This leaked wearOS Watch could be Android's Apple Watch killer

(Image credit: Amazon CA)

published 1 May 2023

If you're looking for one of the best smartwatches and don't want an Apple Watch or a Samsung Galaxy Watch, the forthcoming TicWatch Pro 5 could well be the best smartwatch for you – and thanks to a premature Amazon listing we've just discovered a whole lot about it.

The listing was spotted on Reddit and picked up on by 9to5Google, and it's impressive stuff – not least because this will be the first wearOS watch to come with the Qualcomm Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1 chip inside it. That means much smoother performance and much better battery life.

TicWatch Pro 5: key features and specifications

The listing didn't include pricing, but it included pretty much everything else you might want to know. The processor is the aforementioned W5+ Gen 1 with 2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, it runs the latest wearOS and it has Bluetooth 5.2, 2.4GHz Wi-Fi and multiple GPS. There are "more than 100 professional workout modes" and key fitness features including VO2 Max, heart rate and sleep tracking.

The display is a decently sized 1.43-inch dual-layer display. One layer is an OLED and the other is a backlit blue FSTN screen. The watch promises up to 80 hours of battery life in smart mode or 45 days in essential mode, with fast charging bringing your battery from flat to 65% in just 30 minutes. There's 5 atmosphere water resistance and US-MIL-STD 810H certification, so it should be pretty tough. It looks good too, with an "obsidian black" casing with a rotating crown and Gorilla Glass on the front.

Pricing and availability haven't been confirmed but if retailers are writing product listings then the official launch can't be far away.

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Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).