Fossil Will Add Alexa Support To Its Wear OS Smartwatches

Fossil smartwatches will soon gain Alexa support. The Texas-based fashion brand, which is a long-time maker of Wear OS smartwatches, announced the news during an online briefing at CES 2022. The company also unveiled a new smartwatch under its Skagen sub-brand, called the Falster Gen 6, at the recently concluded electronics show. Additionally, it collaborated with Razer for a limited edition version of the Fossil Gen 6 smartwatch that debuted last year.

Alexa support will roll out to both of these new smartwatches in the coming months. Perhaps, according to a 9to5Google report, the Skagen Falster Gen 6 already features a Wear OS tile for the Amazon digital assistant. But it currently doesn’t work. You can apply the tile but navigating to it simply brings up a “Coming Soon” message.

The original Fossil Gen 6 will also get Amazon Alexa, the company has confirmed. “Alexa will be launching in the first half of this year on our Gen 6 devices, with the opportunity to roll out on future devices. We’ll have more information closer to launch!” Fossil said in a statement.

While Alexa is all but confirmed to feature on future Fossil smartwatches, the company didn’t tell whether or not it plans to roll out the Amazon digital assistant to its older models. We will likely get confirmation on that when the rollout begins for the Gen 6 devices.

We’ll have to wait longer for Wear OS 3 to arrive on Fossil smartwatches

Google’s Wear OS platform for smartwatches received a much-needed overhaul last year, thanks in part to Samsung and Fitbit. The new unified platform, which is called Wear OS 3, debuted on Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 4 series. But, unfortunately, those are still the only devices running the much-improved new version. And will remain so for several more months.

Fossil’s Gen 6 models launched after Wear OS 3 arrived but, disappointingly, still running the older version. Google said they will eventually receive the update to the new version but not until the “mid to second half of 2022”. Fossil was expected to provide a more concrete timeframe at CES 2022 but, sadly, it didn’t. The company simply reiterated Google’s original timeline. So we’ll have to wait longer for Wear OS to arrive on Fossil smartwatches.

Wear OS 3 will be also available to a handful of devices from Mobvoi. These include the TicWatch Pro 3 GPS, TicWatch Pro 3 Cellular/LTE, TicWatch E3, and the Chinese brand’s future models. Stay tuned for more information regarding the rollout timeline.