A Few Days with Fossil Gen 5

I’m a Wear OS watch user, the stock Wear OS kind. The watch I’ve been using is still the LG Watch Sports, and I’ve had it for over two years now — I even replaced the battery. Its battery life is honestly fine, but I’m still not happy with it, for three reasons:

1. You can’t swap the strap. I’ve been stuck with the default rubber one, which feels pretty dumb. Once it cracks there’s no fixing it — you can only go buy knockoff parts.
2. Nobody’s in charge of system updates. Google says LG handles it, LG says Google handles it, and the two of them just kick it back and forth. By 2020 that legendary Wear OS H still hadn’t shown up.
3. It’s way too bulky, and the SoC isn’t new either, so it stutters sometimes.

So I couldn’t take it anymore and wanted to switch. Right around then Xiaomi announced its watch — big battery, decent RAM, plenty of features — and I got tempted.

But the Xiaomi Watch isn’t official Wear OS. There’s all sorts of evidence that you can treat it as Wear OS if you just don’t install Xiaomi’s app, but it seems Xiaomi is also working hard to kill Wear OS and reskin it into its own MIUI.

Didn’t Google say it would strictly control Wear OS and not allow skinned versions!

If you want a watch with the original Wear OS, generally you can only buy overseas — that’s how it was with the old Moto 360, and that’s what I planned this time too. But soon I noticed that Fossil, which is hot overseas right now, has a Chinese-region version here, with a two-year warranty.

And the most important part:

If you activate a Chinese-region Fossil watch with the international Google Wear OS, you get the international system.

I asked Tmall customer service and got confirmation: when the watch activates, it asks whether you want to use Google or “Mobvoi,” and if you pick the former, it’s the international version.

So I bought it. It arrived quickly too — I ordered on Double 12 and it came by SF Express, plus there was a Tmall discount at the time. I activated it right out of the box, and sure enough it was the genuine international Wear OS. Pretty honorable of them, honestly.

Foreigners call the Fossil Gen 5 “the Wear OS device most worth buying this year,” and after getting it I’d say that’s no exaggeration. The build and feel are both good, it looks nice, and the new SoC is a bit more powerful (though it doesn’t feel dramatically faster). It also has the more power-efficient Wear OS H version, and with the AMOLED screen and always-on display enabled, I still have 40% left after a day — more than enough.

Of course, this watch is different from the old LG: no more wireless charging. Instead it uses two “conductive rings” on the back for contact charging, and Taobao has all kinds of modded contact charging docks that work about the same.

You can put a screen protector on the watch, and there are plenty of options online. But the bezel is stainless steel, and not long after I got it I bumped it and chipped off a piece of the finish. I tried touching it up with a paint pen but it wouldn’t stick. No idea what the best way to fix that is.

Even though you can enable international Wear OS, there are still some preinstalled apps built in — Fossil’s own watch face store, Spotify, that sort of thing — all of which can be uninstalled through the Google Play Store. That’s something to watch out for compared to pure Wear OS.

All in all, I’m pretty satisfied with this watch swap. The watch itself is good quality, you can change the strap, performance is acceptable, and it’s a Chinese-region unit with a warranty, yet it also has the international system.

And most importantly: if you want a Chinese-region watch with international Wear OS and you don’t want to mess with flashing ROMs, Fossil might be your only option.

One last sigh — looking at those screenshots from the first time I put on the Moto 360, it really feels like times have changed.