. It was really our top pick for android watches. For the past two years, and that gives the fossil gen 6 some pretty big shoes to fill, but the gen 6 is boasting major improvements with a new processor, a big update coming soon and some more improvements to the health sensing as well. But there is just one thing: holding this back from being pretty much the perfect android smartwatch one thing thats holding it back and were going to talk about that throughout this video. Of course, we will also put this watch to the test and show you the microphone quality, the speaker quality, the accuracy of the heart rate and the gps and tell you everything else. You need to know before considering buying the fossil gen 6. Music, so ive been wearing the smartwatch for the past week and there are some things that i really liked about it, but also a couple things that i didnt like quite as much but im getting ahead Of myself before we talk about the design or the accuracy, i want to talk a little bit more about a statement i made in the beginning of this video, and that is that pretty much every other smartwatch is on death row. What did i really mean by that? Well, as i mentioned before, on this channel theres, a big update coming and essentially, if you look at smart, watches right now, if you are going to make a smartwatch app and you wanted to do it for android users, you had to decide between fitbit or samsung Or wear os or garmin, or all these different operating systems meant that people would make an app for one or the other and there wasnt a uniform platform and, alternatively, they would say well, i could just make an apple watch app and it works for all apple Watches, which is most apple users out there so thats why apple watches generally had more and a better app selection, and this is finally changing with the new unified platform, which is essentially a partnership between fitbit and google and samsung.
Agreeing that theyre all going to use. One operating system, meaning that youre going to get better apps and this new operating system is wear os 3. warehouse 3 is rolling out to some very, very select devices. This is one of them, but other than this device. We have two devices from ticwatch and we have the samsung galaxy watch 4. thats it no other devices out. There are getting wareos 3 except anything new being created in the future. So if you have an android and you dont want to get left behind without updates, you really want to be looking at one of these three devices. So with that being said, thats why the fossil gen 6 is such a significant device, its really the first honestly, i think its the best looking out of this group. But, of course i will compare this to the other two a little bit in this video, but in a full in depth, video in the future. So if you want to see that definitely go down and click that subscribe button, so you dont miss it. When that video comes out so lets look a little closer at this design. You can see on the front. We have a 1.3 inch amoled display. It gets really bright, it automatically dims in dimmer environments, its easy to read, and it has an always on display option as well. So, overall, i think the front looks pretty nice. We do have a black bezel around there.
I dont recommend using a bright orange watch face like you see here. If you have a black watch face, it really hides it a lot better and you dont notice that much at all, but on the outside youll see the case itself. This is the 44 millimeter option and i think it looks fantastic. This is the stainless steel version, so you can see it has that that metal bracelet, but, of course you might be saying i dont want to run with the metal bracelet or maybe you want to change it every now and then something i think fossil does really Well is make their designs versatile. So if you want this to look a little more formal, you can put the metal bracelet on there or a leather strap, and if you want to go work out, you can very easily swap these out with a very common 22 millimeter strap to put on a Silicone band, or or whatever else you want, so that youre good for working out for all different situations and, looking at the outside a little closer, you see that we have a kind of a ridged bezel on the outside its not a rotating bezel. It looks like one but its not. Instead, you do have a rotating crown on the right. So a three button configuration on the right. You can customize the top and bottom buttons and ill talk more about that later in the video. But the middle button is your back button, your home button, your app drawer, and it is a rotating crown as well, and you can see that now we have a little crown guard on either side, so youre not going to worry about hitting that button by accident.
If youre trying to reach for one of the others so and then, if you flip it over the back, you can see we have some differences here as well, one of them being the charging is not the concentric rings. Instead, the rings are split into kind of concentric seas, on either side, because you do have double charging here, essentially giving you a much faster charging than the previous fossil gen 5. and in the middle we have our array of health sensors, which now include spo2 tracking, Which should give you more in depth, sleep tracking and then on the crown guard on the right. I think this is cool its really sneaky, i believe, thats the microphone they actually put right there and on the left side we have our speaker so well get into a speaker test in a second to see how loud this is b could use that for phone Calls for voice assistant for all types of things like that, of course, it also has haptic feedback, and it is water resistant up to three atmospheres, so swimming or washing your hands or showering should not be a problem at all for this device. Okay, so with that being said, lets actually get into that speaker test now. So for a quick test of the speed and the speaker lets check out, google assistant tell me a joke: heres, a joke for halloween whats, an optimistic vampires favorite drink be positive. So this is a sample recording with the fossil gen 6 to see how the audio sounds from the onboard microphone.
There is one microphone right next to the crown, and so, if i was on a phone call, it would probably sound something like this so thats. A summary of the physical design. Personally, i think, thats the main reason people will be buying this device, because its a beautiful looking watch has a fantastic physical design. It feels premium, but its not too bulky. I think its overall just a really well designed smart watch, but lets talk a little bit more about the health tracking side because, of course, smart watches are becoming more and more meant for health. Tracking people want ecgs and heart rate and things of that nature, and so right off the bat. I want to say that, while this does have plenty of health, tracking accessories or capabilities on here, it doesnt its, not necessarily the main focus of this. So we dont have ecg, we dont have really advanced stress tracking. We do have sleep tracking, we do have blood oxygen, of course, pedometer gps, heart rate and of course you can track all types of different workouts on here, but keep in mind thats, not the main focus of this device, not like garmin, not like polar, not like. Even samsung, this ones really meant to be an accessory like a peripheral device for your phone. So with that being said, lets look at the accuracy tracking anyway, i took this on several different runs. Obviously i swapped out the band for a silicon one and personally i really liked it on the runs.
It was really easy to see the information very digestible, and you have plenty of options as well between the google fit app which im not the biggest fan of theres. Also, the native one that fossil kind of gives you and you can get like strava and all types of different apps to track that nike runs another one. But looking at this right here, the accuracy of the gps and the heart rate were not impressive. Just to say it simply, if you look at the heart rate tracking, it is, it did an okay job, but but really where this fell apart. In my opinion, that makes it not an ideal. Fitness tracker was the gps, so i ran without my phone nearby, so it was using its onboard gps and it said it was gps connected right in the beginning. It said it had gps signal, it knew where it was, but when i started running it seemed to have not tracked the beginning of the workout and instead, at the end of the five mile run, the watch was short by about half a mile. Now, google fit is a nightmare of an app, so i couldnt export a good map to show you guys, but i can tell you this at the 12 minute mark. I knew that i ran approximately one and a half miles. However, looking at the watch, it registered exactly one mile, so you can estimate that most of the error is in the beginning of this workout.
My best guess is that the first half mile was completely untracked, even though the watch told me in the very beginning that it had an established gps connection. I know that, like i said, thats, not necessarily the main focus of buyers, in my opinion, for the fossil gen 6.. I suspect most people will be buying this because of the interface and the aesthetics and just as a a really nice accessory as a signed, peripheral device for your phone, and so talking a little bit more about the interface it is subject to change were going to Be seeing wear os 3 in the next, hopefully in the next couple months, maybe by april or may of 2022, but for now wear os2 is still a pretty solid interface. So if you press the top button, itll open up whatever app you want right now. I have it set to google fit. You can also tap and hold the center of the watch face and change between any watch faces. You want the right button is going to be your app drawer and you can scroll through this as well, and if you press and hold the right button, itll also open google assistant, as you can see right here, if you swipe from the left, you get kind Of a little my day, thing, google just really the assistant honestly, if you swipe over from the right, you can go through some of your your tiles as theyre calling them, and these are just different widgets for your sleep tracking for amazon alex and things of that Nature so i began from the bottom.
You have your notifications, which are you can interact with the notifications and reply and swiping down from the top. You get some quick settings. Of course you can scroll for that as well, and if you press the bottom button on the right again thats another app, you can open whatever app you. You have programmed right now on the bottom. I have spotify. Now i mentioned more than a few times that the battery controls are a highlight of this device. So if we just swipe down from the top, you can see the little battery icon on the right there and when you tap on that, you have a couple options. Now, at first it seems like theres, not much theres a daily mode, an extended mode and a custom mode, but with each one of these you can actually fully customize them to exactly what you want. So if we go to extended, for example, you can just turn it on very easily or you can go into this and edit the settings and make sure you have exactly what you want now its going to tell you that for extended mode, its going to turn Off a lot of stuff is really going to disable things, but whats interesting is, if you go back to just the daily mode, even with this one, you can customize exactly what you want so daily mode. You can turn on like tap to wake lift to wake bluetooth, nfc all these things on or off, to really maximize the battery life available.
So now i want to deviate a little bit from the subjective approach and talk about my opinions and my experience with the device, and so the first thing i noticed is that i really like the design. I think fossil did a great job with the battery controls and the aesthetics and everything like that with the device. But it does have that hiccup of of not having wear os 3, yet so its hard for me to sit here and recommend this as a definite great buy, because i dont know for sure when wear os 3 is coming, and i dont know exactly what its Going to be like so in the current landscape, i think this is a fantastic device, but there are some kind of interesting things that again make it a little bit more like a fossil, gen, five and a half maybe or 5.6 5.7. I dont know its not quite at what the fossil gen 6 is really meant to be when a warehouse 3 rolls out and so lets talk about some of the little differences right there. One of them is that, unlike the fossil gen 5, when it was released, we now have offline spotify. I think thats a fantastic feature to have when youre running and doing things like that. On top of that, although the battery is a very similar size, we now have a better processor on here, which is giving us better battery life in general.
So last friday i woke up. The battery was at 100. I went for a run around noon and it was a five mile run. I had gps on. I had my bluetooth earbuds connected to this listening to offline spotify and at the end of the run, i still had plenty of battery left to get me through the rest of the day and at the end of the day, i think i ended at about 20 Ish percent, so the battery life on here is easily getting through an entire day of regardless of how much you work out unless you do like a five hour workout. But i think people who are not pushing quite as much with gps and with bluetooth, earbuds youre. More likely to see a solid two day battery life, if not even more than that, depending on how you optimized battery within those battery controls some other interesting things, this technically still works with an iphone, so i was able to set it up with my iphone. I then disconnected and set it up with a pixel, but i just thought it was interesting that at least for now with wear os 2.0, you can still set it up with an iphone. Unfortunately, this still has eight gigabytes of storage. I think thats not really enough for a device that now has offline spotify, snapdragon 4100 does a great job and bluetooth 5.0 gives you a little extra range. So when your phones in the other room and youre walking around your house, you still are able to stay connected to your device and, i think thats, a solid upgrade as well.
So, overall, the fossil gen 6 ill say is a fantastic smartwatch with a little asterisk and the asterisk is essentially, it needs an update, its going to get an update, but the updates just not here yet and so looking at the device. It has fantastic hardware. I think fossil did really what fossil does best and they made a great looking smartwatch with a great battery life on here great pretty much everything they could do, but its lacking an update, really two updates for that matter. One of them is that the accuracy of the gps was not where i thought it needed to be, and i think again an update could improve that. And the second thing is that it doesnt ship with warehouse 3.0 which, if this doesnt sell well, i think thats going to be the main reason. Theyre going to be a victim of a bad launch launching before warehouse 3 comes out. But regardless im happy to see another watch in the landscape in that lineup of now, three or four devices that are going to get the wear os 3 update. So leave a comment below.eHhGmkVLLXg
