With more people developing an increased interest in their fitness and health levels, there’s been a huge surge in the popularity of smartwatches. The Fossil Gen 4 Explorist HR has been one of the many in the market that have benefited from this increased interest, and with the fitness tracking capabilities that it has in store, many people continue to take it up even as their first ever smartwatch. The Fossil Q Explorist is powered by Google’s wear OS, and as a result, it features Google Assistant built-in to allow you to issue voice commands through it. The watch also comes with enough battery life to push through a day on a single charge,and also has NFC connectivity so that you’re able to use Google Pay when you don’t feel like carrying your wallet around. Is the Fossil Q Explorist HR the best Android smartwatch for you? Read this review to find out how it stacks as one of the best smart watches on the market.
Why We Like It – Fossil Men’s Gen 4 Smartwatch
The Fossil Gen 4 smartwatch comes with a decent number of features that its predecessor didn’t have, making it a worthy upgrade for anyone who wants to use a heart rate monitor, NFC support for payments, and a GPS for movement tracking.
- NFC Payments
- Water resistant to 100 feet
- Built-in GPS
- No sleep tracking
Performance
Perhaps the three most iconic features that the Fossil Gen 4 watch comes with are a heart rate monitor, a water resistance depth of close to 100 Feet, and NFC support for POS payments. These three capabilities mean that you can monitor your health, go to swim with your watch and leave your wallet home every once in a while. For even better health monitoring, the Fossil Q Explorist HR watch comes with the Google Fit app for you to use, though if this doesn’t sound ideal, the watch does allow for third party app downloads so that you don’t feel restricted to what’s available. Bear in mind that you won’t get this kind of latitude with the samsung galaxy android smartwatch. Read our Fossil gen 5 review to learn about a model with 8GB of storage.
Design
The Fossil Gen 4 ships with a stainless steel strap as standard, giving it a more masculine look and feel. The watch is meant for men afterall, though if you’re able to switch the 22mm band, it may very well be worn by women as well. Unlike the Apple watch, the Fossil Gen 4 features a circular bezel that’s similar to that of the ticwatch pro smartwatch, making it look like more of a traditional wrist watch. If you don’t like the standard watch face collection that the watch comes with, you can change the appearance of its AMOLED display by downloading many watch faces that are easily available on the Google Store. For sporty look, check out the Fossil sport review.
Value
One of the biggest issues that most people have with smartwatches always has something to do with battery life. What makes the Fossil Gen 4 stand out is that it allows you to choose which battery mode you want it to run on, where there’s the “Daily” option for a one day battery life, “Extended” which lasts slightly more than one day and “Custom” setting which lets you to choose which sensors or features to keep on. With features like these, you’ll get to have a lot more control over exactly how the watch functions, making the Fossil Gen 4 a little bit better than the Garmin Vivoactive 3 GPS Android Smartwatch
Fossil Men’s Gen 4 Smartwatch Wrap Up
The Fossil Gen 4 smartwatch may earn a bit of criticism for being more expensive than what most people would be comfortable paying for a smartwatch, but it does have a wide variety of features that any health and fitness junkie would find quite useful.
