The last Fossil watch I reviewed the Explorist HR was a mixed bag for me, while it looked great it was put down by an aged processor and poor battery life, have things changed with the Fossil Sports Watch now? After all, things look little brighter with the latest Wear OS and the new Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 3100 chipset on this watch. So let’s dive deep into this Fossil Sports watch review and unravel the facts.
Design: Balancing the Sporty and Stylish Look
It’s a sports Smartwatch but yet it has to be stylish in parts at least to command the price. It has to be lightweight, comfortable, durable as well as stylish. It’s a tricky job. Fossil has opted for a mix of metal and silicone for the balancing act. The main watch body is made of aluminium and the strap of the watch is silicone which makes it lighter as well as good for workouts since it doesn’t absorb sweat. The Fossil Sport comes in both 41mm and 43mm to suit wrists of different sizes. The 41mm variant weighs only 38 grams. The strap can be replaced with any 18/ 22mm straps depending on the size you opted for, so that provides the variety in case you want.
On the side of the Fossil Sport, there is a rotating dial in the centre flanked by two buttons above and below. The bottom button is tied to Google Fit and the top can be customizable to run one of Fossil’s own app say like you can use it launch stopwatch. Pressing once the rotating crown takes you to the app menu list. You can rotate the crown to scroll through the list and access the apps.
Turning back, you will find the optical heart rate monitor.
Display of Fossil Sports Smartwatch:
You get a 1.19-inch or 1.29-inch OLED screen depending on which size of Fossil Sport you choose. Both have 390 x 390 resolution, so needless to say the larger screen has a marginally lower pixel density which frankly makes not much difference even if you look at both. The display is bright, something I really liked about in this watch. The colours are vivid. It also has an ambient light sensor so the watch can automatically adjust the brightness depending on the environment. I found the display to be good even outdoors offering good readability. The touch response is fairly well for a watch.
You can also choose a watch face of your liking or one for your mood of the day.
Performance & Wear OS
The Fossil Watch boasts of the latest Qualcomm Wear 3100 chip and runs on the latest Wear OS. Its paired with 12MB of RAM and 4GB of storage. On paper, they sound great. The new chip is also supposed to be energy efficient. Before we dive into the last part, let’s see what the watch offers in terms of features and performance. Foremost it’s a sports watch, so let’s begin with the fitness features. It comes with built-in GPS, an altimeter and a Heart rate monitor. Google Fit offers you many workout training from basics like walking, running, cycling, strength training and challenges to push your fitness to almost close to 80 other activities as varied as aerobics, badminton to Zumba. So you get a large pool of activities to choose from. On the casual apps side, you have apps from Play Store tailored for Wear OS. While all this sounds great, the watch still feels a bit sluggish at times when opening or using certain apps. I had a situation when my watch simply froze on a notification panel. Even the keys won’t work and I have to simply wait till the watch battery is worn out and upon charging and booting again, it went back to normal. That was quite irritating. It was just once though in my fortnight of use. It won’t be fair to blame Fossil for the sluggishness, the entire Wear OS and the chip has more to contribute for the ecosystem for faster, cleaner approach. Step tracking is accurate maybe a 5% off in stats, which can be forgiven. Even the heart rate monitor seems to be doing well in terms of accuracy.
You can even check emails and choose to reply right from the watch if you choose to. While it might not be the best typing experience you can manage at certain situations. You can add even some emojis.
The battery life of Fossil Sport Smartwatch
This is the part that got me interested when I started using the watch after all the Snapdragon Wear 3100 processor is supposed to be energy efficient and deliver better battery life. If there is one reason I don’t use many of the good looking Smartwatches in the market, it’s due to the poor battery life. I am not a person who is ready to charge a watch every single day. If you share the same concern, the Fossil Sport would disappoint you the same way it did me. It would not last a full day. After 15-16 hours the battery goes down to 22-25%. If you opt-out of the phone notifications it would fare a little better. The battery saving mode gets activated once the 15 per cent mark reaches and you could only check the time from then. If you turn on the always-on display and continuous heart rate monitor, expect still less battery life. So I didn’t see any improvement with the latest 3100 chip at least on this phone with Wear OS.
