Fossil Gen 6: Smartwatch leaks again with a familiar design, an outdated SoC and probably Wear OS 2, but it could still be the best Wear OS device for Android fans

Roland Quandt has spotted the Fossil Gen 6 online, the company's upcoming next-generation smartwatch. As expected, the Gen 6 will feature an older SoC and not the upcoming Snapdragon Wear 5100. Surprisingly, Fossil has opted for the Snapdragon Wear 4100+ rather than the Wear 4100 found in the TicWatch E3 and TicWatch Pro 3.

Fundamentally, the Wear 4100 and Wear 4100+ are identical. Both are 12 nm SoCs with four ARM Cortex-A53 CPU cores, an Adreno 504 GPU and support for LPDDR3 RAM running at 750 MHz. However, the Wear 4100+ also has an AON Co-processor that supposedly reduces battery consumption. According to Qualcomm, the AON Co-processor supports 'up to 64K colours' and 'extends offload experiences' for key smartwatch features, such as continuous heart rate tracking and haptics.

The Wear 4100+ is over a year old at this point, even if the Fossil Gen 6 will be the first smartwatch to launch with the SoC. Additionally, Google has implied that Fossil will not have access to Wear OS 3 until the middle of 2022 at the earliest. Hence, the Gen 6 will arrive with Wear OS 2 instead of the latest version of Wear OS.