But they all have about a one to maybe three day battery life at best and when they died, youre left with a black screen, not a very good look, but even while they were charged, many people werent really that fond of their look. If youre going to wear a suit wearing an apple watch might look a little bit tacky and thus hybrid smart watches became a thing for those who wanted a long battery life, a classier and less techie design and a nice style. Even when the battery dies. There are hybrid smart watches with analog hands on the outside and a display underneath you seemingly get the best of both worlds. But until now you kind of didnt, you see. The input for hybrid watches has always been limited to pretty much just buttons or maybe in the case of garmin. A very, very low end touch screen that just allows simple swipe gestures, but because of this, the features were really limited too, but fossils. New gen, 6 hybrid smartwatch claims to have a solution. To that. You see fossil added a friendly little voice assistant named alexa. You might have heard of her and this infinitely increases the watches capabilities from setting timers to asking about the weather or even asking it who the 10th president was. This watch can now become a truly smart watch, hey for anyone new here. My name is mike, and this right here is the fossil gen 6 hybrid samara watch, probably one of the most exciting hybrid watches of the year and, as i said, this watch has well ill just call her alex.
So i dont set yours off at home, but it has alex on it, and so now we can actually get incredible functionality out of a hybrid smartwatch. But before i get into the interface and testing the heart rate and testing amazon alex, i want to dial it back and talk a little bit more about the physical design, so the physical design, of course, is going to be one of the main reasons people buy. This watch, it really does look pretty great and there are a couple different styles theres, a larger version and a smaller version, probably more of a masculine and feminine one, and with those youre going to get a couple different colors for each of them. This one is the larger and it is a brown version, so its kind of hard to tell on camera, but the actual watch face is brown, and so the text on the on the on the screen, its an e ink, display its kind of like a light Brown and a dark brown instead of like a black and white, i think it looks really good it blends in really well with the the bezel all the way around with the tick marks, and it comes with a leather strap right here, but its not really just A leather strap its actually a silicone, strap on the inside uh with some leather sewn on the outside. It says genuine leather and it does feel – and i think it looks pretty nice as well, but youre still getting that silicone interior, so youre gon na be all set for water and durability, and things like that now the watch itself has a nice ridged bezel.
All the way around on the right side, weve got three buttons. The middle one looks like a crown, but it doesnt actually rotate, and these three buttons well ill dive into what they do in the interface tour. But you can just single press them or press and hold them if you want to, and on the left side we have our microphone thats how you can actually communicate with amazon, alex, of course, and flipping over to the back side of the watch. You can see the straps are 24 millimeters and you can see we have a very familiar cluster in the middle, with the two concentric rings very similar to the fossil gen 6. Full smartwatch, not hybrid and weve, got a very similar heart rate sensor in here, as well as a blood oxygen sensor, ill test, those out in just a second, but lets talk a little bit more about the the screen, the display itself. So the display, as i said, is kind of like a sepia kind of like its brown and light brown. I find its actually really easy to read in bright daylight. The camera was catching a lot of glare from the glass on the outside, but i found unlike a lot of smart watches, which you can still see in bright daylight. This actually gets more visible when its brighter out right, because it is an e ink display. A lot like an old kindle or something like that now, the refresh rate on there is not the fastest ever its going to kind of flash white and then go back to what you want, but its fast enough that youre able to navigate around and do stuff And in addition to that, fossil really utilizes the analog hands so theyre, not just in the way and theyre, not just out of the way either, but rather theyre, very useful when youre navigating the interface.
So, for example, if i just press the middle button on the right its going to bring me into all the different apps and features we have here and it uses the two hands to point to whatever my selection is so. If i go up to, we can see right there. Notifications, weve, got amazon, alex itll, bring the hands around and theyre in line to point out, whatever option im actually selecting right now. So, for example, if i really want to go down to notifications, i can press the middle button now. Itll show me what notifications i have on my phone and we can just go down cycling through these. We can see, i missed a call. We can see messenger on there. We can see basically, whatever app you have for a notification, its going to tell you what it is on the top and on the bottom, its actually going to tell you what the notification is and you can cycle through these. You can clear them, or i could just go back to home right now from what i can tell the watch. Doesnt have a speaker or a beeper, but it does have a vibration haptic motor on there. So you can feel your notifications and from what i can tell you. Cant actually do any kind of quick reply, so that seems to be a little bit of a drawback there. But what you can do – and i think this is really cool going back to the watch face.
You can actually change the watch face within the fossil app on your phone, and this allows you to change it to really whatever you want. It allows you to customize where the little widgets are with the the time. Of course, you can have the heart rate. You can have your blood oxygen, the date whatever you want, theres a lot of options or you can just have a photo as the background which i was very very impressed by how good this actually looked now, its not perfect, of course, its an e ink display, Pretty low resolution, but i was still really impressed with how this looks and the best thing is. This requires essentially no energy. So once you have, the watch face set its not going to draw a lot of power, not like an always on display for a typical smartwatch, and that was a huge positive for this. But getting back to the interface. If we press the middle button, you can press the top and bottom button to cycle through this, and so, if i go up, you see notifications, we have amazon alex, we have music control. So if i press the middle button to select that it shows me what songs playing right now, i can actually pause it or i can continue playing it with the top button and then the bottom button brings me into another option right here where i can either Go to volume up or volume down, and i can press and hold the top or bottom to skip forward or back a song, so really all the music controls.
You would really need now if we press the middle button. That brings us back if we press it again. It brings us home and im going to press it one more time to go back into those apps. Now in those apps, we can go through them and youll see. We also find my phone. We have weather and you actually can go all the way around full circle here. But if you go to find my phone itll just obviously ring your phone. If we go to weather, you can open that up and its going to load that for a second, you could also ask amazon alex for the weather, but the weather app is a little bit more detailed in my opinion, and it can show you things like the Temperature in todays, forecast and stuff like that. Additionally, if we go down to the bottom, we have settings. We also have your your wellness, which has three options in here. You can measure your heart rate. You can measure your blood oxygen or you can see a snapshot of today, which kind of breaks down like how much you slept in and how many steps you took all the basics of what youd really think to see in something like this going down. We can actually start a workout. There are quite a few different workouts you can choose from here far more than i would really need for a hybrid watch like this. Now it doesnt have gps, but you can use your phones, gps, to track your workouts and, of course this has heart rate and a pedometer on there.
So you can track your steps as well, but for some pretty basic workouts. If its on your lunch hour, youre going for a jog or a bike ride or a walk, this is absolutely perfect. We also have a stopwatch and a timer, but you can actually set those with amazon alex. So if i go back to home, of course, the bottom button right now you can customize and to do whatever you want. So if i press it once itll go and show me notifications, but the top button i have set for amazon alex. So i could just say, set a 10 minute timer with fossil and there it says fossil timer 10 minutes starting now, and it brings me over to the timer app. So you can use the voice assistant to navigate within this watch, including starting workouts, starting timers things. Like that im going to pause this timer, so it doesnt go off in 10 minutes and thats a big positive. I really like that functionality, but you also have the ability to use amazon alex for a wide variant range of other things as well. So not just controlling this watch but, for example, what is the square root of pi and shell tell us that the square root of pi is 1.77245′ right. You probably already knew that, of course, but you know its nice that she does that as well, and so as long as your phones around youre getting a lot of functionality, you can ask about the weather in different countries.
Time zones, whatever all the usual amazon alex stuff, but there are a few limitations things where amazon would normally kick into, like a podcast, for example, can get a little bit weird. So if you ask her what the news is, it just says: this is the news. So i i dont, really i dont know thats a small drawback and another cool feature. If, for example, the watch hand is covering some information, you want to see like your heart rate, you can flick your wrist twice like that itll cycle, the hands all the way around and while theyre moving. Of course it opens up and you can see what the information was and, of course, if you dive into settings, you can change a couple things, including enabling a do not disturb mode. But a lot of the reason people like to buy smart watches or hybrid smart watches is to keep tabs on their health, and you can only do this if its actually accurate, so lets get into an accuracy test for the heart rate sensor on here i went For run with this and lets see what the results actually looked like so to test out the accuracy i went for run, but unfortunately, the fossil app doesnt make it easy to see the analytics from your workout. So the best we can do right now is look at the average heart rate of 163 beats per minute and the max of 181.. Now, if we go over to the polar h10 heart rate, strap, we can see 165 and 183 so about two beats per minute.
Higher, which overall, is pretty consistent for a fitness tracker. However, without an actual graph, we cant be sure how accurate this actually is. The one drawback i faced with this watch is the same drawback ive faced with previous fossil hybrid watches, and that is theyre, so good at saving energy that sometimes the connectivity is not the best. And so, if i leave my phone behind and i come back, it doesnt always reconnect to my phone right away, and sometimes you have to open the fossil app and kind of refresh things. But once you open the app its pretty easy to get connected again now, when i review watches, i dont always show you a lot about the app, but i wanted to show you this one, so the fossil app, if you click on wellness or tap on wellness, It shows you, you know some basic stuff you can dive into that, but i think is really cool is if you actually tap on the watch, you can really customize it. So you see all these different designs, the custom ones that actually allow you to have an image on there like, for example, just me and my groomsmen for my wedding. You can have that and it looks surprisingly good or you can customize little icons. I can add a cactus on there. For example, i can have different designs if its light or if its dark, you really do – have a lot of options.
So thats my take on the fossil gen 6 hybrid smartwatch, ive, always loved hybrid watches, and this one is no exception. I love the long battery life at two weeks. I love the design of this. It is a little bit on the heavy side. I wish it was slightly smaller ill say that, but i love the aesthetic and the design overall of this watch and, of course, adding amazon alex on there. In my opinion, really brings you a lot of extra functionality to do a lot more, that you cant normally do on a hybrid smartwatch. So leave a comment below and let me know what you think about this watch.U7ZqikymXho
