Mobvoi has taken the wraps off of a brand new smartwatch, which is powered by Wear OS, in the TicWatch C2. It’s the next-generation of its classic smartwatch, and it is also aimed at smaller wrists. Seeing as smartwatches are typically pretty big and bulky, it is rather refreshing to see the TicWatch C2 coming in a smaller size, for those with smaller wrists, or those that just want to have a smaller smartwatch on their wrist. The watch itself is about 43 mm in diameter, with two different strap sizes, 20mm and 18mm. Mobvoi is defining them based on their watch strap sizes, so there is a 20mm and a 18mm version – don’t get that confused with a 42mm smartwatch, which is typically referring to the diameter of the smartwatch’s case. Mobvoi offers this in three colors: Rose Gold, Black and Platinum. The Rose Gold is only available in the 18mm size, as it is suited more towards women, while the 20mm size comes in Black and Platinum colors. The Rose Gold version is also a tad bit thinner.
The TicWatch C2 is also running on a Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 2100 chipset, with a 1.3-inch AMOLED display (360×360 resolution). There’s 768MB of RAM inside and 4GB of internal storage for storing apps and some music offline. Mobvoi has included a 400mAh capacity battery which should get most people through a full day – and in fact, Mobvoi is touting two full days here. This is also IP68 water-resistant, so it can be taken into the pool and such. Of course Google Pay and Google Fit is on-board. So despite the smaller battery and a relatively large capacity battery, Mobvoi was also able to add in NFC support.
Background: Mobvoi is actually marketed as an artificial intelligence startup, that is funded by Volkswagen, Google and a few other investors. This makes sense, seeing as Mobvoi has debuted a number of products that use Google services. For example, a Google Assistant-powered speaker, as well as a few different Wear OS smartwatches and even an Assistant-powered pair of earbuds. This makes it a fairly interesting company, and it’s definitely not the first name you would think of when you think about smartwatches, especially elegant watches. It’s a pretty small company, but it is hitting a ton of waves with its products and getting a whole lot of attention, of course having Google as a major investor does help with that.
Impact: Mobvoi states that the TicWatch C2 is going to be available beginning the first week of December at retailers worldwide. It is currently available now for pre-order from its website, with a list price of $199 in the US, £179 in the UK and €199 in Europe. That actually makes the TicWatch C2 one of the cheaper smartwatches currently on the market, especially when talking about Wear OS smartwatches, many of them are closer to $400 if not a bit more than that. It’s a nice watch that you can pick up and have in time for the holidays, which is also a good thing here.
