Few Watches Are Specifically Designed for Padel Players — This One I’ve Tested

What do padel players need so that smartwatches don’t stop us from monitoring our matches? That same question crossed my mind back in 2021, five years ago, and the situation hasn’t changed much today. Even though padel is an extremely popular sport, few, almost none, of the brands remember those of us who enjoy it, and the ones that do remember tend to offer padel modes that don’t deliver any useful information.

Then came MWC and there I discovered Mibro, a Chinese smartwatch brand that seeks to differentiate itself right there, in padel. They openly acknowledged that padel isn’t so much gaining popularity in China as much as they want to use the sport to push into Europe. And of course, as someone who has been playing padel since I was a kid, curiosity got the better of me, so I decided to try one of their watches on my own wrist.

Over these past weeks I’ve been using the Mibro GS Pro2 during my padel matches and lessons, and this has been my experience.

Forehand, Backhand, Bandeja, and the Short Shot at the Feet

As a smartwatch, the Mibro GS Pro2 covers almost all aspects. It’s big, but comfortable; the display looks good, the battery lasts two weeks with plenty of room, and it can receive notifications, calls, etc. It does have, however, three drawbacks:

• The operating system, which is RTOS-based, moves with a certain sluggishness and responds a bit slowly to taps and gestures.
• It has some connectivity issues with the phone that cause notifications to miss at certain moments.
• It lacks advanced features like ECG or mobile payments, which isn’t a big deal given its 140-euro price.
• There are serious translation issues in Spanish, both in the app and on the watch.

Positive side? The performance, connectivity, and the app problems could be fixed with a software update, I’m not worried about that at all. Anyway, we’re here to talk about padel, so let’s get to it.

When we step onto the court and activate the padel mode, the first thing we need to do is wear the watch on the same wrist as the hand that holds the paddle. I always wear the watch on my left wrist, but since I’m right-handed, I hold the paddle with my right hand. This is inconsequential in tennis, where the racquet isn’t strapped to the wrist, but in padel it’s different.

A padel paddle has a wrist strap that prevents it from flying off if the hand sweats, it slips when we deliver a strong shot, etc. That strap goes on the wrist, right where we wear the watch. If it’s just a simple cord, no problem, but if the strap is bigger, as is the case for mine, it can feel a bit uncomfortable. This, however, will depend on each player’s paddle.

During the session, the watch measures in real time the type of stroke and the speed at which we execute it. You can actually see it live as you play. This is quite useful, especially when the shot decides the point. It helps you know if, perhaps, you’ve overpowered a defensive shot. This information, well managed, is useful, and I’m going to indulge myself with a coffee-for-coffee-lovers aside.

Although padel might seem like a sport of hitting the ball hard, it isn’t like that at all. Generally, a softer, well-defined shot is more useful than a very hard shot. The soft, well-placed shot, hitting the wall or the net, creates more difficulty for the opponent. The hard shot, however, tends to give more opportunities.

All of this depends on the situation, but if you watch a professional padel match you’ll notice they only hit the ball hard when they know they can win the point by four (over the back glass), by three (to the side glass), or when they’re going to bring it back (the ball hits the opposite glass and comes back into their court). And in fact, you don’t need to hit it hard because, again, it’s more about technique than raw force. Otherwise, they usually rely on softer shots with intent.

And why am I telling you this? Because I, who attend weekly lessons, have found it very useful to review the speed applied to shots to discover what I’m doing right and what I’m doing wrong. If I’m volleying on the backhand and want the ball to go crosscourt to the mesh or deep into the double wall, a strong shot helps little. Better a softer one. Checking the speed at which I struck the ball when it came out well (or badly) helps me adjust future shots and memorize the motions. Coupled with the coach’s feedback on posture, position and rhythm, it’s valuable information.

The watch detects the type of shot and its direction with fairly good accuracy. In the top screenshots you can see on the left a padel class focused on bandejas alternating forehand and backhand; and on the right a match (which we lost, unfortunately) in my backhand, hence the higher proportion of backhand shots, too few bandejas, and too many lobs. What does that indicate? We were being pulled off the net with ease, kept at the back, and therefore had little attacking opportunity.

Lack of Context

This information is useful, but if you know how to play you’ll surely know why you won or lost. It’s a matter of feel. Knowing that you hit more or fewer shots is fine, but what’s truly interesting would be to cross that information with heart rate and its evolution throughout the match. I return to coffee mode for coffee aficionados.

Padel is a highly technical sport. Anyone who tells you that padel isn’t tiring doesn’t know how to play, because in padel you never stop moving. It’s not a sport of arms, but of legs. Having a good stance, performing the motions correctly and knowing how and where to position yourself is vital when playing. That sounds great at the start, but after you’ve spent 40 minutes stuck at 6-5 with advantage, deuce, advantage, deuce, you’ll see that technique goes out the window for a simple reason: fatigue.

It would be useful to cross the information about shot type with heart rate, so that we can see which shot we tend to hit when we’re freshest and when we’re tired. This would allow us to identify from what moment we start making mistakes and improve from there.

Knowing that you won the first set because you hit more slow volleys and that you lost the second because you hit many smashes gives you a clue that you were getting too fired up and that when tired you lose control, rush to win points, and opt for a hammer-blow that goes into the glass or stays on the net.

In other words, the watch is capable of collecting useful information, but it still needs to digest it so that its representation becomes truly meaningful. In my view, a graph showing the match duration on the X-axis and the type of shot you’ve hit and its average speed on the Y-axis, broken down by minutes, would be glorious. I’ll leave that as an idea.

In Conclusion

If we’re looking for a watch to monitor padel sessions, this is one of the few that can gather meaningful information. It’s missing, as I said, that extra touch to present it in a more useful way, but the foundations are solid and there.

As a smartwatch, I find it solid for its price range. It isn’t the best watch by any stretch, but it ticks almost all the boxes. For 140 euros there are interesting devices from brands like Amazfit and Xiaomi that should be considered, albeit without a dedicated padel mode.

On Xataka | Where you see a padel court, a bird sees nothing: Spain’s obsession is killing thousands of birds each year

This device was provided for review by Mibro. You can check how we do reviews on Xataka and our policy on relationships with companies.