The TicWatch GTH is somewhere between a smartwatch and a fitness tracker — maybe you should think of it as a fitness tracker with a limited set of smartwatch features, kind of a “fitness tracker plus.” I’ve been using it for a bit over a week and, overall, I like it; it’s a genuinely nice device with a very good feature set for the money.
In the course of playing with it, I’ve paired it with both an Android device and an iOS device, though it was paired with the iOS device for the majority of the time.
Now let’s go into the details.
•• The Good:
• The TicWatch GTH has sensors for respiration rate (breaths per minute), blood oxygen (SpO2), pulse, and skin temperature. All of these can be set to record automatically (and this is the default; you can turn any or all of them off in the app), though it wasn’t immediately clear to me how often it takes measurements. Of course it also offers step tracking and sleep tracking.
• The weather display on the watch is very attractive: it packs in a good amount of info, even cramming a readable 3-day forecast into the small space.
• The screen is really nice to look at, considerably better than many other similar devices (I’ve tried several). There is no auto-brightness, so you must set it manually. It offers four brightness levels, with a good range. Unlike other reviewers, I find it perfectly easy to read in bright sunlight, and it’s not too bright at night (though they could make it a little dimmer and I wouldn’t complain).
• The watch paired quickly, zero hassle, on both Android and iOS. They really nailed this.
• The watch’s interface is overall intuitive. Swipe to scroll through lists. Swipe up from the bottom for notifications (opposite of Android/iOS), down from the top for quick settings, left/right from the edges for pages of info — weather, fitness tracking, and several others. Particularly nice: the info pages are in a circle — the last one you see when swiping left is the first one you see when swiping right, and vice versa. This helps make it so no page is too far away — if too far away when swiping left, start by swiping right instead.
• The crown is a button, and it’s got a good clicky feel. It wakes up the device (there’s no tap-to-wake) or, if it’s already awake, brings up the list of apps. Depending on where you are, it’ll also go back to the previous screen if that makes sense to do.
• Music controls are basic (only play/pause, previous, next) and awkward to get to, but they work perfectly, including when your phone is off.
• There’s a wide variety of watch faces, both analog and digital, and some of them are really pretty. (There are a few with astronomical pictures; amusingly, the one called “The Saturn” is actually a picture of Jupiter. It’s pretty, though — I made it my default.) And if you don’t like any of them, you can install your own using a picture on your device.
• Notifications work flawlessly AFAICT and can be dismissed individually or all at once. The font is a weird spidery serif thing.
• The battery life claims are plausible. I put it on the charger after about eight and a half days, and I could have pushed it most of another day, I think (it was at 8%). It was fully charged by the time I came back to it two hours later. It offers a power saving mode, though I haven’t tried it; presumably, that would extend battery life even further.
• It is very comfortable to wear.
• The app understands both metric and imperial units.
• Overall, this device offers attractive hardware that responds smoothly.
•• Neutral:
• Weak vibration motor. “Find watch” doesn’t work well — the screen doesn’t light up, and I would never hear that faint vibration unless I was right on top of it already, in which case I obviously don’t need the feature. It is hard to notice timers or alarms, and they don’t buzz for very long, which only makes it harder. Having said that: to my surprise, I invariably notice the alerts (I think the buzz is just a bit stronger?), so whether this is a problem might be more of an individual thing.
• It understands lots of different workouts — jumping rope, cycling, mountain climbing, running, yoga, and many more. I went out for a walk around the block the first full day I had it, and it automatically noticed I was on a brisk walk within a minute or so.
• There is no automatic “Do Not Disturb” mode — you can’t tell it not to bug you between, say, 11 PM and 8 AM every day. This is mitigated somewhat by the fact that it has no speaker and the vibration motor is so feeble, so unless you’re a very light sleeper, I doubt it would wake you. At least there’s a DND quick setting, so it’s easy to turn it on and off, but the downsides of making this a manual procedure are obvious.
• Do Not Disturb mode doesn’t just turn off buzzing for notifications, it also turns off the notifications themselves. Any notifications you would have received while DND is on are just discarded. While I’m at it, there’s a limit to how many notifications are visible on the watch at once (I think eight?); if you accumulate too many, the older ones are just pushed off forever.
• You can’t rotate the crown to scroll through lists. (I don’t care; I would never use that feature if I had it, because swiping is easier and works well.)
• There’s no way to quickly get battery percentage (as a number) unless your chosen watch face happens to show it. It’s not even available in the app. The quick settings page has an icon where you can get a sense of how much battery is left, but not a precise one.
• The screen offers tilt-to-wake, and that works quickly and well, but there is no always-on mode.
•• Needs Improvement:
• I couldn’t sync with Google Fit on either Android or iOS. Trying just got me an error from Google saying that Mobvoi had tried to access sensitive data in my account and Google had blocked it. (I am sure this is just a mistake somewhere; Mobvoi is surely not trying anything nefarious!) Maybe this will be addressed in a future software update.
• I did sync successfully with Apple Health, but strangely, not all information captured by the watch is pushed there. Apple Health shows steps, distance, workouts, pulse rate, and sleep duration, but not blood oxygen (SpO2), skin temperature, or respiration rate. All of this information *is* tracked in Mobvoi’s own app, though, and that part of the app is very well designed and attractive.
• Using the watch to find your phone works great on Android but did not work for me on iOS, not even with the iOS device on and the Mobvoi app open. I turned off Do Not Disturb and turned the volume up — still nothing. This is a mystery. Maybe I’m just missing something.
• Changing the watch face happens only through the app, not on the watch itself, and it’s agonizingly slow, discouraging experimentation. This, too, might be improved in a future software update.
• Like other devices in its class, the “sleep tracking” feature is really a “stillness tracking” feature. It’s liable to count time you spend reading in bed before turning off the lights as sleep time, for instance. Or if you’re awake for an hour in the middle of the night without moving around much, it’ll also count that as sleep time. This unfortunately means you need to take its sleep measurements with a grain of salt.
•• Would Be Nice:
• What WearOS and the Apple Watch call “complications” are baked into the watch face — if the watch face you like shows steps and you wanted battery percentage, too bad. If it shows battery percentage and you wanted the day of week and day of month, too bad. I think you could consider this outside of the “fitness tracker plus” niche this device occupies, though; I don’t think it would be fair to complain that this mix-and-match functionality is missing, even though it would be nice to have.
•• Stacking It Up Against the Competition:
• The Wyze Watch does a decent fraction of what the TicWatch GTH does at a quarter of the price. The Wyze Watch’s sensors are more limited: compared to the GTH, it can measure only pulse and SpO2, and it offers continual (every-five-minute) monitoring for pulse only, not SpO2. It also lacks music controls and several other bits of GTH functionality. OTOH, both models of the Wyze Watch have a much stronger vibration motor and overall somewhat better polished software than the GTH. Battery life is comparable. Depending on your needs, it might be a contender.
• There’s quite a variety of Wear OS devices, with varying feature sets, worse battery life, and a higher price than the GTH. If you want actual smartwatch features such as apps or Google Assistant on your wrist, then you want something like a Wear OS device, but of course that’s really a different product category.
• I’ve never used the Apple Watch, though of course it has a much higher price tag.
•• Summary:
Except (arguably) for the vibration motor, Mobvoi has really nailed the hardware basics here. This is a good-looking, comfortable watch with a great variety of sensors, for a very reasonable price.
It is somewhat let down by the software, both the app and the watch’s own, but I’m hopeful they’ll be improved over time. (That’s one of the nice things about software, after all!)
Even if they never change the software, though, I’d be happy with this device as it stands. The software is OK, and the hardware is good, and the price is right.
Report