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Fossil unveils a Gen 5 smartwatch with 4G LTE

Today, Fossil announced the Gen 5 LTE smartwatch, adding cellular connectivity to the wearable device that launched in 2019. Just as the name suggests, it's a similar product to the original, right down to the Snapdragon Wear 3100 chipset, which is Qualcomm's last-generation SoC. It also comes with a 1.28-inch 328ppi AMOLED display, a 45mm case size, 8GB storage, and 1GB RAM.

"At Fossil, our teams are always striving for new innovations and evolutions of our bestselling smartwatch platforms to provide users with wearables that truly enhance their lifestyle. We identified this tremendous opportunity within the cellular wearables space to design the Gen 5 LTE Smartwatch and provide an exciting new service on our latest technology. Fossil is proud to present this new capability with Verizon that offers additional connectedness with the world around you, while still maintaining the designs our customers love," said Steve Evans, EVP Fossil Group. "Entering into the cellular space is a direct result of consumer feedback, so we are excited to present this exciting new offering for the first time within the Fossil portfolio of functional and beautiful wearables."

The Fossil Gen 5 LTE smartwatch is arriving this spring, and it's exclusive to Verizon; yes, that means that as of right now, there's no availability outside of the U.S. It uses Verizon's Number Share feature, letting you sync one phone number between two devices. However, the company did confirm that there will be international availability later on this year, and it hinted at more carrier availability in the U.S.

There's more bad news, which is that it's only compatible with Android. Fossil didn't say specifically why that is, only that it has a "long-standing relationship with Google", and it does make sense since Wear OS is an Android platform. What wasn't said was why cellular connectivity doesn't work with iPhones, although the firm did say that it's going to try and bring LTE to iPhones at some point. After all, Fossil was the first Wear OS vendor to allow you to make and receive phone calls when paired with an iPhone, so feature parity is a priority.

Right now, the Gen 5 LTE smartwatch is coming in two colors, black and gold, for $349, although Fossil also hinted at more colorways that might be coming later on.

Interestingly, the company didn't shy away from the fact that it's not using Qualcomm's latest chipset, the Snapdragon Wear 4100. While it won't confirm when the Gen 6 smartwatch is coming, the firm did acknowledge it.

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