Fossil won’t be upgrading its existing Wear OS watches to Google’s new Wear platform
At Google I/O 2021, Google made a surprising announcement in which they revealed that they would be working with Samsung on a new Wear platform. This would essentially take features from Wear OS and Tizen and merge them together for a new wearable platform, which honestly sounds rather exciting.
This does beg the question of existing Wear OS devices – will they be upgraded to the new Wear platform? As far as Fossil is concerned, they won’t be doing that for their smartwatches.
In an interview with CNET, Fossil executives Greg McKelvey and Steve Prokup said that the company’s existing Wear OS smartwatches will not be upgraded to the new Wear platform. Instead, Fossil will be launching a new premium smartwatch with upgraded hardware that will be able to take advantage of the new operating system.
According to McKelvey, Fossil’s Gen 6 smartwatches will have similar features to the watches from Google and Samsung, such as improved performance, better battery life, and so on. It is a pity that existing Wear OS devices will not get the upgrade, although we have to wonder if it might be hardware compatibility issues or if Fossil is simply hoping that users will just buy the new model.
There is no word from other Wear OS device makers as to whether or not they plan to upgrade their devices or if we can expect to see a new wave of Wear devices.
Source: CNET