Mobvoi Ticwatch C2
Can you get a stylish smartwatch for under two hundred without compromising quality? You can now £179 mobvoi.com
A full Wear OS smartwatch for under £ 200? And it’s not garbage? Mobvoi’s managed some witchcraft to make this somehow look good and work well
Though your friendly neighbourhood T3 team loves smartwatches as much as the next person who owns a smartwatch, they’re still in the ‘nice to have’ category rather than ‘essential’. That means a lot of people are sceptical of dropping several hundred pounds on one, but the new watch from Mobvoi makes it more tempting to dive in.
Cheap and chipful
The C2 is a full smartwatch, featuring Google’s Wear OS and a Snapdragon Wear chip for its brains, but it starts at just £179. That’s about £100 less than the Samsung Galaxy Watch or Apple Watch Series 3, and a full £230 cheaper than the Series 4. The Huawei Watch GT is around the same price, but it has stripped-back software with no support for installing new apps. Here, you get the full experience for the price.
Of course, corners have to be cut to get things to a lower bracket, but Mobvoi has done a solid job of keeping that non-obvious.
It definitely doesn’t look cheap, for example: the case is stainless steel, and comes in black, silver and rose gold finishes, with leather straps. The rose gold actually has a slightly different shape (the case curves towards the sides, while the others are more squared off), which makes it
a tad thinner at 12.8mm, while the black and silver clock in at 13.2mm.
The back, which includes an optical heart-rate sensor, is plastic – the stainless steels continues right to the point where you can’t see it, and then Mobvoi swaps in the lower-price materials. Smart. The plastic feels fine on the skin, but there’s no denying the ceramic of the Apple Watch Series 4 is nicer, and feels more premium to you.
There’s a 1.3-inch circular AMOLED display that, again, looks perfectly premium, and at 360x360 pixels matches the Samsung Galaxy Watch for sharpness. Down the side, you’ve got a couple of buttons that help you to navigate Wear OS.
The C2 is waterproofed to IP68 standard, which means it’s designed to survive an accidental dunk or a walk in the rain, but not swimming. It’s another cut corner, but we imagine it won’t bother many, because this isn’t really a hardcore sports device.
For a start, it only comes with leather straps, which you won’t want to be sweating up too often. Other materials are coming from Mobvoi, but it’s an early indicator that this is more for light fitness tracking (steps, heart rate on a run, and so on). That’s partly because it’s just not really set up for it, and partly because of the performance. The heart-rate monitor takes a while to pick up the beat, though seems accurate enough once it does. GPS similarly takes longer to lock on than we’d like, though we’re fairly impressed it’s included at all at this price.
Wear it well
We were worried that the ageing Snapdragon 2100 chip that powers the C2 would leave it feeling sluggish, but it has the latest version of Wear OS, and it feels pretty smooth. Not super-zippy, but perfectly fine.
The software itself is easier to navigate than previous versions, and you can expand what it’s capable of with apps, though it doesn’t have the range that the Apple Watch does.
It works well with Android and iPhone (slightly better with Android, but the difference is minimal overall), and Google Pay is supported.
When it comes to battery life, you’ll feel that it’s budget again, but once more, it’s not so bad as to be a problem. It’ll definitely last a day, and can get through two if you’re not doing a lot of fitness tracking or treating it like your main email client.
With costlier smartwatches now hitting more like four days from a charge, the C2 isn’t blowing us away here, but it’s fine.
That’s the story really: if you like the idea of a full smartwatch rather than a hybrid, want something that hits the mark for fashion, and still comes in under £200, you’ve now got a good choice.
It won’t bother the Galaxy Watch and Apple Watch at the top of our list overall, but for the price, we’ve got to hand it to Mobvoi.