Mobvoi TicWatch C2

Can you get a stylish smartwatch for under two hundred without compromising quality? You can now

Though your friendly neighbourhood T3 team loves smartwatches as much as the next person who owns a smartwatch, they’re still in the ‘nice to have’ category rather than ‘essential’. That means a lot of people are sceptical of dropping several hundred pounds on one, but the new watch from Mobvoi makes it more tempting to dive in.

Cheap and chipful

The C2 is a full smartwatch, featuring Google’s Wear OS and a Snapdragon Wear chip for its brains, but it starts at around `16,700. That’s few thousand rupees less than the Samsung Galaxy Watch or Apple Watch Series 3, and a lot cheaper than the Series 4. The Huawei Watch GT is around the same price, but it has stripped-back software with no support for installing new apps. Here, you get the full experience for the price.

Of course, corners have to be cut to get things to a lower bracket, but Mobvoi has done a solid job of keeping that non-obvious.

It definitely doesn’t look cheap, for example: the case is stainless steel, and comes in black, silver and rose gold finishes, with leather straps. The rose gold actually has a slightly different shape (the case curves towards the sides, while the others are more squared off), which makes it a tad thinner at 12.8mm, while the black and silver clock in at 13.2mm.