Mobvoi TicWatch E3 drops to $140 ($60 off), and it will get Wear OS 3

Mobvoi is one of the few companies currently producing Wear OS smartwatches, alongside Fossil Group, Samsung, and others. The company released the TicWatch E3 earlier this year as a budget watch with the Snapdragon Wear 4100 chip, and now you can get it on sale for $140. That’s a discount of $60 from the usual price, and best of all, the watch should get the Wear OS 3 update sometime next year.

The TicWatch E3 is equipped with a 1.3-inch 360×360 round display, a heart rate sensor, a blood oxygen sensor, NFC for Google Pay, Bluetooth 5.0, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n, 1GB RAM, 8GB storage, and the Snapdragon Wear 4100 chipset. It’s one of the least-expensive Wear OS watches with the latest chipset from Qualcomm, and it’s $80 cheaper than Galaxy Watch 4 right now. Not bad at all, and you also get IP68 water/dust resistance and (roughly) two days of battery life on a single charge.

Google said in July that the TicWatch E3 would receive the Wear OS 3 update in the “mid to second half of 2022,” alongside the Fossil Gen 6, TicWatch Pro 3 GPS, and TicWatch Pro 3 LTE. Wear OS 3 was built by Google in partnership with Samsung, and a heavily-skinned version is already available on Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 4 series. The YouTube Music app was initially exclusive to Wear OS 3, but Google has gradually rolled it out to select watches on Wear OS 2, including the TicWatch E3.

If you want a Wear OS watch with the latest update right now, your only option is the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 series. Samsung’s latest watches have more hardware and software features than the TicxWatch E3, but they’re also much more expensive.