Mobvoi TicWatch Pro 5 Enduro review: the best Wear OS watch?
Mobvoi TicWatch 5 Pro Enduro
Pros
- Exceptional battery life for a Wear OS watch
- Vibrant and easy-to-read dual-display
- Rugged and durable design
- Comprehensive health and fitness tracking
- Blazing fast performance, zero lag
Cons
- Mobvoi Health app currently Android-only
- Occasional sleep tracking glitches
- Still runs on Wear OS 3
Last year, I reviewed the Mobvoi TicWatch Pro 5, the first wearOS watch to feature the Qualcomm Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1 chipset. The device impressed me with its long battery life and rugged design. Today, I’m back to take a closer look at its successor, the TicWatch Pro 5 Enduro. This new model promises even longer battery life, design tweaks, and enhanced fitness tracking features.
Is it a worthy successor? Should you upgrade if you have the previous version? Let’s dive into the review and find out.
Mobvoi TicWatch Pro 5 Enduro review: Design, hardware
Look & feel
Visually, the TicWatch Pro 5 Enduro shares a similar design language with its predecessor, the TicWatch Pro 5. In fact, put the two devices side by side and you might struggle to see the difference. But there are some changes. Currently, you are only able to get Enduro in Obsidian Black with Red trim on the digital crown. Its likely other colour options will follow.
Crafted from a robust blend of aerospace-grade aluminum, high-strength nylon, and fiberglass, the Enduro exudes durability. However, this ruggedness doesn’t come at the expense of comfort or style. With a MIL-STD-810H military certification, it’s engineered to withstand shocks, drops, and extreme temperatures. A 5 ATM water resistance rating further bolsters its versatility, making it suitable for swimming and diving.
The Enduro feels substantial and well-balanced on the wrist. Its dimensions are slightly slimmer than the Pro 5, measuring 11.95mm thick compared to the Pro 5’s 12.2mm. Nevertheless, I feel it is still better suited for male wrists. In fact, it’s a fraction heavier than the previous version.
Another change is the upgraded “Fluororubber” band. It closely resembles the sport bands used on Pixel Watch and Apple Watch, providing a familiar, comfortable and airy feel. Its definitely better than the band that can be found on the predecessor device.
A standout feature of the Enduro is its scratch-resistant sapphire crystal display. This premium upgrade of gorilla glass ensures better protection against accidental scratches. However, it’s worth noting that minor discolouration might occur on the black edges of the bezel if bumped against hard surfaces. I’m not sure if this is because of the new arrow-like reinforced carvings or the paint job.
The final design change is the rotating crown. Like its predecessor, it offers buttery smooth navigation and control over various functions like scrolling, app launching, music volume, and map zooming. But the crown is now bigger so easier to operate and feels a lot nicer. Its tactile feedback adds to the overall user experience.
As before, there’s also a flat physical button on the top right-hand side of the device. One change since my review of the 5 Pro is that this button is customisable now. By default it is set to open a list of recently used apps. But by simply going into the settings, it was a 15 second job to change it so that it functions as a shortcut to launch the exercise app. In fact, you can configure the button to open any app you like. Nice.
Dual-display technology
Mobvoi’s signature dual-screen design returns in the TicWatch Pro 5 Enduro, balancing rich functionality with impressive battery life. The main 1.43″ AMOLED display is vibrant and easy to read, even in sunlight, and serves as your primary interface for apps, notifications, and watch faces.
When idle, by default, the watch switches to an enhanced Ultra Low Power (ULP) display for essential info at a glance. You can navigate ULP tiles with the crown to see health data, compass directions, or notification previews. This secondary display now even supports popular third-party apps like Strava, Adidas Running, Nike+, and more.
The watch allows you full control over the display settings. You can choose the screen timeout time, there’s an option to select the backlight colour of the ULP display, and you can even enable the AMOLED to be always-on. Lots of options there to customise everything to your liking.
Under the Hood
Under the hood, the TicWatch Pro 5 Enduro retains the same powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1 chip found in its predecessor, the TicWatch Pro 5. This delivers a smooth and responsive user experience, with snappy app loading times and seamless smartphone connectivity. The performance remains impressive, ensuring lag-free operation and efficient multitasking.
The Enduro also inherits the comprehensive suite of sensors found in the Pro 5. These include PPG heart rate sensors,SpO2, accelerometer, gyroscope, barometer, skin temperature sensor, and a compass for added functionality. So it seems there has been no change there. The device also continues to support GNSS (GPS+Beidou+Glonass+Galileo+QZSS) for satellite positioning, and includes a built-in microphone, speaker and NFC support.
A WearOS 3 watch that lasts for days!
One of the TicWatch Pro 5 Enduro’s standout features is its exceptional battery life. In Essential Mode, it boasts an impressive 45 days of power, while in Smart Mode, it can last up to a remarkable 90 hours. This surpasses its predecessor by 10 hours, likely due to software optimizations, as the battery capacity remains unchanged. A quick 30 minute top-up is enough to get almost 2 days of usage.
Essential Mode deactivates wearOS, utilizing only the energy-efficient LCD layer. The low-power display also conserves battery in smart mode, primarily showing exercise metrics like heart rate, speed, and distance.
Even with intensive use, including regular GPS tracking and health monitoring, the Enduro comfortably lasts multiple days on a single charge. This impressive longevity makes it an ideal companion for outdoor adventures, travel, or simply a busy lifestyle. It is something that you simply don’t get with other Wear OS devices and is definitely one of the most important selling points of the watch. Hopefully, other companies will take note.
The Enduro also offers clever ways to conserve battery life. For instance, it can automatically switch to Essential Mode during sleep, maximizing power efficiency. In fact, it has done this to me a few times during the several weeks of testing. Once in this mode, you need to do a long press of the flat physical button to get back to the full wear OS experience. That reboot takes about 10 seconds.
Charging is done via a proprietary magnetic puck with a wired USB-A connector. So same as before. I really like the watch’s ability to display an exceptionally precise, battery status during charging, showing the exact percentage to the hundredth decimal point in real-time.
Mobvoi TicWatch Pro 5 Enduro vs TicWatch Pro 5: Technical specs
Specification | TicWatch 5 Pro Enduro | TicWatch 5 Pro |
|---|---|---|
Dimensions | 50.15 x 48 x 11.95 mm | 50.15 x 48 x 12.2 mm |
Weight | 44.7 grams (without straps) | 44.35 grams (without straps) |
Case | Stainless steel, 7000-series aluminium and high-strength nylon with fibreglass | Stainless steel, 7000-series aluminium and high-strength nylon with fibreglass |
Lens | Sapphire Crystal | Corning Gorilla Glass |
Strap | Fluororubber (Interchangeable, 24mm) | Solid Silicone (Interchangeable, 24mm) |
Display | 1.43“, 466 x 466 pixels, 326ppi, Always On Display OLED (plus ultra-low-power display option) | 1.43“, 466 x 466 pixels, 326ppi, Always On Display OLED (plus ultra-low-power display option) |
Chipset | Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1 Wearable Platform | Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1 Wearable Platform |
Memory | 2GB RAM/32GB ROM | 2GB RAM/32GB ROM |
GNSS | GPS+Beidou+Glonass+Galileo+QZSS | GPS+Beidou+Glonass+Galileo+QZSS |
Battery | 628 mAh (typical), Smart Mode: up to 90 hours. Essential Mode: up to 45 days. 2 days usage achieved in 30 minutes. | 628 mAh (typical), Smart Mode: up to 80 hours. Essential Mode: up to 45 days. 65% charge achieved in 30 minutes. |
Water rating | 5ATM, Open Water Swim/MIL-STD-810H | 5ATM, Open Water Swim/MIL-STD-810H |
Mobvoi TicWatch Pro 5 Enduro review: Health & fitness tracking
The Mobvoi TicWatch Pro 5 is very good at health tracking, providing a comprehensive overview that goes beyond just the basics. In addition to tracking skin temperature, it continuously monitors heart rate and features Irregular Heart Beat (IHB) detection (region dependent), potentially alerting users to heart health issues. While I personally haven’t experienced any alerts during my testing, the feature offers peace of mind.
The company has also made noteworthy improvements to the user interface. TicHealth now consolidates health data, eliminating the need for separate apps. This streamlined approach makes it easier to track your health metrics, and detailed reports are just a tap away.
The watch delivers a wealth of health data, much of it accessible directly on your wrist. A standout feature is its ability to measure five vital health metrics—heart rate, blood oxygen levels, respiratory rate, stress level, and heart health—in under 90 seconds with a single tap. This quick “health snapshot” provides a convenient overview of your well-being.
Everything else is tracked including steps, calories, detailed heart rate data, blood oxygen stress, stairs climbed and more. You may want to take some time to go through the settings. There are some tweaks you can make – for example for more detailed stress data. I did enable everything possible and found it did not effect battery life very much.
So all the fitness tracking basics are there. One notable omission is heart rate variability (HRV) data, a valuable metric for tracking recovery that has become increasingly common on smartwatches. Unfortunately, just like its predecessor, the TicWatch Pro 5 Enduro does not currently offer this feature. I feel like Mobvoi might be missing a trick here.
As far as the quality of data, I did not notice any big discrepancies compared to other devices I use. So a thumbs up from me on this count.
The Mobvoi Health app
Unlike most Wear OS watches that utilize the Google Watch app for setup, the TicWatch Pro 5 Enduro relies on the Mobvoi Health app. This app handles the initial pairing, syncs activity data, and offers further visualization and analysis of your health metrics.
It is worth nothing, at the moment there is only an Android version of the software. So if you have an iOS smartphone, you are out of luck. However, given that the previous version of the app is compatible with both Android and iOS, it’s reasonable to expect an iOS version to be released at some stage.
The Mobvoi Health app boasts an attractive and user-friendly interface, ensuring a smooth experience. I did not notice the occasional delays in loading data I experienced when testing its predecessor last year.
The app’s three main sections—Statistics, Device, and Account—offer comprehensive functionality. Statistics provides access to your health and activity data, Device manages watch settings and watch faces, and Account handles general account settings.
Overall, Mobvoi has done a commendable job with the app’s clean interface and intuitive navigation. However, I did encounter a few glitches during my testing. Twice, the watch remained connected to the app, allowing me to change watch faces and access other features, but the health data failed to sync until I logged out and back into the smartphone app. While no data was lost, this minor hiccup slightly marred the otherwise seamless experience.
Sleep tracking gets snore detection
Similar to my experience with the original device, sleep tracking is good. The watch diligently monitors your sleep and naps, although there is one glitch that I thought I had noticed.
For instance, let’s say you briefly wake up during the night and walk around for a few minutes, and perhaps watch a short Youtube clip – altogether lasting 10 minutes. The watch will split your sleep into two sessions, classifying one of them as a nap.
Subsequently I learned that there is a trick that helps to avoid this – you need to set up a sleep schedule. This will allow the watch to track your sleep as one continuous session for the entire night, with the “fully-wake” time simply appearing as a gap in the data. All sleep sessions will still be included in your overall sleep record for the night.
Beyond that the stats are incredibly detailed. The TicWatch Pro 5 diligently monitors the stages of Awake, Light, Deep, and REM sleep, as well as heart rate, blood oxygen levels, respiratory rate, and skin temperature while sleeping. So that’s all quite good.
The news accompanying the Enduro launch is the snore tracking feature. You can check out my separate, more detailed, article on this. It requires manual activation through the Mobvoi smartphone app, utilizing the phone’s microphone to record snoring throughout the night. The app then generates a comprehensive report detailing snoring frequency, intensity, and duration, along with visual representations of patterns and trends.
I was a bit doubtful at first, especially since I didn’t think I snored. I wasn’t expecting much from the report. But boy, was I wrong! The app hit me with a full-blown snoring report! I couldn’t believe it until I listened to the recordings – yep, that was definitely me sawing logs towards the end of my sleep.
Sports tracking
Switching gears to sports, the TicWatch Pro 5 boasts over 100 professional workout modes. Some of these are with auto-recognition which works quite well.
As a runner myself, I mainly focused on testing its run tracking capabilities, but I also took it for a couple of swims.
Running – accurate heart rate, view heart rate zone on low-power display
For running, I put the TicWatch Pro 5 head-to-head with a Garmin Forerunner 955 (linked to a chest strap) on my other wrist.
Heart rate tracking was comparable, usually only differing by 1-2 bpm on average, and max heart rate values were often identical. So it performed quite well on that count.
Satellite connectivity was also speedy, matching the Garmin most of the time. However, the TicWatch consistently overestimated distances by roughly 20 meters per kilometer compared to the Garmin, potentially due to testing in the busy streets of central London. It’s not a huge discrepancy, but I did notice the consistency of this difference between the Mobvoi and Garmin.
The type of data that you get for running can be seen below. Its quite comprehensive, plus you get some more advanced performance stats such as recovery time and Vo2Max.
Something that is not very intuitive is ending or pausing workouts. It requires you to wake up the display, swipe to the right, end the workout and then confirm that you’ve ended the workout. And the symbols that you need to click are quite small. If you accidentally press the crown it will take you to the watch home display. So then you’ll need to navigate back to the exercise app. It would have been simpler to enable you to end a workout with a double-press of the crown and to pause with a single-press.
A feature I like very much is the ability of the low-power display’s backlight to adjusts according to your heart rate as you are exercising. The color spectrum ranges from blue to green, yellow, orange, and finally red, indicating the intensity of your workout. This allows you to monitor whether you need to decrease or increase your pace to maintain your target heart rate zone at a glance. It is something I have not seen on any other watch.
A good swim tracker
As mentioned, I also did a few swim sessions. And the Mobvoi did a pretty good job there.
It was excellent at recognising my stroke types – almost flawless. As far as heart rate tracking, in one of my sessions it was impressively close to Form 2 Swim Goggles I was also testing out. In another session the heart rate data was a bit off. So that was a mixed bag. Not too surprising considering that optical heart rate sensors struggle to do a good job under water. I’m guessing I should have made sure to tighten the strap more the second time around.
Mobvoi TicWatch Pro 5 Enduro review: Smart features
The TicWatch Pro 5 Enduro, like its predecessor, runs on Google’s Wear OS 3+, providing a smooth, intuitive user experience with easy navigation. It boasts features like contactless payments via Google Wallet, media playback control, independent Spotify playback, Google Maps navigation, and smart home control.
The watch comes preloaded with Mobvoi’s health and fitness apps, offering a comprehensive suite of tools, though some users may find the number of apps excessive and the inability to uninstall some a drawback. However, the TicWatch Pro 5 offers ample customization options, including a variety of watch faces, allowing users to personalize their watch’s look and feel.
Plus you now get the, above mentioned, ability to customise the physical button. Which is a nice addition.
Also, Mobvoi is actively testing Wear OS 4 for the TicWatch 5 range. The company recently invited users to register for its beta program. The recruitment period closed on April 30th, so hopefully the watch will be upgraded to the new version of the operating system soon.
Mobvoi TicWatch Pro 5 Enduro review: The bottom line
The TicWatch Pro 5 Enduro is an iterative upgrade over its predecessor. While visually very similar, it comes with a few improvements, such as a sapphire crystal display, thinner body, a more comfortable strap, a larger rotating crown, and a customisable physical button. The dual-display technology remains a highlight, providing a balance between functionality and battery efficiency.
The watch does a good job in health and fitness tracking, offering a wide range of features and comprehensive data. However, the absence of heart rate variability tracking and occasional glitches in sleep tracking are minor drawbacks. The Mobvoi Health app, despite being Android-only for now, offers a user-friendly interface and detailed data visualisation. The addition of snore detection may benefit some users.
For sports lovers, the TicWatch Pro 5 Enduro provides accurate heart rate tracking and a vast array of workout modes. Runners may find the distance tracking slightly less accurate than dedicated running watches, and the process of ending workouts could be more intuitive. However, the watch’s ability to display heart rate zones on the low-power display is a standout feature.Overall, the TicWatch Pro 5 Enduro strikes an impressive balance between smartwatch functionality and fitness tracking capabilities. While it may not be the absolute best in either category, its exceptional battery life combined with its diverse capabilities make it the most well-rounded Wear OS watch currently available.
At $349 on Mobvoi / Amazon the TicWatch Pro 5 Enduro is reasonably priced, especially considering its impressive features, smooth performance, and remarkably long battery life.
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