Fossil is moving on with their smartwatch range, showing off their 4th generation devices earlier this week. Fossil has now confirmed that we’ll be seeing both the Fossil Q Venture HR and Fossil Q Explorist HR here in Australia this month.
As a refresher, the watches both introduce a number of new hardware features previously lacking on the Fossil smartwatch range. The Fossil Q Venture HR and Fossil Q Explorist HR both include NFC for tap & pay, as well as GPS for tracking your run, walk, bike ride or hike, and you can now track your heart rate as well with a PPG heart-rate monitor included as well.
The Q Venture HR is the smaller of the two watches with a 40mm case that comes in a variety of colour options including Stainless Steel, Gold and Rose Gold, along with a range of interchangeable leather and metal link 18mm bands.
The Q Explorist HR is the larger and more chunky of the two with a 45mm steel casing that’s 13mm thick and like the Q Venture HR is also available in a range of colour options including stainless steel, ‘Smoke’ stainless steel and Gold. Like the rest of the range, the Q Explorist HR also supports interchangeable 22mm bands.
The watches come with a touchscreen and are powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear 2100 processor and come with 4GB of storage. Fossil says the watches both have ‘all day’ battery life and charge with an ‘Inductive Charging Magnet.
So, when can you get your hands on one? And how much will it cost?
Fossil says that there is limited stock of the Fossil Q Venture HR and Fossil Q Explorist HR in their retail stores around the country now, and they’ll be launching online sales later this month. You should also soon see the watches start to hit partner retailers next month as well. Taking into account the various colours, and watch strap combinations, the watches will be priced between AU $429-$469 and NZ $499-$529.
Are you interested in the 4th Gen Fossil Q Venture HR and Fossil Q Explorist HR?
I thought I would chime in… I bought one last night from their Melbourne Central store. I have just switched over from using an iPhone X/Series 3 stainless steel watch to an Android phone…. and wanted a fashionable smartwatch. After weighing up the few decent options in the non Apple space (tried the Garmin vivoactive 3 but the screen was rubbish)…. I settled on this. Charging it daily is no issue since the Apple Watch was like that until Series 3 came along, so I was already in the habit. I have a smallish wrist but it doesn’t look as… Read more »
I have the explorist Q and while the watch itself is a great package the usability of it is a huge issue, the position of the crown allows the back of your wrist to push the crown accidentally, waking the watch and activating assistant. This would happen to me 20-30 times a day. While fossil were as helpful as they could be the watch can’t be set to take no action on crown press. Even with assistant as off as it can be the crown still wakes the watch. This constant waking causes huge accidental battery drain in a device… Read more »
It would be a big call spending $4-500 on a watch when there is a new Wear chip from Qualcomm coming out in a month.
This watch and brand is potentially not aimed at the type of people checking for the pixel watch and CPU upgrades
They look ok , but one day battery life , not good enough for my $$$$ .