It's been a long time since the TicWatch Pro 3 first impressed us with its ingenious solution to the battery-hungry Wear OS platform. That model launched in September 2020, and in the time since, Google has entered the arena with a smartwatch of its own.

The TicWatch Pro 5 comes in at a price of $349, exactly the same as the Pixel Watch, so it's up against pretty stiff competition. However, with the clever dual-display tech making an appearance on the new model, it's definitely going to have a leg-up when it comes to battery life.

That's not the only trick that the TicWatch Pro 5 has up its sleeve, either. It's also the first smartwatch to hit the market with Qualcomm's latest and greatest Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1 SoC - something that was announced back in July 2022 but hadn't appeared in a device until now.

So, the TicWatch Pro 5 has all the makings of a seriously impressive smartwatch, and it could prove to be the fastest Wear OS device to date. We've put it through its paces to find out.

Design

• Size: 50.15x48x12.2 mm, 44.35 grams
• Water-resistant to 5ATM + MIL-STD-810H rated
• Obsidian colour only, swappable 24mm silicone strap

The TicWatch Pro 5 keeps things simple with its aesthetic choices. It's only available in black and has a circular face with a black silicone strap. There's a central rotating crown on the right-hand side, and next to it, you'll find a flat button with a textured surface, which reminds us of an alert slider.

The bezel has a shiny finish and a knurled texture on top, elsewhere the watch body has a matte finish, and we're much less nervous about potential scuffs than we were with the glossy sides of the Pixel Watch. The display is coated with Corning Gorilla Glass which has a special fingerprint-resistant coating that keeps it looking slick, too.

It's an inoffensive design that's easy to wear with a variety of outfits, but we can't help but feel it's lacking some flair. Thankfully, the strap is replaceable, and 24mm options are easy to find, so you can jazz it up a bit if you feel the need.

It's a bit of a chunky watch, but not drastically larger than any of its competitors, and we found it comfortable to wear. It's worth noting that it's only available in one size, though, so it might not be too suitable for those with daintier wrists.

The TicWatch Pro 5 is rated as water-resistant to 5ATM, a big improvement over the IP68 rating of its predecessor, and it also carries a MIL-STD-810H rating for durability. That's a United States Military Standard, don't you know, which tests the kit that soldiers will use against a broad range of environmental stresses - including pressure, temperature, waterproofing, humidity and shock. We reckon that means it'll handle a rainy British summer without worry.

Display, features and software

• 1.43-inch OLED dual-layer display, 466x466, 326ppi
• Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1, 2GB RAM, 32GB storage
• Wear OS 3 + Mobvoi Health app

Just like the TicWatch Pro 3, the Pro 5 features a dual-layer display, and this is how it achieves its impressive battery life. There's an always-on monochrome panel on top, and this covers all the basic metrics including time, date, heart rate, step count and current battery level. It's a little hard to see in some conditions, but raising your wrist will automatically activate a backlight which makes everything much more legible.

Interacting with the watch will awaken the full-colour OLED panel underneath. It's plenty bright, and has a resolution and pixel density that exceeds that of the Pixel Watch and Galaxy Watch 5, if only just. The touch controls are very responsive and the display is very sharp. The dual-layer design means that the black levels of the OLED panel suffer a bit, but it's a small price to pay for such impressive battery life.

The TicWatch Pro 5 runs full-fat Wear OS 3, so it's capable of countless things depending on what apps you choose to install. This includes contactless payments with Google Wallet, controlling media playback on various connected devices, standalone Spotify playback, Google Maps navigation and smart home control with Google Home.

Our favourite addition to this model is the rotating crown control, which makes scrolling through notifications and your app drawer much easier, and comes with some satisfying haptic feedback, too.

With the TicWatch Pro 3, you needed two apps installed on your smartphone to set it up. The Wear OS app was required for initial setup and then Mobvoi's app was required for all the fitness features. That's not the case with the TicWatch Pro 5, now everything is connected to the Mobvoi Health app.

This is a much simpler setup and makes it far quicker to get up and running. Plus, the watch was recognised by Google Fast Pair on our Vivo X90 Pro, so all we had to do was press connect and we were almost ready to go. Interestingly, we also tried connecting via the Wear OS app, and it didn't seem to work. As far as we can tell, though, this doesn't mean that we're missing out on any features, so it's no big deal.

The Mobvoi Health app is quite simple but, as the name suggests, there are plenty of in-depth health statistics to sink your teeth into. Otherwise, it allows you to change your watch face, tiles and basic settings. We aren't too keen on the design of the standard watch faces, they're not awful, but certainly not as polished as the ones you'll find from competitors. However, this is Wear OS, so there are endless third-party apps you can install if you want more customisation options.

As we've mentioned the TicWatch Pro 5 is the first smartwatch to feature Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1 processor, so it should be the fastest Wear OS smartwatch out there. For the most part, we'd say that's true, navigating the OS feels snappy and smooth, and it's worlds apart from our old Fossil Gen 5. Compared to current flagships like the Galaxy Watch 5 and Pixel Watch, though, the difference isn't as big as you might hope.

It's marginally quicker, sure, but it doesn't feel like a massive generational leap. We wonder if we'll see bigger performance gains when Wear OS 4 rolls around. With the Pixel Watch successor rumoured to be running on a Snapdragon W5 chip, too, it'll certainly be optimised for it. We'll just have to hope the updates are timely, as at the time of writing, TicWatch Pro 3 users are still awaiting their promised upgrade to Wear OS 3.

The majority of our experience with the watch has been extremely smooth and bug-free. However, we've had one reoccurring bug that's quite frustrating. We often find that opening the Play Store from the watch will result in an endless loading icon, and the only way to get it to open is to restart the watch. We're sure this will get patched in firmware updates, but it's a bit annoying in the interim.

Fitness and health tracking

• HD PPG Heart Rate Sensor, SpO2 Sensor, Skin Temperature Sensor
• GPS+Beidou+Glonass+Galileo+QZSS connectivity
• Compatible with Mobvoi Health, Google Fit, Strava and more

The fitness tracking features are a big selling point of the TicWatch Pro 5, and there are a lot of them. By default, the Pro 5 will track your steps and monitor your heart rate all day, but you can also manually choose to check your blood oxygen saturation, respiratory rate and stress level with just a few taps.

Interestingly, these features are all separated out into individual apps on the watch, but all can be viewed from within Mobvoi Health on your smartphone. We'd prefer it if these features weren't so spread out, or if you could remove the ones you don't want, but it doesn't appear that you can do that. The result is that you have a lot of apps to scroll through, and that's before you've added any of your own.

It's hard for us to gauge the accuracy of Mobvoi's tracking, but our results seemed credible. One feature that surprised us was that when you're tracking a workout, the backlight of the low-power display will change depending on your heart rate. It'll switch to amber when your heart rate climbs and fade into red when if your heart rate reaches concerning levels.

We've used Google Fit and Strava as our primary workout trackers for many years, and these can easily be installed on the watch, which we were happy to see. You can even change the watch face to use Google Fit's metrics, but when doing so we found that the accuracy of the Mobvoi Health step counting went down - likely not a huge deal, as you'll probably want to stick to one or the other and won't be checking both (unless you're writing a review, of course.)

Battery and charging

• 628mAh battery, up to 80-hour battery life in smart mode
• Fast charging: Up to 65 per cent in 30 minutes
• Proprietary magnetic pogo-pin charger

As we alluded to earlier, Wear OS is a pretty battery-intensive platform, to the point where Google's own Pixel Watch can't make it 24 hours with the always-on display enabled. The TicWatch Pro 5, though, is in a league of its own.

In the default settings, we were able to achieve 4 days of battery on a charge, and our use wasn't exactly light, as we were busy testing all the features.

The default mode gives you the full smartwatch experience when you tap the face or press one of the buttons, but the rest of the time the always-on low-power display will be active and the backlight will come on when you raise your wrist to check the time. At night, it'll automatically switch to essential mode and the smart features will be disabled until you interact with the watch in the morning.

Of course, all of these settings can be changed, but the default mode fits our needs perfectly - offering all the smart functionality we could want, with very little in the way of compromise. The only minor inconvenience is waiting for Wear OS to boot back into smart mode when you first use it in the mornings, which can take a minute or so.

Charging is done with a proprietary magnetic puck with a wired USB-A connector. We'd love to have seen something more universal, like Qi support, but this gets the job done just fine, and it charges pretty quickly, too. You can expect a 65 per cent charge in around half an hour, while a full charge takes around an hour and a half.

Verdict

If you're in the market for a Wear OS smartwatch, we think the TicWatch Pro 5 is probably the most appealing option available right now. It has superb battery life, the most up-to-date processor of any smartwatch, the latest version of Wear OS and all the fitness tracking capabilities you could possibly want.

The question is, how long will this appeal remain? Rumours point to the Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 series being released in the coming months, and given Samsung's history with Wear OS, those watches could debut with Wear OS 4. Mobvoi doesn't have the greatest track record when it comes to delivering timely OS updates, so we'd be a little concerned about our fancy new smartwatch being stuck on an outdated OS after just a few months. Although, when it comes to battery performance, we can't imagine Samsung's latest coming close to matching the TicWatch.

However, that's all purely speculation at this point. As it stands, the TicWatch Pro 5 is the best Wear OS experience that we've had to date. Much of this is down to the clever battery optimisation, but the snappy performance and confidence-inspiring build quality help a lot, too.

We've loved using this watch, and we're confident that most other Android users would feel the same way, which makes it extremely easy to recommend.