Looking at how it’s going to compare against something like the apple watch series 6., is it both a smart watch and a fitness tracker let’s find out. So this is the ticwatch pro 3 gps watch, and this was sent to me by ticwatch for full disclosure. Now they did send this to me, but they’re, not compensating me in any other way other than sending me the watch and so i’m going to try to be as unbiased as possible, and in fact, in this video i will highlight some areas where i think this Watch did really well in terms of its health and fitness applications and some areas where it did not do so great at all now, in addition to having built in gps. This also has an optical heart rate sensor on the back of the watch for tracking your active exercise and your resting heart rate throughout the day, and you can kind of manipulate those options with the app additionally. This does have a built in o2 sensor, similar to the new apple watch series 6, meaning that it can measure your oxygen levels and more on that in a moment, the watch charges with a magnetic charging cable, that’s included with the watch you just plug one into Your typical charger and the other end just kind of snaps onto the watch using magnets, pretty strong magnets nice little charger included there now charging times on this watch were actually pretty extensive about twice.
As long as my apple watch, i was consistently needing to charge the watch for about two hours to go from zero to a hundred percent. That said, i was easily able to get at least two days worth of battery life out of the watch using it as a smart watch and a fitness tracker, not quite the 72 hours worth of battery life that they claim, but at least 24 hours longer than I typically use my apple watch for the watch features an always on display and the way that it does, it is using dual layer screens. One screen is the bright color screen. The other one is a dim kind of flat screen that doesn’t consume a lot of energy, and so the color screen comes on anytime. You touch the screen or raise the watch to wake it up or push a button, and then the watch will revert back to its dim uh. You know energy savings display when you’re not interfacing with the watch now in terms of brightness. The screen looks great indoors. However, i will say that using it outside, while exercising like going for a hike or a jog, the color screen doesn’t look super bright in direct, sunlight, so that’s, something to consider it is visible, but it’s definitely dim. That said, the touch responsiveness of this watch is great. I never noticed any sort of jittering or weird glitching, like you would get on some of the older android watches uh.
This definitely was very touch. Responsive had no issues there now in terms of the applications that you’re going to want to immediately download to make sure that you’re getting the best experience from this watch. The first one is obviously the where os or the android wear application and you can use that to download different watch faces and access other applications and then the proprietary mobvoid application, which is tick, watches proprietary app. That allows you to interface with the native ticwatch apps that are pre loaded on the watch and i actually do recommend using that proprietary ticwatch application for all of your health and fitness tracking on this watch, because the layout of it is really intuitive and helpful. And it provides all of the information really that i wanted from the watch in a neat clean way. My first fitness test was to find out how accurate the built in oxygen sensor was for the ticwatch compared to apple’s new sensor on the apple watch series 6., and what i found is that the ticwatch takes a long time. What you’re seeing right now is in real time the watch just takes forever to get a reading, and even though i would eventually get an a reading that would agree with my apple watch. It actually usually took two or three attempts, because oftentimes i would get some sort of error message telling me to restart. So after that experience, i was a little bit nervous that i would have a bad experience using this for steady state cardio exercise and in fact i was pleasantly surprised.
Yes, i did experience a couple of glitches, which i’ll tell you about, but overall my experience using the watch for steady state, cardio and distance based activities was that the optical heart rate sensor is accurate for tracking your active heart rate during those kinds of exercise and The gps was also accurate. Now i did say that i had a couple of glitches, so let’s talk about those, so the first glitch that i experienced had to do with my heart rate, while riding my bike. What i noticed was that a couple of minutes into writing my heart rate information was dropping off and i was getting some inaccuracies once i tightened up my strap on the watch, then those inaccuracies went away, as you can see, and for the remainder of the ride. Everything was great, so basically, what i found out was that the watch was kind of unforgiving in terms of movement on the wrist. You definitely have to make sure that the watch is nice and snug and tight. If you want your heart rate readings to be accurate, but again once i had the watch nice and tight on my wrist, i did not experience any sort of weird glitches using the heart rate sensor. From that point on, for any of my steady state, cardio exercises, the next weird anomaly i experienced was with the gps. What i found is that, once you start the watch up, you’re gon na need to let the watch lock in on the gps.
For about a minute or two before you actually begin your run, so what you’ll want to do is start your run and then immediately hit the pause button so that it’s not burning any time or anything or counting any calories or anything like that and give the Watch about a minute or two to lock in on the gps, otherwise, you’ll end up with something that looks like this, so you’ll see that it recorded my starting location, my ending location, but between that you’ll notice. Those really weird green lines that cut through the middle of the park and go over top of the houses and roads and all of that yeah that didn’t happen. So, for some reason, it charted out an area that i ran, that i didn’t actually run and it totally messed up my distance and pace and all of those kinds of things, and so i found out on subsequent runs that if i started the workout and then Immediately paused and gave the watch time to acquire the gps signal, then i ended up with results that weren’t glitchy. So do i recommend this watch for steady state cardio exercises? Absolutely i do you’ll just need to make sure that the watch is nice and snug on your wrist for an accurate heart rate. Reading and you’ll want to make sure to give the watch a minute or two to acquire the gps signal before you start so next i took the watch with me into the gym to put the watch through a wide variety of different gym, based exercises and, in Particular what i like to do in the gym, when i’m testing out a new watch, is to really get my heart rate.
Elevated by doing super sets, meaning what i’ll do is i’ll. Do a set of exercises pause for about a minute, maybe two minutes and then immediately go to another exercise and, as i begin to do, that throughout uh, you know my 30 to 45 minutes worth of working out. My heart rate really begins to get up there as i get tired, and this really does kind of push the optical heart rate sensor to its limits to find out how good and accurate it actually is. And basically, what i discovered is that about 75 of the time the watch is not able to accurately track my active heart rate for gym based use, no matter really what exercise it was uh there were occasions where, surprisingly, it did well like when i did battle Ropes or when i did um high intensity interval, training stuff with box jumps uh. Actually, the high intensity interval training exercises seemed to do a better job, actually tracking, my heart rate, even though it was much more elevated than when i was doing weight lifting exercises. Now something to keep in mind is that the watch does have bluetooth compatibility with external bluetooth, chest straps and armbands. So if you were wanting to use this watch in the gym, you could go ahead and purchase an auxiliary uh. You know bluetooth chest strap for about fifty to 70 on amazon that you would be able to pair with the watch in order to get a more accurate heart rate reading for gym based exercise.
But i did want to bring to your attention that the only area that this watch really didn’t perform well is when i did strength, training exercise in the gym that’s, where the optical heart rate sensor here just could not keep up with my apple watch and in Fact, most of the time it was showing nearly a resting heart rate of like 80 to 90 beats per minute, so not even something that uh would be realistic if you were walking fast, so not not a great job work. You know working in the gym. That said again, there is that workaround of using an external bluetooth chest strap or armband. If this is something that you would want to use in the gym now other than that, i have had zero complaints about the watch in terms of its user interface and its app it’s, very seamless. It works great. I just uh would not recommend this for gym. Based use, but for steady state cardio again, this did great after i got past those couple of glitches. It worked flawlessly so basically here’s. My , if you have an iphone you’re, probably better served buying an apple watch, because you’re going to get a little bit better accuracy from the apple watch in terms of its heart rate sensor for gym, based use or, for you know, more strenuous activities. Now, if you’re an android user, on the other hand, i would obviously recommend this because it’s something that’s going to pair very seamlessly, with your android phone it’s, going to give you that android wear smart watch experience and just work really really well you’re gon na have Thousands of watch faces, i mean hello, uh apple, you don’t, have thousands of watch faces, so this watch, in my opinion, just cosmetically looks better than the apple watch.
You’Ve got more uh watch faces and it works great in just about every workout scenario, with the one exception of being for strength, training, and in that case you can always buy a bluetooth external chest, strap as a workaround. Now, one of the really cool things that i need to mention about the ticwatch that, in my opinion, makes it something that’s better than the apple watch in at least this way is the essential mode of the watch so built in on the ticwatch is an essential Mode which allows you to record even passive health metrics, like your sleep tracking, like steps like your heart rate, even though the watch is technically in what would be considered an extended battery life mode, and this allows you to get up to like three or four days Worth of battery life, while still tracking those other metrics, like your heart rate, your sleep and oxygen levels, and things like that now, you won’t be able to track your active exercise that would pull the watch out of the essential mode, but you are still able to Track all of those passive metrics, which is really really cool, so this isn’t a perfect watch on a scale of 1 to 10. I give this a 7 out of 10 and i would probably give the apple watch, maybe an 8.5 out of 10., so the apple watch does have a few more things that i think make it a little bit more of a premium better product.
But this is no slouch you can check out purchase links in the description below and hey guys thanks for watching.wo051t2LT_Q
