At the ongoing Baselworld 2017 watch show, Fossil Group has today taken the wraps off its complete range of smartwatches for 2017. The company, as promised earlier, is introducing 300 different – fitness bands, touchscreen, and hybrid smartwatch – styles across its fourteen brands.
This new collection is not only graduating previous smartwatch releases to Android Wear 2.0 but is also adding more of its brands to join the party. Earlier, Fossil had upgraded its Diesel, Emporio Armani, Armani Exchange, Fossil, kate spade new york, Michael Kors, Misfit, and Skagen watches into smart timepieces. But, they are now pushing more of their brands, including Marc Jacobs, MICHELE, DKNY, Relic, and Tory Burch to include smart features. This means most of Fossil’s brand collection available in stores will become smart in 2017.
Talking about their new collection as a whole, Greg McKelvey, chief strategy and digital officer, Fossil Group said,
This explosion of new styles is further proof that the entire purpose of the watch is changing. Our customers are no longer wearing a watch simply to tell time, they are wearing it to stay connected to the people and activities they care about most while remaining fashionably on-point. We’re thrilled to offer them so many ways to maintain those connections and to do it with beauty and uncompromised style.
Since we’d have to spend hours talking about each smartwatch unveiled today, we will just be taking a peek at the highlights. The new Android Wear 2.0 touchscreen watches will pack the same internals, high-resolutions AMOLED screens and Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 2100 processors.
No additional info about the internals, such as battery and connectivity options, has been detailed in their press statement. But, Fossil watches will include all new Android Wear 2.0 features, such as a standalone Play Store, Google Assistant, and even LTE connectivity. This will be accompanied with Fossil’s custom micro-apps, which will be designed with respect to each brand and its customer base in mind. These apps will offer unique functionalities to each smartwatch, such as using an Instagram photo as the watch face in Michael Kors’ watches.
The touchscreen watches include the following releases, whose design and styling will depend on the brand you choose:
- Diesel On: first touchscreen smartwatch for this brand, coming holiday 2017
- Emporio Armani Connected: first touchscreen smartwatch, releasing in early-September
- Michael Kors: It will add two new watches — Access Sofie and Access Grays — to the collection, shipping fall 2017
- Misfit Vapor: It includes heart rate monitoring, GPS, standalone music functionality, and is swimproof. It sounds like the best of the bunch and will release late in summer 2017.
- Fossil: Q Venture and Q Explorist smartwatches are the slimmest watches released by the company. These will also release in Fall 2017.
In addition, Fossil is also introducing a wide variety of hybrid smartwatches that’ll provide you with the feel of both an analog, as well as digital watch. These will be connected watches with some form of smart technology, such as notification delivery and heart-rate or activity monitor. It would also include functional buttons on the side of the watches to provide you additional option to assign specific tasks. These can range from taking a selfie or ringing the phone to controlling music or tracking your steps. These watches will still be powered by cell batteries. The prominent names under this category are DKNY, Armani Exchange, Diesel, Fossil, and Skagen among others.
Though there isn’t exactly much information on what capabilities the hybrid smartwatches are packing within them, they will be the highlight of Fossil’s new smartwatch collection. Speaking about this category, Steve Evans, executive VP of Fossil Brand says,
As an innovator in the fashion watch space, we knew that Fossil Group had the ability to launch a new category of watches that would be extremely relevant to a new generation of watch wearers.
We are confident that the launch of hybrid smartwatches across multiple brands this year will be a transformative moment in the watch industry, and we look forward to exciting and educating customers globally that Fossil Group has a (smart) watch for every wrist.
Only Diesel On smartwatch has got itself a price tag, which will be $325 when it goes on sale in the United States. No specific pricing or availability information has been provided for other brands, but they’ll all be shipping before the end of this year.
