Smartwatches don’t have to look like the Apple Watch, with smooth, rounded edges and few to no physical controls. Fossil’s Gen 6 watch packs loads of communication, entertainment, and fitness functionality into an attractive round case with a physical crown, two buttons, and a classically nubbled bezel. While the watch comes in a number of designs, we tested the $329 model made in conjunction with Razer, which looks and feels just as stylish as Fossil’s other offerings, but gives it an edge for certain PC gaming fans with a Razer-green strap and a few exclusive watch faces. It’s also limited to 1,337 units, for even more weird gamer cred. The watch is powered by Wear OS, which is both a strength and weakness: Google’s smartwatch platform is powerful, but uneven and often awkward to use. Ultimately, Samsung’s One UI tweaks to the Wear OS-based Galaxy Watch4 make it a stronger choice for Android users, while the Apple Watch Series 7 remains our top pick overall.
Stylish, Whether You Like Razer or Not
A round screen, metal body, ridged bezel, and prominent mechanical controls make the Gen 6 look and feel as solid and stylish as any of Fossil’s standard watches. The Razer model we tested is black, but other versions are available in gunmetal, rose gold, or stainless steel from $299 to $319. The watch is also available in 42mm and 44mm sizes, with rose gold only in 42mm and black only in 44mm. The smaller size features a slightly more elaborate rose gold bezel for all models.
Two textured silicone wristbands, one black and one bright green, come with the Razer watch. Dozen of other straps in different colors and materials are sold separately for $29 to $49. After using the black silicone band for a while, I switched to the bright green one and found it grew on me. It’s bright and unconventional, and works well with the black case. Of course, this shade of green will be familiar to any Razer fan, and is really one of the only things that makes this watch different from the standard models.
The metal watch is rated for 3ATM, so you can swim with it, at least in theory. It doesn’t have a formal IP rating, so even if Fossil says you can get it wet, the watch isn’t officially waterproof. The Samsung Galaxy Watch4 is more rugged at 5ATM with a IP68 dustproof/waterproof rating, as well as MIL-STD-810G compliance ensuring it can handle hard drops and extreme pressures and temperatures.
Screen and Controls
The watch face is a 1.28-inch circular AMOLED screen with a resolution of 416 by 416 pixels. It’s bright, colorful, and crisp, comparable with the Apple Watch Series 7 and Samsung Galaxy Watch4. The round design accommodates both digital and analog watch faces, and the Gen 6 comes with several Fossil-specific faces preinstalled (in addition to the standard Wear OS faces). The Razer version has three exclusive Razer faces, including a simple analog face with the Razer logo, a digital Razer Chrome face that shows a color wheel, and an all-text face.
Adding to the conventional watch feel, three physical controls sit on the right side (if worn on the left wrist) that work in conjunction with the touch screen. A ridged crown sticks out from the middle, and can be pushed in to wake the screen or jump to the app list, held down to activate Google Assistant, and twisted to scroll the screen up and down. The button above the crown displays your fitness stats, while the button below accesses your Google Pay cards for NFC payments. If you don’t want to use those features, the two buttons can be set to open any Wear OS app.
It’s a useful control scheme, but it has its share of quirks. Physically, the biggest issue is that I keep accidentally activating Google Assistant when I bend my wrist too much. Two small metal nubs flank the crown to protect it, but they’re shorter than the crown itself, making it easy to accidentally press the button down. It’s a minor issue, and the watch usually goes to sleep a few seconds later, but it’s still slightly annoying. As for the other quirks, they’re entirely Wear OS-based, and we’ll explore them more below.
On the Inside
Internally, the Gen 6 runs on a Snapdragon Wear 4100+ processor with 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage, which should be enough for any apps you want to load on it. For connectivity, it has Bluetooth 5.0, Wi-Fi, NFC, and GPS. In terms of environment and user monitoring, the watch has an accelerometer, altimeter, ambient light meter, compass, gyroscope, IR presence sensor, PPG heart rate sensor, and blood oxygen sensor. The Gen 6 is also equipped with both a microphone and speaker so you can use Google Assistant and take calls directly through the watch.
Fossil claims the Gen 6 has a battery life of over 24 hours in its power-saving Extended Mode, but in normal use mode its time varies heavily based on use, and it still falls a few hours short of both the Apple Watch Series 7 and the Galaxy Watch4. The first time I set up the watch, the battery drained fully over the course of maybe six hours, though this was likely due to very heavy usage and installing a number of apps and updates. After that, I found I could comfortably get a full day of use from the watch, though using it to track sleep after that would be stretching it. Fortunately, the watch charges rapidly, taking about half an hour to reach 80% battery life, so you can quickly juice it up if you want to wear it to bed.
Wear OS: Powerful, But Awkward
I regularly use an Android phone, and the best way to describe Wear OS is that it’s very clearly an Android-based smartwatch platform, for good and bad. It’s loaded with features, but its functions are wildly scattered across multiple navigation methods with unintuitive controls. Samsung’s Galaxy Watch4 is also based on Wear OS, but it uses Samsung’s One UI interface on top of it, making it a bit easier to use, especially when browsing and opening apps.
Unlike the iPhone-only apple Watch, Wear OS works with both Android and iOS phones. Nearly all of the same features are available through the Android and iOS Google Wear apps, and I had no problem getting notifications from an iPhone on the watch or using it to control music and podcast playback.
After following the included instructions to connect the watch to your phone, you can choose whether you want to set the watch face to be always on (which will drain the battery faster), tapped to wake, tilted to wake, or to only appear when you press the crown. The face is eminently customizable, with over 20 choices preinstalled and the ability to download others from the Google Play store. The watch face marketplace app Facer is also preinstalled, offering an even larger selection to choose from.
The watch faces show basic information like time, of course, in a variety of formats. There are plenty of digital and analog faces, including the aforementioned Fossil and Razer faces. They can be as simple or as complicated as you want, from elegant two- and three-hand analog clocks and simple four-digit digital readouts, to chronographs with multiple analog displays and data-filled digital screens loaded with biometric data.
Certain watch faces have sections you can tap to jump into other Wear OS features or display more information. A step meter might switch to show the exact number of steps, or the date might show your upcoming appointments. I settled on the Fossil Wellness face, which shows the time digitally inside a ring that displays six different fitness metrics.
Swiping up on the watch face shows your notifications, a simple text display you can scroll with a touch or by turning the crown. Swiping right on the face brings up Google Assistant, with the current weather displayed. You can also use Google Assistant by pressing and holding down the crown.
Swiping down on the face of the watch brings up a quick settings menu with buttons for Airplane mode, Silent mode, Do Not Disturb mode, Theater mode, and battery and brightness options. A gear button above these jumps to the full Wear OS settings menu, which offers many more options.
Swiping left on the watch face takes you to your Wear OS tiles, individual screens you can flip between that show different information or enable various features. There are 16 tiles you can arrange in any order, and individually enable or disable. They include weather, phone access, timers (both a standard timer and a 20-second handwashing timer), a variety of biometrics displays, and even Amazon Alexa.
Then there are Wear OS apps, and this is where the system starts to get really uneven. Pressing in the crown brings up the Wear OS apps currently installed on the watch. Apps are completely separate from tiles, and can only be accessed through this menu, or by assigning one of the two buttons next to the crown to that app. You can set your favorite apps to appear higher on the list, but there’s no way to set up a quick-launch menu or tile with those apps, so you still need to scroll and tap through a long, Android-like list with fairly small icons.
There are more Wear OS apps available than tiles, including dozens of different fitness and wellness apps like Adidas, Calm, Nike, and Strava. There are also ovulation and period tracker apps, which is fortunate since the feature isn’t built into the watch natively. For music, you can control Podcast Republic, Shazam, Spotify, and YouTube Music from the watch. Outside of entertainment and fitness, you can add productivity apps like compasses, calculators, Google Keep, and Google Translate. Disappointingly, Google Authenticator isn’t available on Wear OS, which I can see being quite handy. There are a few authenticators and password managers for Wear OS, but they’re from seemingly unknown developers and I wouldn’t trust their security.
Then there’s the issue of actually finding apps to download. You can look through the watch itself, though this is obviously unwieldy on such a small screen. You can use the Google Play app store on the web through your computer. Or, if you have an Android phone, you can use the app store on that. If you’re using an iPhone, well, you still have the watch and the web.
Between watch faces, tiles, and apps, it’s very clear that the more powerful the feature you want to use on the watch, the deeper you need to dig to find it. Time and simple information? They can be right on the watch face. Detailed biometrics? They’re on tiles. A calculator, voice recorder, or translation services? They’re buried in apps, and you might need to pay a few dollars for a third-party app that does the job, since Google doesn’t offer quite as many options as Apple.
Speaking of fitness, the Gen 6 is equipped almost as well as the Apple Watch Series 7 in terms of health monitoring. It has electrocardiogram (ECG), blood oxygen (SpO2), and sleep tracking features, along with the standard step counting and workout functions, all of which worked fine in testing.
That said, the ECG app doesn’t watch out for irregular heart rhythm like the Apple Watch does. And Google’s purchase of Fitbit hasn’t resulted in smooth integration with Wear OS yet, so if you’re transitioning from a Fitbit device, you won’t be able to carry over your progress or use the Fitbit app with the watch. It also doesn’t have a bioelectric impedance analysis (BIA) sensor for measuring body composition, like the Galaxy Watch4 has.
A Fine Fossil Watch With Some Razer Edge
If you don’t mind wrestling a bit with Wear OS, the Fossil Gen 6 is a fine choice for Android users, though the Samsung Galaxy Watch4 is our Editors’ Choice for its lower price, longer battery life, more rugged design, and easier-to-use Samsung One UI interface. The Apple Watch Series 7 remains our top pick overall, thanks to a more intuitive interface and the best selection of third-party smartwatch apps. As for the Razer collaboration here, it basically adds up to a bright green silicone band and a few exclusive watch faces. I like the green band, but this version isn’t better than any other Fossil model unless you’re a dedicated Razer fan.
