New Fossil smartwatches are still stuck in the bad old days of Wear OS

The new gen 6 Fossil watches. [credit: Fossil ]

Before Samsung showed up and took over the Wear OS ecosystem, the top Android smartwatch manufacturer was Fossil. Even after Samsung's arrival, Fossil is still going, and today the company announced the Fossil Gen 6 watches.

The Gen 6 Fossil watches are the company's first to ship with Qualcomm's Snapdragon Wear 4100+, a 12 nm, Cortex A53-based ARM chip. The "plus" at the end of that 4100 model number means there's a low-power co-process on the SoC now, which can handle things like health tracking without waking up the big cores. It looks like the new SoC is the only upgrade over the gen 5 watches. There's still a 1.28-inch OLED display, 1GB of RAM, and 8GB of storage. Fossil doesn't say how big the battery is, but it charges to 80 percent in 30 minutes. The watch has GPS, NFC, Wi-Fi, a PPG heart rate sensor, and is water-resistant.

Fossil's new watches range from $299 to $319, and compared to the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4's $250-$350 price, Fossil's new watches don't make a ton of sense in a post-Samsung Wear OS world.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments