As Android fans we are waiting on that magic bullet that will make Wear OS better. That may not be hard but by better we mean not laggy and full of bugs. Fossil are about to release a swathe of Wear OS watches through its own brand name and those under its umbrella.
DroidLife have overnight spotted various Fossil-made watches on the FCC database. The FCC filing shows that five watches are in the pipeline with the model numbers DW10F1, DW10M1, DW10M2, DW10E1, and DW10D1. The model numbers are what give away which company will be releasing the device.
Following some investigation of the Fossil website which explains their naming scheme for its devices it appears that the smartwatches will come from:
- DW10F1: Fossil
- DW10M1, DW10M2: Michael Kors
- DW10E1: Emporio Armani
- DW10D1: Diesel
Not much else is revealed about the watches aside from the usual Bluetooth and 2.4GHz WiFi presence (seen in the testing performed on them) and that they do run Wear OS. There is no indication what processors these will be running but we expect it to the the Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 3100. Although it is certainly no magic bullet as the issues with Wear OS extend from Wear OS itself it is still better than its predecessor.
Fossil usually bring their smartwatches to Australia in time so we will be keeping an eye out for when these land — especially the Diesel as I was so very close to buying one in the US when I was there last month.
Just curious, what makes the 3100 better than previous wear chips? I’ve recently upgraded from a Huawei Watch 1st gen with a Snapdragon 400 to a new Fossil Sport, and honestly the UI speed is the same if marginally better, battery life is actually a bit worse (and I’m not even using the built in GPS) and overall not much has changed in 4 years of progress.
My understanding is the only real improvement was meant to be battery life, the actual processing ‘power’ of the chip is the same?
I’ve noticed my Gen 4 HR Fossil is faster than my Gen 2 Fossil with the same chip though so really depends on the software optimization!