Review on ⌚ Fossil Men's Gen 4 Explorist HR: Stainless Steel Smartwatch with Heart Rate, GPS, NFC & Smartphone Notifications by Adrian Smart

[FIRST IMPRESSIONS; Purchase mid-December 2018] In general I like it. Happy with my purchase. All I need a smartwatch for is vibrating alerts from SMS, MMS and voice calls. For that reason alone it gets 5/5 stars. I turn off the following: NFC, GPS, Wi-Fi, tilt-to-wake gyroscope, sleep tracking, always-on display. I also set the brightness to auto dim. I wake up at 6:30am, drain the battery to 100% and am still at around 65% at 10:30am after getting around 1015 notifications throughout the day. I could probably barely last 2 days on a single charge but certainly not more. I wish the battery life was better, but with WearOS, 2 days seems to be the tech at the moment. If you want better battery performance, you'll need to use a different operating system. The three largest batteries are always on, GPS and tilt to wake up the gyroscope. (except the screen of course) I paid for the Watchmaker app and have about 3540 watch faces that I rotate back and forth. It's also a really nice feature that I think feels fresh and new. Love the OLED display. It's clear, bright and looks fantastic. I like the buttons on the side. I programmed one for Android messages and the other for a countdown timer. I use it often in the kitchen and when grilling. A scroll wheel with a spinning crown is a good option instead of swiping the screen. I also like WearOS. MUCH better than Android Wear (its predecessor). This operating system was complete garbage. It has NEVER worked consistently with my moto360. Thankfully, WearOS on this Fossil has been AWESOME for me. I received a major update at the end of January and everything is working fine. [UPDATE March 10, 2019] Minus 2 stars for using Google WearOS since December 2018: 1st WearOS update mid-January 2019. I removed the watch from an overnight batch. , it didn't work. It was just a blank screen. The WearOS app on my phone said trying to connect via Bluetooth. I long press the power button hoping to start a boot loop. After a few tries it rebooted and I was greeted with a 30 minute OS boot. During the update it was eating up the battery at a rate of 10% every 7-8 minutes. I had to leave it charging all the time. I never had the option to pause or stop the installation and later resume it at any time of my choosing. Also, I suspect it's necessary to keep the Wi-Fi connection alive. Luckily it was a Monday morning and my schedule was wide open so I wasted time. I don't know what would happen if I had to leave my home WiFi in the middle of the upgrade process. Does it still work after half charge? Will it roll back to the latest known OS version? Is the clock blocked? Second WearOS update, mid-February 2019: I wore my watch as usual during the work week and noticed that I didn't get Bluetooth notifications for text messages. Notifications worked fine for everything else. WearOS on my phone said Bluetooth was connected well. Cleared cache on phone, restarted phone and checked. nothing changed so i left it. After returning home in the evening I played around with it and found that my phone had another WearOS update waiting to be downloaded/installed. This time it only took 10 minutes to download and install between phone and watch. As before, the watch had to be connected to the charger. What's troubling this time around is how a WearOS update waiting to be installed in sleep mode was able to kill my SMS notifications from Android Messages. WearOS 3rd update, early March 2019: I took it off the charger one morning and the bluetooth radio wouldn't connect. Although the bluetooth watch pairing screen shows the device is connected to my phone. The WearOS app on my phone just says Connected. not "connected via Bluetooth" as usual. I'm trying to use the WatchMaker app to change watch faces over bluetooth and it results in a watch disconnected warning. At that point, I received a Gmail message. and I don't get any notifications about it on the watch. I checked the Google Play Store app and sure enough there was another update waiting to be downloaded. It was a quick update, a few minutes, and once I did it everything was fine. 4. WearOS update: March 8, 2019: This update was smooth and smooth. Nothing turned off on the watch and notifications weren't interrupted. A small update that only took a few minutes to download and install. WearOS Update 5: May 24, 2019 It was great. It took a good 10 minutes to download and another 7-8 to install. It then took another 1 hour to "settle down". During this quiet period, my phone got hot and WearOS drained the battery, about twice as much as my screen, or the next largest consumer. It wasn't the worst. The worst part was that he couldn't keep in touch with my watch until late at night. I have no idea what WearOS was doing, but it was clearly struggling and gasping and gasping. Once it connected and slowed down the battery, my phone's temperature went back to normal in the evenings. BUT doing so disabled permission settings via Android Messages. Although I fully allow ALL permission settings in watch and phone app. Luckily, another YT user instructed me to turn off and then turn on permissions settings with the watch. and that fixed it. Now everything is in order. For some reason, WearOS updates that have yet to be installed break the watch remotely. There are no warnings or warnings, and in many cases there is no option to decline the update or postpone it to a later date of my choice. Quite coincidentally, I had non-working hours. It made me see reminders of things I didn't like about the old Android Wear. For comparison, I had Amazfit Stratos literally parallel to Fossil, both bought in mid-December 2018. During this time he received an update that completely disappeared. without accidents. The Amazfit app updates automatically and connects to the watch via Bluetooth. Not once did the watch lose functionality, and when it did, it was so smooth and fast that I didn't even notice. To be honest, I can't openly recommend a WearOS watch to anyone. I think it's a technology product that I think takes that kind of mentality to sustain. This is not an ideal product for the mass consumer. We warn knowledgeable Android engineers that this is very similar to the early days of Android. buggy, lagging, crashing, unreliable, and you need to be pretty tech savvy to keep the ecosystem running. You will NOT find WearOS fixes. You MUST find them yourself. Unlike your Android phone, however, pending updates will disable the watch's core functionality while it's on standby. This is my biggest complaint.[26/05/2019] - UPDATE RATING to 2/5 stars. [07/13/2019] - UPDATE RATING to 1/5 stars. My concerns and complaints above remain. It is now July 2019. I have owned this watch for 7 months. I'm deducting a star because now this watch is so slow and sluggish that it's impossible to use it other than really basic functions or apps. Also, my Amazfit Stratos has COMPLETELY FINISHED this watch in terms of overall performance and reliability. Since around April, the Amazfit has been my favorite everyday watch and to be honest I have no complaints about it. So Google WearOS and its LagDragon microprocessors keep fighting for now. the competition keeps letting it down. I'm just trying to be honest as a buying consumer. If you're looking for smartwatches, look elsewhere. [06/22/20] LONG TERM updates for 17 months My comments above are still valid after 17 months. Basically, WearOS is great when it works. Unfortunately, about 90% of the time it doesn't always work, doesn't recur, or isn't reliable at all. I charged it for one night, everything works fine. Take it off the charger the next day and something on it will die. The last thing I delete is the handwriting keyboard. it is COMPLETELY unusable now. Brake and SLOW as hell and it will be automatically inserted as a step between all s. People think I'm insane when I use it. (no offense to those who actually do). I like WearOS (honestly). but it sucks. I should have saved my money.[10-20-20]FINALLY a good WearOS update! My watch has been running smoothly and reliably again for 2 months. They greatly improved battery life. My Gen4 Explorer can now be used for 1.5 to 1.75 days on a single charge. An excellent result for a WearOS device from two years ago. Before that I had only reached 1011 hours. I'm increasing my star rating to 2/5