Fossil executives Greg McKelvey and Steve Prokup said in an interview with CNET that the company’s existing Wear OS watches won’t get upgraded to the new combined Wear software platform from Samsung and Google. Instead, Fossil is planning a premium watch that Prokup said would have “pretty major hardware upgrades,” and existing watches will probably be discounted as budget options.
According to CNET, Fossil’s Gen 6 watch should have features similar to upcoming watches from Google and Samsung, with faster performance, longer battery life, new chips, and LTE cellular options. “All of the software benefits that Google’s talking about and launching with the unified platform is something we’ll be building into that as well,” McKelvey said.
Google and Samsung announced last month at Google I/O that they would combine Wear OS and Samsung’s Tizen into a new platform, creating one central smartwatch OS for Android.
The Fossil execs didn’t give much insight into what buttons or crowns the company may use in its next Wear OS watch. ”I think you’re still going to see a variety of offerings across even our products, as well as manufacturers,” Prokup said in the interview, “not so much that you’re going to have a watch that ends up having four, five, six dedicated buttons or no buttons.”
