Diesel On Fadelite smartwatch hands-on: bold and beautiful

At CES this week, Diesel unveiled yet another Wear OS smartwatch, the new Diesel On Fadelite. Like the On Axiel which was unveiled as a few months back at IFA, the On Fadelite is large and bold, but the company has dramatically changed the design, giving the new watch a much more playful look with bright colors and even a transparent option using nylon for the body and straps. While that signature Diesel look is still there, it’s much more playful and is better suited as a unisex watch than the previous version.

The internal components of the smartwatch are based on the Fossil gen 5 platform with a Qualcomm snapdragon 3100 SoC, 512MB of RAM and 4GB of storage for your music. Now, that’s about half of what we’ve seen from some competing devices, but what makes it just a bit disappointing is the limitation of the specs considering the watch’s $279 price point. That being said, Diesel smartwatches always sell for a premium and the On Fadelite is significantly cheaper than the On Axel from last year.

The lightweight Nylon used for the body of the watch takes a bit to get used to when you put it on for the first time, but I’m sure it will be extremely comfortable for those who wear smartwatches every waking moment of the day. Details regarding the size of the battery were not shared, but we were assured that battery life will be comparable to other Fossil Gen 5 smartwatches which typically get a day and a half to two days o a single charge.

Of course, the main attraction here is the Diesel brand and the unique design and color options. Diesel’s translucent red being positioned as the hero color to promote the new watch will definitely get a lot of attention, but we’re honestly bigger fans of the clear option. Designs like this are actually quite exciting for this category since it takes quite some time for manufacturers to deliver full-featured smartwatches which will appeal more to watch enthusiasts rather than the tech crowd.

We’ll hopefully be taking a closer look at the Diesel On Fadelite in March when it goes on sale across the globe.