Fossil Sport is the best smartwatch with Wear OS. Don t buy it

I spent over a month with the best Wear OS watch on my wrist. Fossil Sport impresses with its possibilities, it costs reasonable money, but I'm not sure if I can recommend it to anyone.

I tested every generation of smartwatches with the operating system from Google, from the first Android Wear to the latest Wear OS generation, and I can say without a doubt that I didn't have better than Fossil Sport on my wrist. Earlier, for several months I wore a twin Fossil Q Explorist , who also made a very good impression on me.

Even compared to the previous generation of smart watches, which was tragically slow, underdeveloped and poor in functions, Fossil Sport and Q Explorist is a powerful leap forward, and the upcoming - the fifth - generation of Fossil watches announces that it will only be better.

And maybe just ... it's better to wait for this fifth generation, and treat the fourth as a foretaste of what a smart watch with a Google system can be. Because what it is today ... well. Let's say competition has nothing to fear.

At first glance, Fossil Sport does a lot of good things

And even very well. Let's start with the quality of workmanship.

Unlike the quite heavy and crude Q Explorista, Fossil Sport is light, slim and handy - as befits a sport watch. Of course, it is also resistant to elements and immersion up to 5 ATM.

I was particularly enchanted by the silicone strap, which is soft, flexible and does not burn your hand, even in full sun or during intense training. If you're looking for something more elegant or just want to replace the strap with a different color: no problem. Fossil Sport is compatible with any 22 mm wide strap.

We operate the smartwatch with three buttons, to which I will come back again, but it's enough to say that their location, click-through and usability are at a very high level - regardless of whether we wear the watch on the left or on the right wrist.

I will also mention that I really like the size of Fossil Sport - 43 mm in diameter is a perfect compromise so that the watch fits on both average-size men's and women's wrists. It's neither too big nor too small. Just right.

However, while at first glance it is difficult to attach to a belt or aluminum-nylon casing, unfortunately they begin to reveal signs of wear quite quickly. After a few weeks, the bottom of the strap began to wear off, and the edges of the case are already scratched, although I swear - I tried to handle the watch as gently as possible, I did not take it to the beach or the forest, and in general I tried to keep it in perfect condition until I wrote this text. Failed to.

At first glance, the Fossil Sport display is also very successful. This is the same panel as in Fossil Q Explorist - IPS with beautiful colors, with sufficiently high brightness to comfortably use it in full sun.

The trouble is that ... the panel lights up only when the watch is active. Most of the time it is either dim or dim (if you enable always-on mode). As a result, if you want to read the time or check anything on your watch, you must move it quite rapidly or touch a button or screen. It is not handy, but it is probably one common feature of all smartwatches - the worst thing is just giving the time, regardless of external conditions.

However, you can't fault the sensitivity and quality of the touch panel itself, because it is exemplary. The vibration motor is similarly exemplary; maybe this is not the level of the Apple Watch and its subtle knock on the wrist, but close. Anyway - I never missed a notification and I never felt uncomfortable when the watch vibrated. A huge plus here.

Fossil Sport is a smartwatch with huge possibilities

As befits a Wear OS watch, Fossil Sport can do a lot.

It's a watch, it's obvious. You can change the dials from the smartwatch or from the application, it's also obvious. You can pay with Google Pay and it works great. You can receive notifications, reply to them, control your media and do everything we can find the appropriate application in the Play Store.

As Fossil Sport works on the basis of Wear OS in the latest installment, we also have a Google Assistant panel on the leftmost desktop, from where we can call AI from Google. Unfortunately, while Fossil Sport has a built-in microphone, so there is no built-in speaker, so answers to queries will appear in text form or we will be sent back to the smartphone. For the same reason, we cannot make phone calls through Fossil.

Fossil Sport also allows you to store offline music (also from Spotify) and offers a built-in GPS, which will be useful especially during all kinds of activities, if you want to leave the phone at home.

And since we're talking about activity ...

How much sport is there in Fossil Sport?

I will answer: surprisingly much. And you do not need to install external applications for this, because Google Fit has evolved into a surprisingly competent training companion in recent years.

Of course, you won't find a ton of parameters here as in Garmin ; we will not find out what our VO2 max or lactate threshold is, and the watch will not write us training sessions or advise you on rest - we must reach for such goodies in the direction of one of the Forerunners or Fenixes.

Fossil Sport, however, performs surprisingly well in more accessible activity measurement: it can easily measure a straight run, fast walking or cycling. He is also intelligent enough not to count as keyboard typing steps or chopping vegetables; the pedometer reading usually matches the number of steps actually taken.

I also checked the accuracy of GPS when connected to the phone and only the watch, and I can confirm that the readings are almost fully consistent with reality - although not as accurate as, for example, with the Garmin Fenix ​​5 Plus.

The place where Fossil Sport with Google Fit on board really shines on the background of other smart-watches is the gym.

There, Garmina sports watches can do almost nothing. Meanwhile, much cheaper and seemingly simpler Fossil is a great training companion.

The watch is great at recognizing individual activities. Straight from the box, he recognizes basic exercises such as pull-ups, push-ups, squeezing, Russian turn, etc., but he also learns very quickly. For example, if you train calisthenically or do other exercises that Google Fit did not anticipate, we can add them to the set manually. Over time, the watch will recognize these "strange" exercises by itself, counting the number of repetitions with alarming accuracy.

The only thing I really lacked when it comes to strength training with Google Fit is some way to add drop-sets (for the watch to correctly save the drop-set, you need to make a minimum 20-second break between drops, and what's the point then?) . It could also be useful to plan your training in advance so that you do not have to spend time manually adding activities, but follow the previously planned track.

And to tell the truth, if it wasn't for the sporting properties of Fossil Sport, I would have put it in a drawer a long time ago and forgot about it.

Fossil Sport has problems that I can't recommend it for.

For journalistic honesty - the watch I am currently using is the second copy that the company sent me for testing.

The first after a few weeks hung and ... died. Nothing helped. I would consider this deadness and pure accident if it wasn't for the fact that I lost Fossil Q Explorist just a few weeks earlier in a similar way. It also hung on amen.

And unfortunately, I have the impression that sooner or later (rather the first) a similar fate will also befall Fossil Sport, which I now have on my wrist. And even if not, despite all the great features of this watch, communing with it every day is comedy trags.

Watches with Android Wear have had performance issues since its inception. Unfortunately, even the use of the Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 3100 platform and 1 GB of RAM was not enough to meet Wear OS's demand for computing power.

As a result, the watch works sluggishly, like an Android smartphone from 2010. The animations are crispy, the watch needs a few seconds to run the simplest application. Let's do it - if we start the stopwatch and in the meantime someone sends us a notification, there is a very good chance that the watch will cut and either close the stopwatch running in the background or mistake its reading.

After a few weeks with this particular copy of Fossil Sport, I have to restart it at least every other day to enjoy the relative fluidity of the interface for at least these few moments. Then the watch slows down again to an unusable level.

Of course, he also hangs completely in the least expected moment. E.g. in the gym, just before training. I press "start training" and ... nothing. I train with the training start button suspended. Awfully demotivating.

Working time is the biggest problem of Fossil Sport.

The manufacturer declares "all day", which in itself is a meager value, especially against the backdrop of the Samsung Galaxy Watch, which can work away from the charger for up to several days.

In practice, Fossil Sport actually lasts all day ... sometimes. Strangely, this does not depend only on the use of GPS, training days and always-on display.

There were days when Fossil Sport, despite always-on display turned on, lasted all day without much problem.

On other days, the battery was enough for the whole day, even when I was following Google Fit training for two hours.

On other days, however, the watch was able to discharge at 17:00, although always-on display was off, the day was not intense and I did not measure any activity.

It was the worst in the heat - on the warmest days Fossil Sport needed to discharge himself with two not very long walks with the dog and a few lazy hours in front of the desk. At 15:00 the watch called for electricity.

I don't know what the reason is, but in my eyes it disqualifies Fossil Sport. You can get over one day of work time - especially since the watch charges fully in just over an hour. However, you cannot get over the complete unpredictability of this time of work, which is not known about which watch will run out of energy. And believe me: few things make a person feel stupid, how to answer the question "I'm sorry, what time?" With the words "just a moment, my watch hung, I'll check on the phone". Don't ask how I know.

Fossil Sport is a watch with huge potential, destroyed by a number of shortcomings.

I really regret that I can't write "buy". Fossil Sport has great opportunities, works great as a fitness companion for the average Kowalski and does not cost a fortune - we can buy it for less than PLN 1000, which is an opportunity against the background of Apple Watch, Galaxy Watch or Fenix ​​5.

Except that even a relatively low price does not overshadow the shortcomings that may cause the use of this watch to quickly change from pleasure to a technological nightmare.

I hope that the fifth generation of Fossil watches somehow remedies these ills, because they are devices with huge potential, almost perfectly connecting together the world of smartwatches and fitness watches.

But what after a great idea and great possibilities, when their action leaves so much to be desired?

Fossil Sport is the best smartwatch with Wear OS. Don't buy it