Today we are launching a new series here at One Cut titled – Buy this NOT that, a feature designed to inform you, the consumer, which device you should spend your money on and which is the overall better buy! With so few smartwatches out there to accompany Android devices, today we are going to feature the Ticwatch Pro 3 Ultra and tell you why it is a better buy over its competitors right now.

Since 2017, the team at Mobvoi has been making smartwatches with a focus on becoming a recognizable consumer AI wearable brand on a global scale. Leveraging their powerful hardware-software integration, voice interaction technology, and engineering capabilities, they have been designing wearables with a focus on merging the best smartwatch and fitness-tracking technology into a singular device. The Ticwatch Pro 3 Ultra is a testament to this vision and is one of the better Wear OS devices on the market currently today.

With an impressive 47mm display, just short of the Apple Watch Ultra clocking in at 49mm or the minuscule Pixel Watch 41mm, the bright and vibrant screen of the Pro 3 Ultra is impressive. The 1.4-inch, full-color AMOLED display is bright and features a unique always-on mode where it transforms into a low-powered FSTN (Film Compensated Super-Twisted Nematic) display that lets consumers see the time at glance without activating the screen. Reminding us a lot of the Garmin Fenix line, which we appreciate.

The watch’s matte black frame and glossy dial along with thin bezels not only look great but is also impressively tough with IP68 and MIL-STD-810G certifications which means it can be worn in pretty much any situation you throw at it, take-a-licking and keep ticking. Comparing the aesthetic to another similar Android smartwatch the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro, we prefer the look and feel on the wrist of the Pro 3 Ultra, especially because it is devoid of that silly bezel Samsung included.

Powering the watch is the speedy Snapdragon Wear 4100 combined with the 1GB of RAM and is running last year’s version of Wear OS with plans for a software upgrade soon. For those that have not worn a Wear OS device, it has come a long way since conception and only now is starting to gain some traction regarding features and fluidity. Apple Watch it is not, but the gap is closing. Besides the main watch face, users swipe through an alphabetical list of apps and informative tiles of information, and while you can download additional third-party apps and access a lot of ‘Googly’ features, navigation at times did feel cumbersome, disorganized, and slow. Granted, this is not a hardware but a software issue that continues to improve with every software update. As far as other features are concerned, GPS accuracy was very good, as good as the Apple and Samsung offerings, you can mirror and interact with notifications on the watch and even answer and respond to phone calls and messages which we appreciate on the smartwatch side of things.

As someone that values fitness metrics, the watch features all the features one would expect from a fitness device including – continuous HD PPG heart rate and SpO2 sensors, which both monitor your metrics during activity as well as overnight for sleeping. They are quite accurate in comparison to their rivals but here in lies the problem…there is a way to sync some of this data with Google Fit, but the process is a bit convoluted. The TicWatch Pro 3 packs a suite of TicWatch-made workout and health apps, which are all branded with the Tic- prefix (TicExercise, TicHealth, TicSleep, and so on). This divvies the expected features somewhat cleanly, though you’ll keep getting prompted to feed all your biometric data back to your Mobvoi account which gets very annoying.

The TicExercise app works well enough with multiple popular workouts to choose from, though its interface makes some odd, unintuitive choices, like not having a ‘stop exercise’ button – you must press and hold the ‘lap’ command (or press and hold the lower-right physical button on the watch’s side). There’s no tutorial either. If you want other workout and health options, you can go for Google’s Fit suite of apps, which come pre-installed. For us, it’s the constant flipping between the Tic apps and Google Fit apps and trying to sync data between them that needs some tweaking, either keep one or the other, not both, because for the non-tech savvy crowd, we could see this being overwhelming.

Last but certainly not least is the battery, hands down, the Ticwatch Pro 3 Ultra has the best battery life on a Wear OS device than any other released to date, on average we were getting a solid 3 days of battery life before needing a charge. With Mobvoi’s own ‘Essential Mode’ users can expect up to 45 days on a full charge, as it converts the watch face to a digital watch-style monochromatic always-on display.

To sum up, the Ticwatch Pro 3 Ultra is a rugged, affordable smartwatch/fitness watch hybrid that is a jack of all trades and can be used for either purpose quite successfully. The hardware is excellent but the software needs some further revision to make the experience for the consumer more user-friendly, nay, Apple-like, before we can wholeheartedly call this a win for the Android space. It is almost there and if you are in the market for the best accompaniment for your Android device, look no further than this one.

BUY yours here – https://amzn.to/3YHAlNR