“There’s a Good Reason for iPhone Owners to Get This Non-Apple Smartwatch,” gearpatrol.com‘s headline proclaims. That’s some pretty catchy clickbait, what with Apple Watch aficionados saving their pennies for Cupertino’s non-too-cheap Series 5 smart watch. And the reason for unearthing a Fossil is . . .
No, it’s not the bolts of electricity spitting from the Fossil Gen 5 smart watch.
instead of just alerting you that you’re getting a call, which many Wear OS smartwatches can do, you’ll be able to answer the call on the Gen 5 Smartwatch. No need to pull out your iPhone to answer a call if you don’t want to.
That’s a game changer right there, Dick Tracey fans. Only . . . the Fossil Gen 5 smart watch doesn’t actually do the two-way wrist radio phone call thing. Yet.
There’s a catch, however: the iPhone tethering feature isn’t available on the Gen 5 Smartwatch at launch. As The Verge‘s Cameron Faulkner writes, the functionality “will arrive OTA in the form of a proprietary app sometime this fall.”
After the Apple Watch Series 5, of course. What we have here is a failure to communicate honestly. Anyway, lest we forget, Fossil smart watches don’t do the Apple Messenger thing. But it is pretty cool.
And hey, the Fossil wearable looks like a watch. It even has chrono-style stoppers. Over to you Apple. Apple? Hello?