Fossil’s “most advanced” Wear OS smartwatches just leaked on Amazon

Smartwatch makers not named Samsung or Apple are in a bit of a bind right now. Google’s brand-new Wear OS 3 update is currently only available on Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 4 series, making it hard for us to recommend any other Wear OS smartwatch. However, Wear OS 3 isn’t exclusive to Samsung’s watches and will be launching on the next-generation of Fossil smartwatches later this year. Now, the Fossil Gen 6 Smartwatches have just leaked thanks to a premature listing on Amazon.

The folks over at WinFuture were the first to spot the now-removed listings on Amazon Germany, which revealed the Fossil Gen 6 Smartwatches in their entirety. As reported by the publication, all smartwatches in the Fossil Gen 6 series run Google’s Wear OS, specifically the new Android 11-based Wear OS 3 version. The software will likely look and behave a bit differently than what you’ll find on the Galaxy Watch 4, though, because Samsung equipped its new smartwatches with its proprietary One UI Watch skin on top. However, Gen 6 owners will likely have access to all of Google’s Wear OS 3 apps, including the new YouTube Music app and an updated Google Maps. The user will have 8GB of internal storage to install apps on.

WinFuture says the Fossil Gen 6 Smartwatches are all equipped with 1.28-inch OLED displays at a crisp resolution of 416×416. There will likely be an Always-on Display feature but there’s no mention of a dual display to save power. Thanks to an energy-saving mode, which may tap into the always-on ultra-low power co-processor of the Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 4100+ chip, the smartwatches may be able to last for several days on a single charge. The Fossil Gen 6 series interestingly seem to be the first smartwatches to ship with the Wear 4100+ platform rather than the standard Wear 4100, with the biggest difference between the two being the presence of the co-processor in the + model.

The advertised battery life of the Fossil Gen 6 Smartwatches is 24 hours, according to the product listing, but this can be extended to several days through the aforementioned energy-saving mode. It takes an hour to fully charge the watches, though a 30-minute top-up can bring the battery back up to 80% of its capacity. The exact battery capacity hasn’t been revealed yet.

Fossil’s new smartwatches will be able to track your heart rate, oxygen saturation, step count, and sleep pattern among other things. It will have a built-in GPS for location tracking. NFC support was not mentioned in the report by WinFuture, however.

The Fossil Gen 6 Smartwatches will be available with a 42mm or 44mm case size in designs for both men and women. Most of the cases will be water resistant to a depth of 50 meters. The wrist bands will be made of leather, fabric, or metal. In Germany, the watches will apparently be priced at €299 or €329 and will be available starting September 27th. The report did not mention if the watches will be offered in an LTE model.

Fossil has been hyping up its Gen 6 smartwatches for a few weeks now. In an interview with CNET, the company said its next-gen smartwatches will pack “pretty major hardware upgrades” and launch with the new unified platform from Google and Samsung. In Qualcomm’s press release for its Wearables Ecosystem Accelerator Program, the company said it believes it’s bringing “the best possible Wear OS smartwatch to the market this year”, obviously referencing the upcoming Gen 6 series. And in a landing page for the Gen 6 series, the company teases its “most advanced smartwatch is coming soon.” From today’s leak, I don’t see how the Gen 6 can live up to Fossil’s claims, especially considering it’ll compete with the Galaxy Watch 4 and its superior 5nm chip, but the company may have more up its sleeve that hasn’t been leaked yet.

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