Fossil Gen 5 update makes it the first Wear OS watch to make calls w/ iPhone

Ben Schoon | Oct 18 2019 - 2:45 pm PT

Fossil’s Gen 5 smartwatch is the best Wear OS watch you can buy right now, and this week it’s getting a little bit better on iOS. An update for Fossil Gen 5 that’s rolling out right now lets the watch make phone calls if it’s connected to an iPhone.

Wear OS smartwatches have had the ability to connect to iPhones for quite some time, but the experience has always lacked many of the features of the Apple Watch. Most watches have the ability to tell you when there’s an incoming call, but even the ones with a speaker haven’t been able to actually take that call on the watch.

Thanks to some proprietary software behind the scenes, Fossil has figured out how to get phone calls on Gen 5 working with the iPhone. We’ve not had a chance to try out the functionality just yet, though, as the update is still rolling out and hasn’t hit our unit.

Some Fossil Gen 5 users on Reddit say that the update also improves calls when connected to an Android phone, and that’s it’s fixed an annoying “ticking” issue. We’ve reached out to Fossil to see if it’s changed anything else.

The Fossil Gen 5 retails for $295 and comes with a stainless steel design, OLED display, Snapdragon Wear 3100 processor, 1 GB of RAM, and the latest version of Wear OS. We’ve got more details in our full review.