ALBAWABA – Fossil, the American watchmaker, has announced that it’s leaving the smart watch market, a bit over 9 years after it announced its Fossil Q Founder, the company’s first digital watch released in 2015, after its acquisition of Misfit for $260 million.
The acquisition helped Fossil bring Misfit’s technology for activity tracking into its smartwatches line-up, which appears to not have been doing as good as competitors, with Amanda Castelli, a Fossil spokesperson, telling the Verge that the smartwatch landscape has seen major developments in the recent years, causing the company deciding to reallocate its resources towards classic jewelry and mechanical watches.
Fossil’s Gen 6 would be the company’s latest and last smartwatch release, which is now selling at a significant discount of 67 percent, dropping its price from $299 all the way to $99 at Fossil’s official online store. Gen 6 watches comes with 1.28 inches AMOLED display, 1GB of RAM, 8GBs of storage, a handful of trackers and connectivity options, running Google’s Wear OS, which the Castelli told the verge that the company is planning to support with updates for the upcoming few years.
Fossil is quitting smartwatches business!!! pic.twitter.com/Ez7XVgbl9g
— Pratik Rai (@praaatiiik) January 28, 2024
With their absence from this year’s CES show, Fossil was already under speculation to leave the smart watch industry, with different users on Reddit who claim to be retail employees for the company supporting these rumors, which came while the Gen 7 watch, powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon W5 Plus, was anticipated but no announcements were made.
