NEW DELHI: American watchmaker Fossil has confirmed that the existing Wear OS smartwatches of the company will not be upgraded to the new combined Wear operating system from Google and Samsung.
Tech giant Google and Samsung recently announced their partnership.
As part of this association, both the companies are merging Google’s Wear OS and Samsung’s Tizen OS in developing a future Wear operating system for smartwatches.
Fossil executives Greg McKelvey and Steve Prokup confirmed to CNET in an interview that the existing lineup of smartwatches of the company will not receive an update to the upcoming Wear operating system.
Instead, Fossil is working on a premium smartwatch which will come with some major hardware upgrades.
Prokup also added that the existing smartwatches will be available at discounted prices.
As reported by CNET, the company is working on Fossil Gen 6 smartwatch that will offer similar features as the upcoming watches from Google and Samsung.
The wearable will offer better and faster performance, long-lasting battery life, new chips and LTE cellular options.
“All of the software benefits that Google’s talking about and launching with the unified platform is something we’ll be building into that as well,” McKelvey said.
Talking about hardware upgrades, Prokup told CNET, “We’ve had, and still have, multiple configurations of buttons in the market at the same time, and that’s able to be supported.
I think you’re still going to see a variety of offerings across even our products, as well as manufacturers …
not so much that you’re going to have a watch that ends up having four, five, six dedicated buttons or no buttons.”