Fossil giving up on smartwatches

Me, my wife, and our two kids all have versions of the one on the right. Even bought new, it’s hard to beat the price.

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Nice and chunky. Doubles as a coaster for one’s drink.

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Oh, I don’t doubt it - but I’m not particularly more concerned about Huawei and the Chinese than I would be Google and Apple and the UK/US gathering information about me (which I’m entirely certain they already do). I might even be slightly less concerned - Huawei and their data gathering is further away. GCHQ’s only ~120 km from here.

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Where Have All the Players Gone?? | BioWare Social Network Fan Forums

:wink:

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That’s a good tip, but isn’t tucking in the excess material part of the NATO strap style?

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Owned by Google now, Fitbit has 3 product lines they’re selling.

1- A “tracker”, the Charge and Inspire.
2- A Smart Watch, the Sense and Versa.
3- The Pixel Smart Watch line, Watch and Watch 2.

The first two work with iOS and Android, the Pixel only works with Android.

Just upgraded my Charge 4 to a Charge 6 when they were on sale, as my old one the battery was finally getting funky. Gained some heartrate stuff, lost stair counting.

They haven’t shuttered Fitbit yet. It is Google, so you never know, but not yet.

At $100, the Charge 6 (and the prior 4) was all the smart I need. I wasn’t trying to replace my phone.

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I would never adorn myself with any martial ‘regalia’ unearned. Hence, my snippity snip snips for use in civilian life. Also, I just didn’t want a loop just hanging there interfering with my cuffs.

BTW: I have several NATO straps, and I change them out based on my mood. One of the bands is a match to the one shown in the photo. Multi-color NATO straps go great with black face watches.

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That’s the band James Bond wore in Goldfinger.

I do the same. I even have one in the colours of the Norwegian flag for Independence Day

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Not exactly. The band in Goldfinger was an RAF strap, hence too small for Bond’s Rolex, and was sort of a last minute swap-in for the band that came with that watch.

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I have a Fossil sundial watch


and it looks like I can get $150 for it if I sell it on etsy!

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That is the real smart watch, because you have to be quite smart to use it to tell the correct time in your location

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I wore it for parties and made it show whatever time I wanted, by standing or sitting by a lamp.

“Oh, it’s only 9:30! You can’t go yet!

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I just want a souped up Dick Tracy watch.

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“Fossil giving up on smartwatches”

I feel seen.

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Also, perfectly matches your style.

May I assume that you and Anubis share the same taylor?

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They really do! I’m wearing an Icelandic Coast Guard watch right now with a blue-white-red-white-blue strap and it looks perfect.

Maybe I’ll have the money one day to put a Rolex on a NATO strap, but somehow I doubt it.

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Tailor
(I made that meme aaages ago tophat-biggrin )

I wear mostly cotton, which, curiously enough, given Egyptian cotton’s fame, they did not have until the Romans hipped them. (The Romans also introduced chickens to Egypt.) The Egyptians lived in linen, which they could pleat in the most complicated ways.

ETA:


There are tiny jackals’ heads at the points of this king’s kilt. They’re also in the image above this one, but they’re V hard to see.

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A long-overdue decision. I tried a couple of their hybrids (one branded for them, the other using their platform but branded by a different big-name watch brand with celebrity spokesperson, and so on) and both were so disappointing. Timekeeping was fine, but nearly all of the functionalities got offshored to their smartphone app (which they harassed you to leave running all the time) in an effort to maximize their battery life claims. An understandable design choice, given the physical limitations of battery size in a watch-sized package, but the user experience sucked so bad.

Their app was rarely updated in a meaningful way, offered only fractional bits of usefulness, and forced a good part of the app home screen to display their own advertising (which couldn’t be turned off or removed), right in the middle of things. It was insulting, off-putting, put full spotlight on the whole “the user is the product” thing, and just continually made me wonder why dropping a couple hundred bucks on such products was justifiable. Trying to customize the watch faces was very hit-and-miss, and the 3rd party “plugins” for the faces were a complete crapshoot.

There were a handful of things their hybrid smartwatches did well, and the centerpunch that allowed for the physical watch hands was pretty awesome from an aesthetics perspective, but the rest of the user experience was insulting in a way that might have only been forgivable in a “the watch is free, the service is $x per month” sort of way.

They dropped a lot of money on their effort, but they seemed constrained, not only by the chipsets that they blamed in their official statement, but also by a UX & functionality mindset that had calcified. New generations made incremental hardware & battery improvements, but the overall experience got progressively older and more frustrating as new generations didn’t actually correct most of the core UX frustrations from prior generations.

Seeing that period of frustration come to an end makes me hope that maybe they’ll go back to focusing on making watches that are truly water resistant, rather than releasing watches with substandard seals and then failing to actually repair or replace them under warranty, because of how frequently the styles got discontinued. Spending $200 on a nice watch that makes water resistant promises and comes with a long guarantee, only to have it fail within two years due to moisture getting into the innards while using it only in the proscribed manner gets old. Especially when they tell you to send it in, but then consistently declare it to be unrepairable as soon as they receive it. And then consistently then getting told it can’t be replaced because that particular model is out of production but here’s a $60 voucher to spend on a new $200 future disappointment… that’s gotten old too. That’s not a guarantee, that’s a weak loyalty coupon. I’m amazed they haven’t gotten class-actioned over it, frankly.

If they will actually focus on quality within their core business, now that they’re no longer being distracted by the “smart” platform, they could really do well. They used to be a quality brand. Here’s hoping they re-find their footing.

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… said Tim Cook to the design team?

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