Living with Fossil Gen 5

About two years ago I bought a China-market Fossil Gen 5 smartwatch. I already covered why I bought it and how it felt to use in an earlier post, so I won’t repeat that here. Today I’m just going to talk about my after-sales experience with this watch.

First off, less than a year in, I accidentally scraped the bezel on one side, exposing the bare metal underneath the black finish. That bugged me for a while. I even tried some nail polish type stuff to cover it up, but it was no use—just a little mental scab I couldn’t pick off.

Also, after a year or so of use, the battery life was nowhere near what it used to be. I remember in the beginning I could leave Always Display on and still get a day and a half. Later, even with Always Display off, it barely lasted a day. Pretty clear the battery health had declined.

Then the watch started acting weird. The speaker would intermittently produce distorted sound. Whenever you got a message, the watch would make a sound, but it was this harsh, crackly noise—super annoying. The thing is, it wasn’t easy to reproduce. Sometimes it happened, sometimes not. I couldn’t figure out if it was a software issue or a hardware issue.

Last point: the watch would do some strange stuff while charging. For example, after it was fully charged, it would repeatedly act like there was a bad connection—charging, cutting off, charging, cutting off… If it did that silently, fine, but the killer is that when the watch confirms it’s charging, it makes a sound effect just like a smartphone. So it’s always going “beep beep beep” in the middle of the night. Really annoying.

Because of all this, I wasn’t sure if the problems were actually with the watch itself. Maybe the sound effect was from a bad charging cable, maybe the speaker got water in it when I washed my hands? Only the battery life was definitely a real battery issue. So I tried contacting Fossil’s after-sales service to ask if I could get the battery replaced, even if I had to pay.

I found Fossil’s after-sales contact through Taobao customer service, and after getting in touch, I confirmed a few things:

• China-market Fossil watches have a two-year warranty, and my watch was still covered.
• Fossil has authorized repair points all over the country, but “smartwatches” can only be repaired in Shanghai.
• Fossil’s repair process is: prepare a screenshot of your Taobao order as proof of purchase, the warranty card that came in the box, and a piece of paper describing the watch’s problems and your contact info. Mail it all to the Shanghai repair point and wait for inspection and repair.
• Fossil’s smartwatch series cannot get a “paid battery replacement,” because they only do “replacements,” and the after-sales service in mainland China can’t repair them (that’s what the Shanghai repair station told me).
• Fossil watch repairs take about 1–2 months, and because of the pandemic it might take longer. (So I just bought a Redmi Watch 2 to tide me over.)
• You only need to mail the watch body—no strap or packaging. Remember to include the purchase proof, warranty card, and that piece of paper mentioned above. Oh right, you also have to include the charging cable.

So on a nice sunny day, I sent the watch off to Shanghai, fully prepared to go two months without a smartwatch. About five days after mailing it, I got a text message from the Shanghai repair point saying they’d received the watch and it had entered the repair process. They gave me a ticket number and told me I could check its status through their app. They also mentioned that the “smartwatch” category can’t be looked up directly in the app—you have to ask a human…

But出乎 my expectations, about 20 days later, Shanghai called me. They told me a few things:

• The watch had problems according to their inspection, and they decided to replace it with a new one.
• The charging cable I sent wasn’t the original one. I explained that my original cable had stopped working. After checking, customer service said they’d also send me a new charging cable.
• The replacement watch would be shipped the week after that call, via SF Express.

Then I got my new watch. It was indeed brand new. The paint-peeling issue that had been bothering me was naturally gone, and the battery was back to peak condition. Two birds with one stone.

I also discovered a few new things:

• Although Fossil Gen 5 hasn’t been announced as getting a Wear OS 3 upgrade, it still gets security patches and system UI updates that follow the Android 12 design language.
• Before you update to the new Google Play Store, make sure to connect and sync with your phone so you can install some China-made apps that support Wear OS (naming names here: that “small yet beautiful” piece of shit WeChat).
• After you update to the new Google Play Store, you’ll never be able to install the “small yet beautiful” Wear OS version again. The simple reason is that going forward, Wear OS will only support installing apps that exist in the store, whereas some apps used to bundle the Wear OS version directly inside their all-platform APK. WeChat was one of them.

Anyway, thanks to this after-sales experience, my watch is alive again. I forgot to ask if the warranty gets extended after the repair, but who cares. At least I won’t be replacing this watch until the Fossil Gen 7 comes out.