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.

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: 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. 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. 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.