Fossil says it will release the ‘best possible Wear OS smartwatch’ later this year

Ben Schoon | Jul 20 2021 - 1:07 pm PT

Fossil has been the biggest supporter of Google’s Wear OS through all of the platform’s missteps, and now that things are finally headed in the right direction, the company is proud to say that it will debut more Wear OS smartwatches in 2021 with Qualcomm hardware under the hood.

In a press release talking about Qualcomm’s new “Wearable Accelerator” program today, Fossil’s Chris Hartley had a tease regarding what’s next for the Group when it comes to Wear OS. Apparently, Fossil is preparing to launch a new lineup of Wear OS products in 2021, even saying that the company will release the “best possible” Wear OS smartwatch.

At Fossil Group, we are always striving for new innovation and increased performance in our products. Thanks to our continued partnership with Qualcomm and the launch of our upcoming smartwatches later this year, Fossil believes it’s bringing the best possible Wear OS smartwatch to the market this year

While details are obviously unclear on what this smartwatch will bring to the table, it’s almost certain this is referring to the Fossil Gen 6 lineup, which would be due for release sometime this year based on the company’s usual schedule. Given the context that Qualcomm just announced it would be releasing new Snapdragon Wear chips “in the next year,” it seems possible that Gen 6 could run on a chipset that’s newer than the Snapdragon Wear 4100 series, which debuted in 2020, has only been used in two watches, and still has no guaranteed upgrade path to the new Wear OS experience which is being released this year.

In any case, it’s great to see that Fossil is sticking with Google’s platform going into 2021, and it’ll be interesting to see what these new Wear OS smartwatches bring to the table compared to the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 and whatever Google has up its sleeve.