my previous smartwatch(es?)

What Wear OS feels for a happy-ish owner of a Pebble in 2021

I’ve been a Pebble / Rebble user since the first Kickstarter campaign, until Feb-2021, when my Pebble Time suddenly drowned on a relaxing day at the pool.
RIP, Pebble.

Pebble went bankrupt, got sold for assets and workers, but it was still live through the community — the “Rebble” platform. After three years of stillness, though, I wanted to upgrade and get more functions. I made my research and was convinced that the TicWatch Pro was my best bet. It took me just a couple of weeks to post a local ad to sell it again… It was horrible. I even started a rant post about the TicWatch experience, but never published until now — by that time, I wasn’t using it anymore and was gladly forgetting the bad stuff. I recycled that draft into this post.

Thus, this is a comparison of this new watch with the expectations of a Pebble user and the failure of TicWatch Pro, 1st gen. I also added some sprinkles from my boyfriend’s experience with his Apple Watch.

I’ll be adding more details as I stumble upon them (I’ve been using the TicWatch for only a week), but these are the most striking.

TL;DR: the TicWatch Pro 3 is finally a good Wear OS device that I don’t regret using, and definitely recommended for non-Apple users.

That said, there are a lot of rough edges, both on the Wear platform in general, and even more on the Mobvoi side. The watch could be smarter too, as there are still a lot of things I need to do routinely: blocking on the shower, automatic sports tracking, DnD, silent notifications while I’m on the phone, Essential mode during sleep…

A crash course on the TicWatch Pro line

Its main selling point is having two screens, on top of each other. The AMOLED screen is all beautiful and detailed, but when it’s “dormant”, instead of the Wear OS Ambient Mode (which is a powered down version of your watchface, mostly black to save power), it goes even further and turns the AMOLED off, turning on an old-school “LED” screen (like that of your desk clock) (the tech is actually called FSTN) which is transparent and sits on top of the color screen. That’s an always-on screen, with virtually no worry about power consumption.

Promotional description about the dual screens. Taken from the TicWatch Pro 3 website.

You can go full-saver with the Essential mode too — you can’t use the Assistant or any other app, but it still shows the time, steps, heartbeat, oxygen saturation, and “auto-tracking” of sports.

I’ll be calling the FSTN screen “Essential screen” to make it easier.

Pros

• It’s definitely faster than the previous models! FINALLY a Wear device with some battery life AND fast enough! I can use the assistant with no lags at all (unless you’ve placed it in essential mode, of course). The new generation of Qualcomm CPUs and extra RAM made all the difference.
• It now has sleep tracking pre-baked, FINALLY. That’s by Ticwatch, not Google Fit though, but it syncs most of the information (no pulse or SpO2) to Fit and it’s a pleasure to see.
• Essential Mode can also do auto-tracking of sleep, so it’s great to save some extra battery during the night.
• Essential screen got extra functions — including backlight and complete sports tracking!
• Wear OS includes an option to silence the phone while the watch is connected. My phone used to be in silent mode 24/7, but when the Pebble battery ran out, I started missing notifications. This won’t happen anymore, I guess.
• They’ve finally added a speaker draining function once you get wet. This was lacking in the 1st gen.
• It’s lighter and smaller, comparing to the previous version.

Cons (considering the Ticwatch / Mobvoi platform)

• The watch has a round bezel with numbers. It has two popped buttons. WHY NO ROTATING CROWN YET? Wear supports that for a while now. It’s a pain to scroll through the tiny screen with minimal finger slicks… and don’t you tell me about the silly scroll gestures, my hand is already over the watch to press the buttons!
• The app has a horrible UI.
• It also doesn’t sync tracked exercises back to Google Fit. Since it has its own “health stats”, all information tracked in their watchapps are their own, and if you want to see complete exercise information on Google Fit, you got to track it on the Fit watchapps. I can understand the company POV here, but it’s definitely a pity for us, users. I get better UI and stats on Fit, but I can’t see its information on the Essential screen.
• I still can’t dictate responses in two languages, but I can configure them on the keyboard? The Assistant does recognize my languages as usual, though.
• Why doesn’t the smart alarm from TicSleep includes an actual SILENT alarm? Pebble had that since day one and it was simply awesome. No one understood how I woke up in good mood and at the right time “without an alarm”.
• The essential screen’s backlight takes a tiny bit more to turn on than expected when you raise the watch. It’s a fraction of the previous lag, but it’s still not instant as Pebble was. That seems common on the Apple Watch as well. On the other hand (pun not intended), it’s pretty ok when your watch vibrates on a notification, and you can see it on a lift of your arm.
• Pebble’s shake-to-light was much more efficient and reliable — 100% works even when you’re in bed, without any dance (needs further testing), and doesn’t when you just moved.
• Still a bit bulky and way too generic to make any light fashion statement — except for “this is a macho thing”, maybe.
• Can’t find a “dock” for it yet, as the previous version had (unofficial models, though). The charging plug is a bit inconvenient/weird on the desk.

Activity: light green; oxygen: gray (both come from the same app); weather: black??? That’s by the TicWatch Companion app (it’s the larger block. Yep, there’s a black sun there).

• They can’t settle on icon colors for the widgets. Wear OS ones are standard as white on black, but the Mobvoi ones are all over the place, even with… black on black?? Really? I mean, I can’t even customize the background color on the watchface settings screen, don’t they test that??? This is probably a reflect of the bad UI you see on the app.
• Why spend battery with seconds on the Essential screen? I guess it’s an irrelevant drain.
• You can’t really flip the watch. All buttons are on the right, and as a leftie I would prefer to have them facing my arm. There are some workarounds for the Wear OS, but in the past, I had issues with unflipped watchfaces and, well… you can’t flip the physical display of the Essential screen.

Cons (considering Wear OS in general)

Disorganized watchfaces

Both the experience of finding and configuring are frustrating: some need a companion app, some are paid, some charge for “extra” stuff (like the standard widgets!). And configuring tons of options on the watch’s tiny screen is tiring — a phone is much better for that, as Pebble users know.

A lot of things could be automatized — it’s a *smart* watch, right?

• It stilldoesn’t recognize a shower to auto-block the screen (so-called “Theater mode”), like the first Pro. IIRC, Apple Watch does that.
• Still notifies me while I’m on the phone — what’s quite annoying when you’re having conversations on the go. Pebble knew it should go silent almost since day one. There’s even settings for “silence phone while wearing the watch”, but not the other way around 🤦🏻‍♂️
• It doesn’t follow the phone’s DnD state by default. I guess there’s a way to do it but, again… It should be smarter. I also found (deep in the “Personalization” settings??) an “auto-DnD” that turns on/off at a specific time, but that’s quite basic yet.
• Auto-tracking of sleep is awesome, but for sports, it seems awful.

Battery life still has room for improvement

While pretty decent on the TicWatch with his little tricks, battery life still lags behind many other platforms — friends with Garmin devices brag about 10+ days, for instance. On the other hand, my boyfriend has an Apple Watch he has to recharge almost every day. When he remembers.

It’s a pity and one of the main reasons I stuck with Pebble all this time — 4 days of battery with frequent use, on a tiny device, is pretty slick, for something you’ll have to take out of your wrist to charge and then place it back. And don’t you dare to talk about “why don’t you charge during sleep or shower”, because I want effortless sleep tracking (as Pebble had) and no fuss for everyday tasks.

Others

• Google Pay is missing in most countries it’s available on Android. At the time of writing, only mere 11 countries are supported on Wear OS, while Android supports 40. I mean, the tech is the same, so this block is simply stupid from a user's point of view.
• YMMV on apps supported both on Android and Wear. Spotify doesn’t play anything locally (and Play Music is gone); Cookmate is forgotten and broken; famous apps like Out of Milk completely ignore the platform; etc
• You can’t set up custom launchers yet. The default launcher from Wear OS is just basic, with a fast scroll on a plain list, but there’s also the Mobvoi Launcher — which is actually a bit sad since it’s a double list of icons that don’t have a sort order (you have to sort them by yourself with clunky long-press actions on that tiny screen) nor feel “right” on a round screen. That can, fortunately, be toggled deep in the Customization settings.
  I even installed the Bubbles Cloud Launcher… which is not really a launcher since it uses a hack to allow you to swipe from top-right to open it. And, while the app is great, the developer really has no clue about UX — the settings on the phone are a pain in the eyes, and you have to work hard to get something decent on the watch.
• Many more apps/faces are paid/shamefully freemium, comparing with your average Android use. Not exactly a con, but a change of expectations. I guess that’s because you just bought a “luxury” and niche device, so developers feel they can actually charge for their work. I call it “shamefully freemium” because the free versions are basically a trial since they’re way too basic to have an actual use.
• Last but not least… why are widgets called complications? Was this borrowed from Apple? That just complicates instructions… lol