We have tracked so many Fossil devices at the FCC over the past couple of years that I’m not sure I’ll ever truly believe the next one is the Fossil Gen 6. Too many times now have we had hopes raised only to be shown another variant of a Fossil Gen 5 or one of their hybrid watches. So take today with some hesitancy, but we do have a new “smart watch” from Fossil at the FCC. Maybe this is the one?
The new Fossil smartwatch has model numbers of DW13F1, DW13F2, and DW13M1. All three are identical outside of branding, but knowing the history of Fossil naming schemes, we should be looking at two Fossil-branded watches (F1 and F2) and a single Michael Kors watch (M1).
In the past, we thought we could rely on the DW line to mean a higher-end watch, like the Gen 5 (and hopefully the Gen 6). The Fossil Sport was DW9, Gen 5 was DW10, and the Gen 5E was DW11. Unfortunately, a DW12 watch turned out to be a hybrid and screwed up our thinking there.
Documents at the FCC show an e-label (above) and a very familiar screen that you would see on Wear OS, as well as tests for Bluetooth, WiFi, and NFC. They mention a 300mAh battery as well. These watches are indeed Wear OS smartwatches as far as we can tell, we just don’t know if this is the much anticipated Fossil Gen 6 or another Gen 5 variant that Fossil will slide in to kill some time and relieve their warehouses of bad Snapdragon Wear 3100 chips, like they did with the Fossil Gen 5E and Fossil Gen 5 LTE.
We’ll keep digging, but as has been the case over the past two years, we don’t have definitive Gen 6 proof here. What we know is that Fossil is indeed making a “premium” Gen 6 watch that’ll run the new Wear platform and we hope this is it. We’re ready for it.