TicWatch Pro 5 just revealed — and it steals a key Apple Watch feature

TicWatch Pro 5 promo images from an Amazon listing

(Image credit: Mobvoi / Amazon)

At the time of writing, Mobvoi’s TicWatch Pro 3 Ultra just sneaks onto our list of the best smartwatches you can buy. Now, we have an idea of how its successor is shaping up.

And it's all thanks to a listing on Amazon’s Canadian site spotted by an eagle-eyed Redditor. The listing is still up as of now, but the Mobvoi TicWatch Pro 5 is labelled as “currently unavailable.” No, you didn’t miss the TicWatch Pro 4 — Mobvoi is a Chinese company, and in China, the number four is considered unlucky due to it sounding a lot like the word for “death”. It’s the reason there was no OnePlus 4, too.

TicWatch Pro 5 promo images from an Amazon listing show the rotating crown and Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1 — (Image credit: Mobvoi / Amazon)

It’s not the first smartwatch to do this — again, every Apple Watch to date has had it, and the Pixel Watch brought the input method to Wear OS last year — but it’s a welcome improvement all the same.

The Amazon listing says this rotating crown comes with “satisfying haptic feedback” and can be used to “switch tiles, increase or decrease volume, and even zoom in and out on maps at ease.”

Past TicWatches have suffered from occasionally laggy performance, but Mobvoi is aiming to tackle this head-on with a new chipset and more RAM. While the TicWatch Pro 3 Ultra came with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 4100 platform and 1GB RAM, the TicWatch Pro 5 is listed as doubling the RAM to 2GB while embracing the new Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1 chipset.

TicWatch Pro 5 promo images claiming up to 80 hours of battery life and 30 minute fast-charging for 65% of battery life from an Amazon listing — (Image credit: Mobvoi / Amazon)

When that chipset was announced, Qualcomm made a big showing of its benefits to battery life — an area where Mobvoi wearables already excel thanks to its use of dual-display tech to jump between regular AMOLED smartwatch mode and its battery-saving FSTN ‘Essential Mode’. The TicWatch Pro 5 would take advantage of that, as the listing promising that the 611mAh battery will last for 80 hours in Smart Mode and 45 days in Essential Mode.

While existing TicWatch wearers are still awaiting the long-promised upgrade to Wear OS 3, this listing says that it will come with “the latest version of Wear OS by Google."

For connectivity, there’s Bluetooth 5.2, 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, GPS, Beidou, GLONASS, Galileo and QZSS support. “More than 100 professional workout modes” are supported, and it comes with VO2 Max, heart rate and sleep tracking, as you would expect from a wearable extolling its fitness credentials.

It offers a 5ATM water resistance rating and comes with US-MIL-STD 810H certification, so it should be good at dealing with the bumps and knocks of everyday life.

The listing is pretty comprehensive, but two things are still a mystery: price and release date. If Amazon is accidentally putting promo imagery live, we should know both very soon.

Freelance contributor Alan has been writing about tech for over a decade, covering phones, drones and everything in between. Previously Deputy Editor of tech site Alphr, his words are found all over the web and in the occasional magazine too. When not weighing up the pros and cons of the latest smartwatch, you'll probably find him tackling his ever-growing games backlog. He also handles all the Wordle coverage on Tom's Guide and has been playing the addictive NYT game for the last several years in an effort to keep his streak forever intact.