Fossil Sport design and features

• The Fossil Sport uses a classic design, with a round dial and three buttons on the right, just like a traditional watch. The centre button is also a functional crown, which can be used for scrolling through menus or adjusting volume. The other two buttons can be customised to launch any app on the watch.
• The Fossil Sport is available in 43mm and 41mm sizes, with both priced the same. We have the former for review, which should be well suited for most wrists. The 41mm watch face is smaller and the straps are narrower too. The upper portion of the watch itself is made of aluminium, while the lower half is nylon plastic.
• The watch is very light, and the silicone strap is also comfortable and easy to clean. However, on the whole, the Fossil Sport has a toy-like quality to it, which misses out on a premium feel. We noticed some rough edges on the nylon bottom of the case, which made it feel a little crude.
• The 1.2-inch OLED display on the Fossil Sport looks sharp, and brightness is automatically adjusted based on ambient light. Even under sunlight, the display is easily legible. The 22mm straps are removable and you can swap them out for different ones if you want. The bottom of the watch also has a magnetic ring for the charging pod. This makes it very easy to snap the charger on and off, without having to align the charging pins to a specific spot.
• Overall, the Fossil Sport is a comfortable smartwatch to wear, thanks to its low weight. It also looks smart from afar but feels a little plasticky on your wrist.
• Coming to some of the specifications, the Sport runs on the Snapdragon Wear 3100 platform and has 4GB of internal storage. It runs Wear OS by Google, and packs in sensors such as an accelerometer, altimeter, ambient light sensor, gyroscope, and a heart-rate sensor. It also has NFC and built-in GPS along with Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.2 Low Energy. There is a microphone for picking up voice commands, but there's no speaker.
• Lastly, the Sport is compatible with Android (except for Android Go Editions) and iOS smartphones, and requires the Wear OS app.

Fossil Sport performance and battery life

• For this review, we used the Fossil Sport primarily with an iPhone XR ₹ 57,249 (Review) but we also used it with a Samsung Galaxy S10+ (Review) for a bit. We were eager to see how much of an improvement the new Snapdragon Wear 3100 would be, but as it turns out, it's not as impressive as we were expecting. The display's touch response is good, and interacting with the menus and settings is fairly smooth, but there's still a bit of a wait when you launch apps. The Play Store especially takes a while to load, even if your watch is connected to fast Wi-Fi.
• Summoning Google Assistant with a voice command takes a second or two. At times, the watch can become quite unresponsive, forcing you to go back to the home screen and start whatever you were doing over again.
• This is quite disappointing but not entirely surprising. If you look at the technical details of the Snapdragon Wear 3100 and 2100, not a lot has changed. It's still using the same CPU and GPU, and is built on the older 28nm process.
• What this new chip offers is better motion tracking and better battery life (in theory) thanks to a new ultra-low-power co-processor for ambient sensing. That explains why even with this new chip, Wear OS feels barely any faster than before. The Sport runs Wear OS 2.7, which is based on Android 8.1 Oreo.

• Wear OS offers a bunch of preinstalled apps including Fit, Fit Breath, Fit Workout, and Nike Run Club. You can install more from the Play Store app on the watch, but there's not a lot to choose from, unlike the variety you get for Apple's watchOS. Apps such as Spotify and Uber will require authorisation to work, which can be done through your phone.
• There are some nice watch faces to choose from, even though the collection is a little limited. Some of the watch faces let you uses background images from your Instagram or Facebook accounts. These custom faces can be saved in the Fossil watch app, so you can quickly access them when needed.
• Wear OS is easy to navigate through. You swipe down from the home screen for quick toggles; swipe up from the bottom to view unread notifications; swipe right for Google Assistant; and swipe left to you access ‘Tiles.' You can choose up to five of these tile screens from things like your activity progress, weather, calendar events, headlines from Google News, etc.
• A press of the crown takes you to all your apps, of which the three most recently opened ones are always displayed first. You can scroll through the list either with the touchscreen or using the crown.
• The Fossil Sport does a decent job with basic smartwatch functionality. Notifications are easy to view; you're alerted about incoming calls with a mild vibration. Music playing on your phone can be controlled via the watch.
• However, usability is more limited if you pair this with an iPhone compared to an Android device. For instance, you can't reply to SMSes or any chat app unless there's a watch app for it — and the only popular one currently available is Telegram.
• When synced with an Android phone, though, the functionality is much better. You can reply to most chat notifications, even if there isn't a watch app for it. You can use some of the preset replies or create a custom one by either dictation or through a keyboard using swipe gestures. Wear OS will also automatically show you a list of apps that have companion watch apps, and lets you download them straight from the watch's app drawer.
• The Fossil Sport boasts of letting users download and play music from the watch itself. This can only be done using Google Play Music, and you'll need a subscription for that service in order to download songs. There is a Spotify watch app, but it can only be used to control music playback on your other devices and not stream songs directly using the watch itself.