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Fossil’s ‘best possible’ Wear OS smartwatch won’t see the platform revamp until 2022

Wear OS is about to see its biggest update in years starting with the debut of the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 series next month. As Google clarified upgrade plans today, the company also revealed that the new Fossil Wear OS smartwatches will launch without Wear OS 3 and won’t be upgraded for several months.

Taking a step back, Fossil Group this week confirmed in a Qualcomm announcement that it was preparing a new lineup of smartwatches running on Google’s Wear OS that would be unveiled later this year. The Group didn’t go into much detail about this presumed “Gen 6” release, but if patterns hold it would likely debut in Q3 or Q4 and, apparently, may be running on new Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear chips, too.

In that confirmation, Fossil confidently called this upcoming smartwatch the “best possible” smartwatch coming to the market this year. While it remains to be seen exactly what that means, whatever is released will come with a big asterisk.

Google has confirmed that Fossil’s next smartwatch launch will be without Wear OS 3, waiting on a future opt-in upgrade to deliver the completely revamped experience. The company further estimates that it could take until mid-2022 for Fossil to deliver the update to this smartwatch and any others based on the same platform. Even when it does arrive, Google warns that some factors could “impact” the experience, but neglected to share what those factors might be. As a result, users will have the choice of whether or not to upgrade to the new platform or stick with an older version.

You can learn more about Google’s plans for Wear OS 3 below.

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