Fossil Hybrid Smartwatch HR
$195.00Pros
- Battery life is top notch due to the e-ink/e-paper display
- Aside from the malfunctioning hour hand, the build quality is excellent, I've been very rough with it
- It looks great, understated like a real watch
- App is surprisingly good with nice integrations
- Compatibility with other Fossil bands is a nice bonus
Cons
- Pretty expensive, especially compared to Fitbit
- I had some technical glitches early on. They seem to be fixed now.
- Can't interact with notifications (not important to me, but may be for others)
- After six months, the hour hand mostly stopped moving. It's been sent for warranty repair. I'll update this post again if anything new happens.
This is not a perfect smartwatch, but it fits my needs/wants better than any other on the market right now. Looking at the big picture, it’s got everything I want in a smartwatch – great battery life (about three weeks on a charge), basic notifications, and tracking (sleep, HR, steps, activities). It also looks really good. I’m very happy with it overall. But, I did have some issues early on.
The battery life is pretty much as advertised, depending on how consistently I wear it, I’ll get somewhere around 20ish days on a charge. That to me is what makes it possible for this to be a smartwatch I continue to use, as I’m really not interested in keeping another device charged every day.
The watch looks great. e-ink/e-paper (whatever it’s called) blends in perfectly with the watch’s aesthetic and it just looks like a real watch. I also like HR Collider’s interface. It’s easy to navigate and the notifications look very clear. It doesn’t bother me at that it doesn’t have a touch screen.
The Fossil app is much better than I expected, it’s very clean with tons of easy-to-access data. I came from a Fitbit previously and I prefer this interface for how clean it is. Information is easy to access and it provides a pretty rich array of insight into what the watch tracks. The integration with Google Fit is pretty tight, which I did want from the outset…but interestingly the Fossil app is actually better than Google’s.
Despite reading that it doesn’t have connected GPS, I do see mapped exercises in Google Fit after a run. I guess this is an Android feature for mapping runs, but honestly I’m really not sure how it works. I just know I can track runs on the watch (while my phone is also with me) and I see a map when I’m done. No built in GPS though.
There are a couple of issues I experienced early in owning the HR Collider though. In one instance a few weeks after buying, I lost one entire day of tracking (HR, steps, exercise, sleep). I opened a ticket with Fossil, but they couldn’t figure it out. I also had issues with the watch disconnecting from the app several times a week. I only experienced the data loss issue once and it hasn’t disconnected in at least six months, so maybe these issues are fixed.
June 2020 Update: After about 6 months of daily (or at least nightly) use, the hour hand of the watch appears to have failed. Re-calibrating and resetting the watch doesn’t help; the hour hand is stuck at 2:00 (and occasionally moves to 11:00 for some reason). The minute hand does appear to still keep time. I opened a ticket with Fossil and they’re advising me to send it in for what I hope is a free warranty repair. It appears to be free, but they wouldn’t guarantee that. So, not a great sign compared to how well my past Fitbit devices have held up. The review score has been updated to reflect this durability concern.
Manufacturer Description:
- Hybrid smartwatch hr (heart rate) works with iPhone and Android phones. The product has 16 MB storage
- Enjoy 2+ weeks of Battery life on a single charge
- Heart rate, activity and sleep tracking with in-depth wellness stats
- This is one smart watch – Receive and view smartphone notifications and alerts, see calendar and weather updates, control your music and more
- A classic timepiece designed with integrated mechanical hands and an always-on read-out display showing curated information at a glance; case size: 42mm; Band size: 22mm; interchangeable with all Fossil 22mm bands; water resistant to 165ft (50m); imported
[…] The Armdog Reviews score and review I wrote has also been updated to reflect this issue: https://armdogreivews.wpcomstaging.com/fossil-hybrid-smartwatch-hr-collider/ […]
As I mentioned in the review, this smartwatch is really the first test of this “curate reviews like a wiki” concept. As it says in the review, I updated the score and the Fossil Collider Hybrid to a huge hit in the durability/quality category. I just can’t justify the craftsmanship of a device that malfunctioned after 6 months. We’ll see how repairs go and if it holds up after that.