Andrew Heinzman
Back in June, Fossil announced plans to release “the best possible” Gen 6 smartwatch. The company is now emailing customers to boast that the watch offers “way more, way faster.” But we still don’t know if the new Fossil watch will support Wear OS 3, which we expect Samsung to announce on August 11th—two days from now.
To better compete with the Apple Watch, Google and Samsung are collaborating on a new version of Wear OS (likely called Wear OS 3). This new operating system will require powerful hardware, and unfortunately, most Android watches use 7-year-old chips. The only existing smartwatches that we expect to receive the Wear OS 3 update are the Mobvoi TicWatch Pro 3 and E3, as they’re the only wearables to run on Qualcomm’s somewhat-new Snapdragon 4100 chip.
There’s a very good chance that the Fossil Gen 6 runs on the Snapdragon 4100 chip, though Fossil hasn’t confirmed the specifics. We know that Google will not offer Wear OS 3 support for the Snapdragon 4100 until mid-2022, though of course, it’s up to Fossil to carry out this software update.
We don’t know when Fossil will give the Gen 6 watch a formal reveal, but we hope that the company will clarify if and when the watch will run Wear OS 3. Still, there’s something very important to keep in mind here—Google may need to strip away some of Wear OS 3’s features to get it working on Snapdragon 4100 devices.
Until we know more about this watch, the new Wear OS, and Samsung’s expected Galaxy Watch 4 devices, you should avoid buying a smartwatch. It’s best to wait and see how things play out.
Source: /r/wearos via 9to5Google
