Fossil Gen 6 ‘Venture Edition’ brings a tweaked design and new band to the Wear OS smartwatch

Ben Schoon | Jun 30 2022 - 12:21 pm PT

The Fossil Gen 6 has a new “Venture Edition” available for purchase which updates the design and included band on the Wear OS smartwatch.

Available now for $299, the Fossil Gen 6 “Venture Edition” takes the core design and specs of the regular Gen 6, but with a bit of a new style. The updated design has a silver body with an etched ring around the bezel. Fossil says this is to make the watch look like a “field watch.”

Building on that look is the band, which has a mix of leather and green fabric. Fossil notes that it is using “eco-leather” and recycled green nylon to make up the band.

There’s also an exclusive watch face for this model which “recalls classic digital field watches from the past and features metrics that display hiking distance, duration and altitude, plus compass functionality, heart rate tracking and estimated blood oxygen measurements.”

Aside from those changes, this is the same smartwatch Fossil released last year. It has a Snapdragon Wear 4100+ chipset, 1GB of RAM, 44mm case, and 1.28-inch AMOLED display. Battery life is rated at around a day, and there’s a faster charger available this year. It will be eligible for Wear OS 3, eventually.

The Fossil Gen 6 “Venture Edition” is available for a “limited time” and has been available in the US for about two weeks so far based on what we could find. As mentioned, it costs $299 both on Fossil’s site and on Amazon. Fossil also today announced that the limited edition is now available in India where it costs ₹23,995.

9to5Google’s Take

I wasn’t personally too pleased with the Fossil Gen 6 when I spent some time with it last year. Frankly, the battery life was rough, and almost unusable even in my less-demanding use cases.

But I can’t help but be interested in this new “Venture Edition.” It surely has the same problems as the standard model – the sole review on Fossil’s site even says the battery couldn’t last a full day – but the design is just top-notch. It reminds me of 2018’s Fossil Q Explorist HR, which to this day remains one of my favorite smartwatch designs to date.