Fossil won't upgrade existing smartwatches to new Wear OS

Fossil has no plans to upgrade its current lineup of smartwatches to Google and Samsung's upcoming Wear platform. Instead, it will discount these devices while also releasing a new premium watch with "pretty major hardware upgrades." You can expect faster performance, new processors, longer battery life, and LTE options. According to Fossil's Greg McKelvey, this Gen 6 watch will have "all of the software benefits that Google's been talking about and launching with the unified platform."

Source: The Verge

Fossil Gen 5 smartwatches get new sleep tracking, fitness features

Fossil updates its Gen 5 Wear OS smartwatches with many new features, even without Google's help. The wearables get new functions that aren't part of standard Wear OS, including sleep and VO2 max tracking. The latter helps with tracking your overall cardio fitness level. 

The update improves activity tracking, promising better real-time fitness tracking (like heart rate, pace, distance, steps, and calories) at half the power consumption. Fossil achieves this by offloading the tasks to the QCC1110 co-processor.

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The new Fossil Gen 5 smartwatch will let you take iPhone calls

We already knew that the Fossil Gen 5 is coming, and now we get more details about the smartwatch. And one of the new features is its ability to let you listen to and answer iPhone calls right from the watch. This feature has been available for a while on Android already. But we believe this is the first time Wear OS is offering this for iPhone users. It isn't available at launch, though. It'll arrive via a proprietary app launching in the fall. According to a Fossil spokesperson, "No action is required from your iPhone. The watch becomes another way to take your call via Bluetooth." If you're looking for iMessage support, that still isn't available right now.

All of the specs that were leaked recently were right. But we're here to share additional details we didn't get to share. The smartwatch has 1GB of RAM, NFC, and built-in GPS. And it's waterproof up to a depth of 30 metres.

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Fossil Wear OS watch gets leaked ahead of official launch

Fossil is set to unveil a new a Wear OS watch on August 5, Monday, and the company teased it on Twitter with a video clip that has Google Assistant’s voice saying the words “Coming Soon.” The implication is the new smartwatch will feature a speaker. And shortly after the teaser was released, a Reddit user showed off some hands-on images of the watch being called the Gen 5 version. The watch has also been seen on Fossil’s official Australian site. The specs include a Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 3100 processor, 8GB of storage, a speaker, and “smart battery modes” that promise to extend battery life for “multiple” days. It also features waterproofing, an upgraded heart rate sensor, and sleep tracking. The site didn’t mention anything about pricing, though. But we hope to get more details in a few hours.

Source: 9to5Google