TicWatch Pro 3 experience: First Qualcomm’s strongest watch chip, and 45 days of long battery life
On June 30, 2020, Qualcomm announced the launch of the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 4100 wearable device platform, and immediately announced that it would launch the first products of the platform: TicWatch Pro 3.
The first release of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 4100 solution using 12nm process technology differentiates TicWatch Pro 3 from mainstream smart watches that are still equipped with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 2000 series (28nm process technology) on the market. It can satisfy people’s concerns about higher performance and lower cost. Expectation of power consumption.
After more than three months, TicWatch Pro 3 arrived as scheduled. Can TicWatch Pro 3 respond to the high expectations of fans? I found the answer after a week of experience.
One appearance, two personalities
The appearance of the TicWatch Pro 3 watch maintains the same design language as the previous generation. The difference in appearance is mainly reflected in the bezel and strap.
Let's talk about the body of the watch first. TicWatch Pro 3 is made of very rich materials, including a shiny metal digital bezel for vision and a matte ceramic case for tactile consideration. There is a round of polished metal ring under the digital bezel, so that the two completely different materials of shiny and frosted have a good transition, which can take into account the dazzling appearance and the skin-friendly touch.
The design of the TicWatch Pro 3 strap reflects its character. The stitched and bumpy design looks like a leather material. After touching it, it is actually a skin-friendly rubber strap.
The comfort and decoration of leather straps are hard to refuse, but the durability of leather straps is always disappointing. A watch can represent time, but time itself will destroy the leather strap that accompanies it.
To give durable rubber a leather design, TicWatch Pro 3 cleverly combines durability and beauty. This combination of materials and design also allows the watch to take care of work and life. The leather design will not make people jump out of serious work, and the durable rubber strap also allows me to sweat in sports.
Inside the 1.4-inch dial is a retina-level OLED screen, just enough to fill my wrist. For everyone who likes "big big", TicWatch Pro 3 really wins my heart. I admit that the square-shaped watch screen can provide more information, and I also admit the success of the square-shaped design, but if I choose a smart watch, I still want a round shape.
The dispute between a round watch and a square watch is like a contest between a curved screen and a straight screen on a mobile phone. It is a dispute between aesthetics and functionality. If I were to choose between the two, I would vote for the beautiful round dial, just like choosing a beautiful curved screen that would be touched by mistake.
The speaker of the watch is on the left side of the watch body. The opening of the speaker is not only thin and deep, but also waterproof. Therefore, there are many "holes" in the body. It still supports IP68 protection and can also record my sports data every time I swim in the pool.
On the right side of the meter body are two buttons with the same bright surface. The upper button acts like the back button and the home button, while the lower button is the application shortcut. By default, the one clicked to call out is the fitness application, and the double click is the payment code of Alipay. Custom applications are also supported.
Exercise is a function used by smart watches with high frequency, and the presence of physical buttons allows people to respond to every "run and run" in time. And double-click to call up the payment code, which not only saves the waiting time for payment, but also frees me from the embarrassment of unlocking my mobile phone every time I make a payment.
The screen with almost no power consumption is always on
One point that smart watches are often criticized is that the screen cannot be always on. Compared with traditional watches that can know the time at a glance, smart watches have one more step of lifting the wrist. In many cases, it is indeed inconvenient to use, so how to make smart watches "Allways On Display" will be the watch manufacturers What you want to achieve with painstaking effort.
A common solution is to use the self-luminous characteristic of OLED to achieve a constant screen with a black background. This is actually a balance between the user experience and the battery life experience. If you want to check the time anytime and anywhere, it will inevitably reduce the battery life.
TicWatch Pro has adopted a double-layer screen design since the previous generation to solve the pain point of the screen always bright. There are actually two layers of screens on TicWatch Pro 3. The upper layer is an energy-saving screen that displays simple information when the screen is always on, while the lower OLED screen is displayed when the surface is lit.
In TicWatch Pro 3, a more energy-saving FSTN screen is used to replace the previous generation of ordinary LCD energy-saving screens, and the power consumption and display effect have been greatly improved.
FSTN screens are commonly found in traditional digital watches. If you are a G-Shock player, I believe you will not feel unfamiliar. In addition to the basic date and time, the always-on FSTN screen also supports the display of steps and heart rate. After the screen is always on, the frequency of raising my wrist has been significantly reduced. TicWatch Pro 3 has returned to the duty of a watch: staying quietly on the wrist waiting for me to glance at it from time to time.
When I want to check the notification, the retina OLED screen will light up when I rotate my wrist slightly. TicWatch based on Wear OS supports downloading a variety of third-party watch face applications in the app store. It officially claims to support more than 1,000 surface designs, so that users like me who are hot for three minutes can always keep fresh.
However, rather than launching more personalized dials, I hope that the official can automatically switch the dark dial and adjust the brightness when sleeping.
TicWatch Pro 3 is still dazzling in the dark even at the lowest brightness. This means that if I accidentally wake up the watch when I turn around, the surface of the blue sky and white clouds will be like fireflies in the dark, awakening the sleepy me.
Worry about battery life? Forgot to bring your phone? Forget these worries
As the world's first smartwatch equipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon 4100 mobile chip, thanks to a new generation of ultra-low power flagship platform, TicWatch Pro 3 has a good performance in battery life and performance.
TicWatch Pro 3 is still inseparable from the charging cable, but it can at least make me forget about charging. How many friends missed the charging cable of the watch bracelet in the office when they returned home during the National Day holiday, and forgot to take them home. As a result, the peak steps of tens of thousands of times when traveling were not recorded in the sports health.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 4100 reduces the power consumption of the watch by about 25%. The official claims that TicWatch Pro 3 can be used in smart mode for 72 hours. In my actual use test, after 40 hours of normal use, there is still 35% The battery is left, which allows me to safely put the charging cable in the office during the weekend.
Even if the battery is close to 10%, don’t worry, the watch will automatically enter the extreme mode that only uses the FSTN screen. In the extreme mode, I can still watch the time, count the number of steps, measure the heart rate, and even use NFC to ride the bus and unlock the door.
In the extreme mode, the watch can be used for a few more days. Even if the charging cable is lost, it can last until I buy another charging cable. And if I only use the persistent mode, TicWatch Pro 3 can last for more than 45 days of battery life, refreshing my understanding of smartwatch battery life.
The power consumption of TicWatch Pro 3 is reduced, but the performance is not compromised. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 4100 solution using the 12nm process has increased CPU and memory by 85%. The most intuitive experience is that it allows the multi-application advantages of Wear OS to be fully utilized.
Wear OS, which is backed by Google, after a series of localization operations to ask questions, it is very approachable, and it is a familiar face to open the application market. In addition to the common WeChat and Alipay, there are also commonly used software on mobile phones such as QQ Music, NetEase Cloud Music, Bilibili, Dianping, Himalaya Listening, and Didi Taxi.
The sports software alone includes three types of Keep, Happy Running Circle and Gudong, no matter which account you want to synchronize sports information with.
Thanks to the efficient CPU, even if I turned on QQ music to listen to songs, recorded exercises in the jogging circle, navigated on Sogou maps, and responded to WeChat at the same time, the complicated multi-application switching scene did not make TicWatch Pro 3 show obvious lag. However, it is worth mentioning that Sogou map navigation is not very easy to use. It often fails to locate my location.
If I were to choose my favorite app, it would be Bilibili. Watching videos on such a small screen for a long time is of course nonsense. I insisted on watching it for 10 minutes and it was uncomfortable. Playing some audiovisual videos with it is the correct way to open it.
For example, using it to connect a Bluetooth headset to play the "Rap New Generation" I am chasing or the cross talk of the Deyun Club. Whether it is fishing at work or going out sports, it unlocks a new experience.
Voice interaction is a feature that I particularly like. In addition to regular functions such as asking the weather, making outgoing payments, and setting an alarm clock, TicWatch Pro 3 also adds a recording and note function. When I need to record a meeting, I can click on the note function to convert the voice into text in time. Thanks to the AI algorithm for asking questions, the accuracy of text conversion can reach 98%.
TicWatch Pro 3 also supports the opening of eSIM to achieve 4G networking, and finally you no longer need to carry a cumbersome mobile phone when you go out.
Whether it’s making and receiving calls, sending and receiving messages, listening to music online, or paying at any time, TicWatch Pro 3's 4G online all the time can be considered to solve my "mobile phone phobia", no longer worry about whether to miss important WeChat during exercise If you miss a good relationship, you can still not derail your digital life even after you put down your phone.
A more intimate health assistant
Exercise and health are still the most important functions of smart watches. On the hardware of health detection, TicWatch Pro 3 has added blood oxygen detection, which is getting more and more attention in addition to the conventional heart rate detection.
Like other smart watches on the market that support blood oxygen detection, TicWatch Pro 3 still requires me to stay still for about ten seconds to perform the detection, which makes me rarely take the initiative to perform blood oxygen measurement.
In order to know if you are hypoxic, put down everything on hand and wait for 15 seconds. The blood oxygen is only 94% low due to prolonged sitting. Stand up and do a few squats to get your body active, and then wait for 15 seconds to find out My blood oxygen returned to 96% and I continued to work contentedly. This kind of use scenario does not exist.
From the experience of the past few days, I think the greater significance of blood oxygen testing is to help determine whether the sleeping environment is suitable. Sleeping is the only situation where I can stay still for a long time. At this time, TicWatch Pro 3 will automatically test my blood oxygen level to provide me with a basis for analyzing the quality of sleep. I usually have the habit of stuffing under the quilt to sleep, but the low blood oxygen level in my sleep monitoring reminds me that I really need to change this bad problem.
TicWatch Pro 3 has put a lot of effort into sports monitoring. In addition to common outdoor walking, running, mountaineering and other scenes, it also supports a total of 13 sports scenes such as pool swimming, yoga, rowing machine and elliptical machine.
Even with such a large range of scene coverage, I still can't find my sports items. I can still choose to train freely to record the rare exercise heart rate and calculate how many calories I have consumed.
In addition to multi-scene options, TicWatch Pro 3 can also automatically recognize and start exercise recording according to the current exercise status. For example, every morning when I am on the way to work, the watch will recognize that I am doing a nervous walking exercise to compete with being late based on my extremely fast waving arms, and automatically record the exercise time and the nervous heart rate when I am about to be late. .
TicWatch brings me the changes and changes
People don't need to weigh themselves before the scale is out. Also before my watch was smart, I would not raise my wrist to care about my heart rate, how many calories I consumed today, and when I got up, I would take a look at the hours of deep sleep last night.
I did have a lot of changes during the week I was wearing TicWatch Pro 3, and some changes were not brought to me by other smart watches. For example, the all-weather online of 4G and the mature ecology of Wear OS have allowed me to truly achieve an "independent life" without the mobile phone, and the exercise monitoring at any time gave me a reason to go out.
One night I stared at my only 2,000 steps of data, and finally came down and ran a step downstairs at 22:00. I became more concerned about my health and began to yearn for the ideal healthy life depicted for me by smart wearable devices.
I replaced G-Shock with TicWatch Pro 3, and some parts remain unchanged. For example, with the FSTN screen that is always on, I can still glance at the time. After taking off the watch before taking a bath every day, the magnetic interface will automatically suck up and charge for tens of minutes, plus the excellent battery life of TicWatch Pro 3 itself. Hardly experience the endurance anxiety brought about by intelligence.
Many years after the emergence of the smart watch, it has undergone many twists and turns. From the beginning with the ambition to replace the smart phone, to the disillusionment of the dream and the search for a suitable form of existence, the entanglement of functions, performance and battery life has not yet been reached. A balanced answer.
It can be seen that many smart watches have begun to develop in the direction of light intelligence, emphasis on health, and long battery life. This is certainly the result of past lessons and market choices, but the word "smart" of smart watches is not so high in gold. Up.
In view of this, the newly released TicWatch Pro 3 this time may be a small outlier under such a big trend: It has more considerations in functional intelligence and performance than other watches, making its independence greatly enhanced without sacrifice Lost battery life. It can be said that TicWatch is actually a category that adheres to the original idea in the smartwatch industry. Initially, everyone's expectations for smartwatches are actually not a healthy companion.
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