The watch has something called "Essential Mode", which shuts off most of the smart capabilities and the OLED screen, leaving you with a simple watch that tells the time and monitors your activity. If you activate this manually, Mobvoi says you can get up to a month of use. Handily, it will also activate automatically when your battery gets low. So if for some reason I found myself away from a charger I could get two days of full smartwatch mode, plus an additional three days in Essential. On the other hand, if you really don't mind charging every night you can override the LCD by turning on the WearOS always-on screen.

Outside of these battery-saving measures, the TicWatch Pro is a premium-feeling watch for the price tag. With a smart two-tone case in black or silver, its round face and prominent buttons make it functional but not overly sporty. I like the feel of the included band, which is leather on the outside but silicon underneath. It means you can wear the watch in the office or on a night out, but you don't need to swap out for a silicon band when you're going for a run.

And speaking of runs, the TicWatch Pro will do fine for a fitness companion, although it wasn't designed expressly with that in mind. It's rated water resistant, for example, but Mobvoi warns against taking it swimming.

One niggle is that Mobvoi insists you use its own smartphone app to store activity data from the watch, so you need to juggle both this and the standard WearOS app rather than having everything in the one place.  I'd be more forgiving of this if it was a great app, but it just shows you representations of your activity on a graph, like many WearOS watches show via Google Fit.

Overall this is a surprisingly nice smartwatch, with easily enough power to manage your notifications, music and fitness smoothly. The included apps and watch faces are high quality (even if the fitness stuff overlaps with Google's own efforts, which are also included), and Essential Mode is a good fallback if you need to seriously reduce your battery drain.

If you want to leave your phone at home it has GPS built in and a little bit of storage to store music or podcasts (via Bluetooth headphones), but there's no LTE so you'll be cut off from the internet.