Why I passed on my TicWatch Pro (1st gen)
Or: why I’m giving up on Wear OS and going back to Pebble, a dead platform for almost three years… for now.
Disclaimer: this was a never-published draft, from early 2019. I gave up on the text since the device got sold fast (yey) and I was gladly forgetting the dreaded experience. Probably also ran out of time to write it all properly, as usual ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Battery
Do I really need to talk about this?
Alright, alright.
The TicWatch Pro is said to last around 3 days on normal use — by actual users, not only their own marketing team. Mine was actually around 24 hours. I never tested it with the special screen disabled to see the difference it made.
My Pebble Time is more than three years old and still shows the same battery endurance from the early days: 2~4 days depending on usage.
Thanks, e-ink screen for your low battery consumption and readability (yep, TicWatch Pro’s special screen is impossible to read under low light).
Notifications
Notifications are actionable in a better fashion than the Pebble had that. Cool.
Now I can see an actual list of notifications and dismiss the ones I’d like to, just like I could do on my phone. But that also hits the odd tiny touch screen issues, as I need to swipe through it to dismiss something. And also hits the performance issue because it takes a bunch of seconds to identify I’m long-pressing the notification because I want to disable that app to notify me on the watch… and then some more seconds to actually disable it… and then a buggy swipe to go back to the notifications list.
I can also respond to notifications that allow it; Pebble allowed that through dictation, which worked fine — and using the language I selected in settings. Wear OS, however, uses the watch language, which is the phone language, which sadly is not the language I use to speak with 99% of my contacts. For the same reason, Smart Replies (automatic reply suggestions) were very stupid and completely useless, and I had to install a custom keyboard to use custom canned responses. Alright, I might be an edge case; I’ll let this pass.
Nonetheless, I still hit the connection and performance issues when trying to dictate a message to the device (edit: I called it Google Assistant, but they’re actually different beasts since Assistant does support multiple languages).
But I need to give the tiny touch screen a point here: it’s surprisingly not hard to type in the watch keyboard! I can also draw emojis, which is handy, kinda works great, and is less tedious than Pebble’s long list of pre-set emojis that I had to scroll through.
Bonus points
It’s definitely boring to have to block my watch screen every time I’m going to take a shower. It seems Apple got this right, as their watch is able to identify water touches and auto-block. There’s also a handy function to remove water from the speaker, which at Wear OS stays muffled for at least half an hour after you shower or wash your hands.
And oh yeah, it’s handy to shake the watch and have it instantly turned on to check the hours with a single hand. I also use that a lot as a handy flashlight in very dark places (i.e. bedroom or stairs when you’re out of power).
It wouldn’t be an issue if the Wear OS was instant to identify the rise of your hand. Apple Watch is not good on this either; it’s fast enough if you’re standing up (enough as in lags like a 15 FPS video), but you’ll need to press a button if you wake in your dark bedroom and wanna know if you can sleep a bit longer.
It’s said that the glowing display is a stigma, but it’s better to have it on when you don’t need it (i.e. brushing teeth) than having it off or lagging when you actually wanna see the time.
