Fossil is a well known identify in relation to watches, however for the previous a number of years, it is also been one of many few conventional watch manufactures to constantly launch smartwatches primarily based on Google’s Put on OS platform. The corporate’s newest mannequin in India is the Fossil Sport, and one of many causes we’re enthusiastic about it’s that it is among the many first smartwatches to characteristic Qualcomm’s up to date Snapdragon Put on 3100 processor. That is the long-awaited successor to the Snapdragon Put on 2100, which was the one actual choice producers had until now.

Now this is not precisely model new tech; Qualcomm launched the Snapdragon Put on 3100 almost a yr in the past, however it has solely simply made its solution to India. The identical goes for the Fossil Sport. However, it is right here now and we’re wanting to attempt it out. Qualcomm’s earlier smartwatch SoC has lengthy been thought of a efficiency bottleneck for Put on OS watches, and we’re hoping this new chip adjustments issues for the higher.

The Fossil Sport is priced at Rs. 17,995 and is accessible in quite a lot of colors. It is also purported to be swim-proof and has heart-rate monitoring in addition to built-in GPS. Let’s have a look at if it is well worth the asking worth, and whether or not Qualcomm’s new chip could make Put on OS simpler to reside with.

Fossil Sport design and options

The Fossil Sport makes use of a traditional design, with a spherical dial and three buttons on the correct, similar to a standard watch. The centre button can be a purposeful crown, which can be utilized for scrolling by way of menus or adjusting quantity. The opposite two buttons could be customised to launch any app on the watch.

The Fossil Sport is mild and appears good in your wrist

The Fossil Sport is accessible in 43mm and 41mm sizes, with each priced the identical. Now we have the previous for overview, which needs to be nicely suited to most wrists. The 41mm watch face is smaller and the straps are narrower too. The higher portion of the watch itself is manufactured from aluminium, whereas the decrease half is nylon plastic.

The watch may be very mild, and the silicone strap can be comfy and straightforward to wash. Nonetheless, on the entire, the Fossil Sport has a toy-like high quality to it, which misses out on a premium really feel. We seen some tough edges on the nylon backside of the case, which made it really feel a bit crude.

The 1.2-inch OLED show on the Fossil Sport appears to be like sharp, and brightness is routinely adjusted primarily based on ambient mild. Even underneath daylight, the show is well legible. The 22mm straps are detachable and you’ll swap them out for various ones if you would like. The underside of the watch additionally has a magnetic ring for the charging pod. This makes it very straightforward to snap the charger on and off, with out having to align the charging pins to a particular spot.

Total, the Fossil Sport is a snug smartwatch to put on, due to its low weight. It additionally appears to be like sensible from afar however feels a bit plasticky in your wrist.

Coming to among the specs, the Sport runs on the Snapdragon Put on 3100 platform and has 4GB of inside storage. It runs Put on OS by Google, and packs in sensors similar to an accelerometer, altimeter, ambient mild sensor, gyroscope, and a heart-rate sensor. It additionally has NFC and built-in GPS together with Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.2 Low Vitality. There’s a microphone for selecting up voice instructions, however there is no speaker.

Lastly, the Sport is appropriate with Android (apart from Android Go Editions) and iOS smartphones, and requires the Put on OS app.

The 22mm straps are detachable on the Fossil Sport

Fossil Sport efficiency and battery life

For this overview, we used the Fossil Sport primarily with an iPhone XR (Assessment) however we additionally used it with a Samsung Galaxy S10+ (Assessment) for a bit. We have been wanting to see how a lot of an enchancment the brand new Snapdragon Put on 3100 could be, however because it seems, it isn’t as spectacular as we have been anticipating. The show’s contact response is sweet, and interacting with the menus and settings is pretty easy, however there’s nonetheless a little bit of a wait while you launch apps. The Play Retailer particularly takes some time to load, even when your watch is related to quick Wi-Fi.

Summoning Google Assistant with a voice command takes a second or two. At occasions, the watch can turn into fairly unresponsive, forcing you to return to the house display and begin no matter you have been doing over once more.

That is fairly disappointing however not fully stunning. For those who have a look at the technical particulars of the Snapdragon Put on 3100 and 2100, not quite a bit has modified. It is nonetheless utilizing the identical CPU and GPU, and is constructed on the older 28nm course of.

What this new chip gives is healthier movement monitoring and higher battery life (in idea) due to a brand new ultra-low-power co-processor for ambient sensing. That explains why even with this new chip, Put on OS feels barely any sooner than earlier than. The Sport runs Put on OS 2.7, which relies on Android 8.1 Oreo.

The Put on OS app on iOS

Put on OS gives a bunch of preinstalled apps together with Match, Match Breath, Match Exercise, and Nike Run Membership. You may set up extra from the Play Retailer app on the watch, however there’s not quite a bit to select from, in contrast to the variability you get for Apple’s watchOS. Apps similar to Spotify and Uber would require authorisation to work, which could be achieved by way of your cellphone.

There are some good watch faces to select from, regardless that the gathering is a bit restricted. A few of the watch faces allow you to makes use of background photographs out of your Instagram or Fb accounts. These customized faces could be saved within the Fossil watch app, so you may shortly entry them when wanted.

Put on OS is simple to navigate by way of. You swipe down from the house display for fast toggles; swipe up from the underside to view unread notifications; swipe proper for Google Assistant; and swipe left to you entry ‘Tiles.’ You may select as much as 5 of those tile screens from issues like your exercise progress, climate, calendar occasions, headlines from Google Information, and many others.

A press of the crown takes you to all of your apps, of which the three most lately opened ones are at all times displayed first. You may scroll by way of the listing both with the touchscreen or utilizing the crown.

The Fossil Sport does an honest job with primary smartwatch performance. Notifications are straightforward to view; you are alerted about incoming calls with a light vibration. Music taking part in in your cellphone could be managed by way of the watch.

Nonetheless, usability is extra restricted when you pair this with an iPhone in comparison with an Android gadget. As an illustration, you may’t reply to SMSes or any chat app except there is a watch app for it — and the one standard one at the moment obtainable is Telegram.

When synced with an Android cellphone, although, the performance is significantly better. You may reply to most chat notifications, even when there is not a watch app for it. You should utilize among the preset replies or create a customized one by both dictation or by way of a keyboard utilizing swipe gestures. Put on OS will even routinely present you a listing of apps which have companion watch apps, and allows you to obtain them straight from the watch’s app drawer.

The Fossil Sport boasts of letting customers obtain and play music from the watch itself. This could solely be achieved utilizing Google Play Music, and you may want a subscription for that service with the intention to obtain songs. There’s a Spotify watch app, however it may possibly solely be used to regulate music playback in your different gadgets and never stream songs immediately utilizing the watch itself.

The Put on OS-running Fossil Sport gives good performance with Android telephones, however not a lot with iPhones

Since that is fitness-oriented smartwatch, we tried the step monitoring and GPS performance to see how correct they have been. You may select the kind of exercise you are logging from the Google Match app on the watch, which is synced along with your Google account. After selecting ‘Strolling,’ it took round a minute for the Sport to get a GPS lock, in our checks.

We walked for precisely 1km and the watch recorded a reasonably shut distance of 1.05km. It is not too dangerous, however you’d anticipate higher from a watch with built-in GPS. Coronary heart-rate monitoring was additionally fairly correct, and the outcomes have been consistent with readings from an Apple Watch Sequence 1.

So far as step monitoring goes, the Sport shouldn’t be essentially the most correct instrument for the job. With a 1,000 step stroll, the watch managed to document solely 979 steps, which is lower than splendid. We carried out this take a look at a number of occasions with completely different numbers of steps, and every time, the rely at all times got here up a bit quick.

The Fossil Sport retains logging your coronary heart price intermittently with on a regular basis use, and can accomplish that constantly if any of the exercises within the Match app are activated. The Google Match app would not have any sleep monitoring operate, which implies it’s a must to depend on third-party apps similar to Cardiogram or Sleep on Android, which include their very own companion watch apps. The previous has a glitchy Android app after we tried it, and the latter is subscription-based. It could have been good to have had native sleep monitoring performance.

Fossil claims that the Sport is swim-proof, regardless that no official IP score is talked about. We took it into the bathe a number of occasions and it continued to work nicely. Fossil’s web site additionally mentions that you would be able to observe swims, however as soon as once more this requires a third-party app as a result of Google Match would not provide swim monitoring and neither does Fossil.

The Fossil Sport guarantees greater than a day’s value of battery life, and in observe, that is achievable (we managed about 25 hours on common) when you disable the always-on watch face and restrict your use to simply viewing and replying to notifications. With the always-on watch face enabled, we have been in a position to get a bit underneath a full day’s value of use.

The watch would not warn you when then battery may be very low, and easily goes right into a low-power state which solely shows the time. You may proceed utilizing it on this mode for about two days earlier than the battery goes useless utterly. Plugging the charger immediately right into a laptop computer or to a quick charger makes no distinction, as both approach, the watch takes about an hour to cost totally from zero.

Even when you develop the behavior of charging this gadget each night time, you is likely to be disenchanted, as battery life is poor by at the moment’s requirements. Different smartwatches on the identical worth or decrease, such because the Honor Watch Magic, ship as much as 4 days of runtime on one cost.

Verdict

Fossil does make some handsome smartwatches, and we now have to provide it credit score for that. The Fossil Sport is likely one of the lightest smartwatches we have worn shortly, which is nice, however we simply want it felt a bit extra premium and had higher battery life, particularly while you’re paying almost Rs. 18,000 for it. The show is vibrant, GPS monitoring works pretty nicely, and you’ll go swimming with it. We additionally just like the customisable watch buttons, which is a pleasant contact.

Sadly, Put on OS is a little bit of a letdown. It is nonetheless too barebones and is not evolving as shortly as Samsung and Huawei’s smartwatch ecosystems, which natively provide much more well being monitoring options. The comparatively new Snapdragon Put on 3100 {hardware} can be disappointing, because it barely supplies any enchancment to efficiency or battery life. Talking of which, lower than day-long battery life for a smartwatch in 2019 is just unacceptable.

For those who use an iPhone, we might counsel paying a bit extra and getting an Apple Watch. For those who do not need to spend that a lot however need one thing with good health monitoring, you then even have good choices from TomTom and Garmin.

The Fossil Sport makes extra sense for Android customers however be ready to cost the watch day-after-day. For those who’re searching for higher battery life, then Samsung’s Galaxy Watch Lively and Huawei’s Watch GT could be good alternate options which ought to final a few days between fees and likewise, provide extra strong health monitoring choices on paper, although we have not reviewed both so it is exhausting to confirm these claims.