New Fossil smartwatch has a faster, more efficient chip. Here’s the bad news…

Fossil just announced a new smartwatch, and we have some good and bad news.

The good news is that the Fossil Gen 6 Touchscreen Smartwatch, as Fossil has endearingly called this new wearable, is the first on the market to be powered with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear 4100+ chips. In practice, this should mean the watch will be faster and more responsive while draining less energy from its battery.

The new Fossil smartwatches come with continuous heart rate tracking and blood oxygen monitoring.
Credit: fossil

The new watch will come in two sizes — 42mm and 44mm — and will sport a number of new features, including continuous heart rate monitoring, a new blood oxygen sensor, and speaker functionality (enabling the user to make and receive tethered calls).

Other specs of note include a 1.28-inch touchscreen display, water resistance up to 3 ATM (which means it’s “swimproof,” according to Fossil), 8GB of storage space, and 1GB of RAM.

Now for the not-so-good news. The new Gen 6 watches will be compatible with Wear OS 3, the new version of Wear OS that Google has developed in collaboration with Samsung. But it will not get the new software until 2022.

Fossil Gen 6 will retail from $299 and $319, depending on the wristband style, and is currently available for pre-order over at Fossil’s website.

UPDATE: Aug. 30, 2021, 9:16 p.m. CEST Story was updated to clarify that the pricing depends on wristband style, and not watch size.