The Fossil Gen 6 Hybrid Wellness Edition makes a lot of claims on paper, but ultimately falls short. Its performance on important wellness measures is rather poor for a watch branded “Wellness Edition,” which makes it challenging to recommend. It serves its purpose for people searching for a discrete hybrid smartwatch with Fossil style, but choosing a different version of the Fossil Gen 6 Hybrid makes more sense.
| PROS | CONS |
| The vintage timepiece appearance. A useful addition is Alexa Good exercise HR accuracy | Generally erratic wellbeing data Unconvincing combination of features and design Software is sluggish. |
Back in 2019, when Fossil started down the path of E-Ink displays, it seemed like a promising advancement for the hybrid smartwatch industry.
Sure, the software needed some work, but the idea of concealing a battery-efficient screen beneath mechanical hands seemed like a smart improvement over all that had come before. The E-Ink, a technology we hadn’t really seen in smartwatches since the days of Pebble, had a certain charm as well.
In 2023, Fossil has now applied the same modifications to its Gen 6 Wellness Edition smartwatch. Although there are many on-paper enhancements, the basic idea of the watch hasn’t changed much. For example, the watch has a new heart rate monitor, SpO2 sensor, Alexa, automatic workout recognition, and a modified dashboard.
Although there has undoubtedly been improvement in some areas, this hybrid smartwatch largely left us perplexed. Here are our longer impressions after a few of weeks of testing.
The Gen 6 Hybrid Wellness Edition looks and feels considerably more sophisticated, in contrast to the last generation’s Fossil Hybrid HR, which had a more plasticky feel.
It’s slightly too big for a unisex alternative and more chunkier than a classic timepiece due to the 44mm stainless steel case, but it at least looks the part on the wrist.
We’ve even confused it for a regular watch a few times, so we’d say Fossil has delivered the kind of appearance that hybrid hunters will desire.
Theoretically, it’s a cool concept, and there are definitely times when it works flawlessly and lets you read the screen precisely (like when you use Alexa or when the hands line up to show you what you’re about to select in menus). Yet, it still has its flaws, such as when the physical hands interfere with the software’s ability to measure your heart rate while you’re exercising.
Due to the nature of E-Ink, we can tolerate this lag to some extent, but it’s still difficult to wait for the E-Ink screen to respond after pressing a button.
It’s not only that it’s slow; it might also feel counterintuitive.
For instance, the crown can be turned, but doing so has no effect rather than making it considerably simpler to move across the dial.
It can be difficult to know which button to hit at different locations on the screen, much as we’ve discovered with the “up” and “down” pushers in the past.
Overall yet, we still prefer the E-Ink display. It is transparent in direct sunshine, and a backlight will activate with a forceful double tap of the covering glass if you require it at night. Really a shame that there hasn’t been much advancement in wider integration throughout the years.
Smartwatch and companion app features
Although the design has a certain level of appeal, we’re not entirely sure that the variety of smartwatch features will be sufficient to make a difference.
The most significant upgrade is the ability of Amazon’s Alexa speech assistant to respond to your questions with text-only responses. For the most part, it accomplishes this swiftly and accurately, and we believe that this kind of feature belongs on a hybrid smartwatch.
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Although we can’t say we’re personally major fans of voice assistants on smartwatches, this is a welcome addition for anyone who is.
The issue is that this is pretty much all the excitement there is.
The Fossil companion app is attractive and well-organized, but it is limited to allowing users to choose fresh E-Ink watch faces and personalise the shortcuts for the two pushers. There isn’t much to keep you engaged in this, although we don’t expect a comprehensive app ecosystem.
In our experience, contactless purchases are few and far between, and music control is also fairly shaky, frequently becoming stuck on a song and not updating very frequently.
Also, there is support for notifications, and you have a lot of flexibility over which messaging and app services are transmitted to the watch. This is presented neatly around the mechanical hands, just like with Alexa responses, and it does help give the watch that smart feeling.
Tracking activities and precision
We anticipated that the Gen 6 Hybrid would perform admirably when it comes to tracking fitness and health given the additions of SpO2 monitoring, automatic workout tracking, and a new heart rate sensor.
Yet even putting the patchy data to one side—which we’ll discuss below—we find it odd that a watch this big and heavy is intended for use in tracking exercise and health.
For instance, it did pretty poorly in the gym, where it quickly acquired a large scratch on the screen and suffered dings from barbells, dumbbells, and other equipment that left fairly obvious marks on the case. Of course, we share some of the blame, but we’d also like to point out that actual fitness watches don’t experience this.
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Also, it feels quite awkward to run with, and we discovered that we needed to fasten it more firmly than we’d like in order to prevent the bulky case from shifting on the wrist.
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