Last Updated on March 18, 2021 by Filip Poutintsev
Fossil Group Inc. is an American company that is a designer and manufacturer of various watch brands. Fossil is one of the popular watch brands under the Fossil Group Inc. Fossil is well known for manufacturing stylish and quality watches.
Pros and Cons of Fossil Smart Watches
Fossil is a great manufacturer of smartwatches besides regular/traditional watches. Fossil released its first smartwatch, Q Founder, in 2015. Since then, Fossil has released hundreds of smartwatches with various stunning designs and features.
Fossil Gen 5 smartwatches are the latest from Fossil. Fossil smartwatches are stylish, natural-looking, and offer similar features as other smartwatches. Fossil smartwatches are very price competitive to other smartwatches. Fossil smartwatches use Google’s Wear OS.
Like every other Wear OS watch, the fossil smartwatches work well as a tool for notifications, tracking your fitness activity, making a call, or asking an assistant a question. They come with all of the features of a modern smartwatch: voice assistant, GPS, NFC for mobile payments, and a heart rate sensor.
Let’s discuss some pros and cons of Fossil smartwatches,
Pros of Fossil Smart Watch
1. Innovative Design
Everyone desires to have a smartwatch that looks stylish on your wrist. If you prefer better looks and functionality, the Fossil smartwatches might be a great option for you. Fossil offers a round-faced design on their smartwatches, which gives you a traditional wristwatch wearing experience.
The Fossil Gen 5 has a colorful 1.3-inch AMOLED display with two programmable side buttons and a rotating crown for seamless navigation. It is a good-looking watch that comes with various colors, finishes, and straps available. The rotating crown helps you scroll through menus.
They all come with replaceable bands, which makes it easy for you to customize your watch. Fossil has been in the watch market for a long time and knows how to design a watch and is continuously providing some eye-catching designs for its smartwatches
2. Hybrid Smartwatch
A hybrid smartwatch is not a proper smartwatch but actually is a dumbed-down version of a smartwatch. Its design is unbelievably natural; you won’t even notice it’s a hybrid smartwatch until you receive a notification. It can be connected to a mobile/smartphone and also receive notifications.
The hour and minute hands are used to navigate through different things on the screens. You cannot actually type a message as it lacks a touchscreen: however you’ll be able to set up alerts and notifications with ease. They also come with health tracking features as well. These smartwatches look like traditional watches but functions like a smartwatch isn’t that amazing.
3. Google Assistant
As Fossil uses Wear OS, it comes with Google’s voice assistant. Google Assistant can do various things like control audio playback, read messages, and control compatible smart home devices. It is very excellent for any speech-to-text replies.
Google’s voice assistant has quite a good performance than Samsung’s Bixby or other voice assistants. Google Assistant is both more consistent and more refined. You can almost do everything on your smartwatch using the voice command. You play music, make a call, reply to texts, and start a timer, and many more with a voice command.
4. Workout and Health benefits
You can track your fitness with your smartwatch. Wear OS has the Google Fit app, which helps you to track various fitness info, like steps taken, calories burned, heart rate, and workouts.
If you use the app on both your watch and your phone, it will sync data between your phone and watch and can also share its data with other apps. It also helps to create a personalized fitness plan for you and displays fitness and heart rate data, which will help to visualize your performance.
Fossil smartwatches can detect heart rate as well and also pick up on unusual spikes in heart rate. Google Fit also has an amazing concept of ‘Heart Points’, which ranks the strength of your activities and gives you points for working out.
5. Google Pay
Google Pay another great benefit of Fossil smartwatches. Google Pay is a digital wallet and online payment system developed by Google. This feature helps to make transactions right from the wrist.
You can use your fossil smartwatch to make quick and secure payments where Google Pay is accepted. This payment feature is so secure, and you don’t need to carry cash or credit cards with you; all you have to is few taps on your smartwatch, and that’s it.
6. Wear OS
It is the operating system specially designed for smartwatches by Google. Wear OS platform is packed with amazing features that make smartwatches amazing. Wear OS has improved the various features of the smartwatch, including iPhone compatibility and better fitness experiences, and many more.
It offers features like Google’s voice assistant, Google pay, which are quite worthy features that make your daily life much easier. Google Fit is another benefit of Wear OS: it is an app that collects your daily activity data and helps you to manage health and fitness.
7. Price
Fossil smartwatches are very price competitive with other smartwatches like Samsung or Apple. If you are tight on your budget and want an average smartwatch, then surely go for Fossil. Fossil Gen 5 is a reasonably priced smartwatch that is an excellent option for those who want a stylish wearable alongside some great features.
8. Customization
Fossil smartwatches offer great customization flexibility. You can customize the look of your smartwatch through hundreds of downloadable watch faces as well as interchangeable bands.
Change out the straps to match your look and personality– from leather to stainless steel. You can personalize your dial for the day, as you can select pre-downloaded watch faces or even select a picture for the dial.
Cons of Fossil Smart Watch
1. Battery
The major weakness of Fossil star watchers is its battery life. Under moderate use, Fossil Gen 5 battery lasts a single day on a single charge. A small-capacity battery won’t be able to last a full even a single day if you turn on constant heart rate tracking or use its GPS. However, Fossil has a smart Battery mode that can help you save your battery for emergency uses.
2. Lack Features and Performance
Fossil smartwatches are not the best when it comes to performance. They lack many features that other smartwatches are offering, like blood pressure monitoring, ECG monitoring, sleep tracking,fall detection and many more.
Tizen OS and Watch OS are more advanced than Google’s Wear OS platform. Fossil Gen 5 smartwatches are water-resistant up to 30m, while Samsung Galaxy Watch 3 is water-resistant up to 50m. Though they can be pairable with the iPhone, you cannot reply to texts or emails though you can read them.
3. Not the Best
Though Fossil smartwatches are budget-friendly, however, are not great smartwatches when we compare them with other smartwatches and features they offer. From design to build quality to the performance, they are far behind other smartwatches brands like Samsung and Apple. Wear OS does lacks many features that Tizen OS and Watch OS offer. Also, the battery life is not good in fossil smartwatches.
4. Hybrid Smartwatches are Not Smart
The concept of hybrid smartwatches is not perfect and user friendly. If you are buying a smartwatch, you definitely want a perfect smartwatch, not a watch on which you can’t operate with ease.
You can’t reply to texts or type a message as it lacks a touchscreen. Navigating through the apps/features using a minute/hour hands on the watch is a really tedious task.
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