The Ticwatch E2 has been teased – here’s everything we know about it, and everything we’re hoping to see.
Update: There’s no sign of a Ticwatch E2 yet, but the company just unveiled the Ticwatch C2 that is a follow up to Mobvoi’s first ever smartwatch. You can read all about it on our hands on Ticwatch C2 review here.
The Ticwatch E2 is coming, but not yet. We know this for sure as Mobvoi, the company behind the Ticwatch brand, has teased the watch on its website, even going so far as to mention it by name and include a picture of the device.
The teaser has since been removed, so it may have been posted accidentally, but you’ll find the image itself, along with other information and informed speculation about the watch, below.
Mobvoi unveiled the Ticwatch C2 and shared more information on the TicPods Free headphones on October 24 at a London launch, but there was no sign of the Ticwatch E2.
We don’t know much about the watch yet, but we’ll add to this article as we hear more, and in the meantime we’ve also come up with a list of the things that we want to see from the Ticwatch E2.
We don’t have much to go on for a Ticwatch E2 release date, though the fact that the makers teased the watch suggests it could be coming very soon.
The first Ticwatch E only became widely available in early 2018 though, so we equally wouldn’t be surprised if the Mobvoi Ticwatch E2 doesn’t land until early 2019.
Whenever it does land it’s sure to be cheap, as that’s one of the main selling points of its predecessor. That watch started at $159/£146 (around AU$200), so the Ticwatch E2 might have a similar price tag, though if anything it could be a bit more expensive since it will have newer tech and likely new features.
The only Ticwatch E2 news so far is a teaser posted on Mobvoi’s official site (and since removed). It included an image, which you can see at the top of this page, and the text “water is now a friend of your watch.”
That text plus the fact that the watch in the picture is underwater all but confirms that it will have improved water resistance. But how improved is still unknown.
The Ticwatch E is IP67 certified (meaning it can be submerged up to 1 meter deep for up to 30 minutes), so the E2 could just up that to IP68 (which typically increases the safe depth to 1.5 meters), but it might go further and be waterproof to 30 or 50 meters (which are two other common depths that some wearables can safely reach).
Extra water resistance also means that swim tracking is fairly likely to be added, but we can’t be sure of that yet.
As for the design of the Ticwatch E2, you can see in the picture that it looks a lot like the original Ticwatch E, though the crown button has moved from the left to the right, which is a more common position for a crown anyway.
Beyond what the teaser shows us we’d expect that the Ticwatch E2 will have both GPS and a heart rate monitor, since its predecessor has both, and it’s sure to run Wear OS.
We don’t know much about the Ticwatch E2 yet but we know what we want from it, most notably the following five things.
There’s a surprising amount of tech packed into the original Ticwatch E given how affordable it is, but one notable omission is NFC.
Without that you can’t make contactless payments, which can be a genuinely useful feature of smartwatches, so we’d like to see the Ticwatch E2 add NFC and Google Pay.
The Ticwatch E is definitely a case of substance over style, as it’s fairly chunky and clad in polycarbonate rather than metal.
This of course will be one of the ways Mobvoi kept the price down, but with more and more smartwatches looking genuinely nice we’d like to see some improvements made here for the Ticwatch E2.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like much will change, as we’ve already seen an official render of the Ticwatch E2 and it looks very similar to the Ticwatch E, but it’s possible that the materials have changed or it’s slightly slimmer.
That the Ticwatch E has GPS at all is fairly impressive, and its implementation isn’t awful, but we noted in our review that it’s not as good at tracking our location as most smartphones, so we’d like to see that improved for the Ticwatch E2, so that it will be more appealing to leave our phone behind when we go for a jog.
Mobvoi has hinted that the Ticwatch E2 will be more water-resistant than its predecessor, so this is likely something that we’ll get, and it’s definitely something that we want.
While the Ticwatch E could survive a splash you couldn’t take it swimming, which slightly limited its fitness potential. We want the Ticwatch E2 to be pool-safe and to make the most of that by adding some specific swim-tracking skills.
Mobvoi has made its own app to go alongside the Ticwatch E and we expect the app to work with the Ticwatch E2 as well, but it’s not very good. Focused on fitness, the app is a poor alternative to the likes of Google Fit.
Fortunately, as the Ticwatch E2 is sure to run Wear OS, Google Fit will be an option, but if Mobvoi is going to continue offering an app we’d like to see it improved so that we actually want to use it.
