Fossil won't upgrade existing watches to Google-Samsung Wear OS

Instead, the company is planning to launch a premium Gen 6 smartwatch that will run on Google's revamped operating system with "pretty major hardware upgrades" like faster performance, longer battery life, next-gen chips and LTE cellular options.

Fossil executives Greg McKelvey and Steve Prokup said in an interview with CNET that existing watches will probably be discounted as budget options.

"All of the software benefits that Google's talking about and launching with the unified platform is something we'll be building into that (Gen 6 watch) as well," McKelvey was quoted as saying in the report on Sunday.

The new Fossil smartwatch could be on par with the newest Apple Watch Series 6, which starts at $400.

Last month, Google announced to bring the best of its Smartwatch Wear OS and Tizen platform by Samsung into a single, unified platform, to deliver faster performance, longer battery life and more of the apps you love available for the watch.

For performance, Samsung and Google teams collaborated and made apps start up to 30 per cent faster on the latest chipsets with smooth user interface animations and motion.

All device makers will be able to add a customised user experience on top of the platform, and developers will be able to use the Android tools to build for one platform and ecosystem.

With the latest Wear update, Google has introduced Fitbit features like tracking health progress throughout the day and on-wrist goal celebrations.