Overall, I’m now able to carry the phone in my backpack — something my wife [unsuccessfully] tried to make me do for quite a while now.

Verdict: works as expected. Would be perfect with a little more granular control.

Requirement #5: Show me what media is playing on my phone

This one was the hardest to research and the one I wasn’t ready to compromise on. Most reviewers of various smartwatches focus on things like offline support in Spotify which I couldn’t care less about as I don’t plan to use the watch without a phone. Then they focus on supported apps.

What I wanted is a completely app-agnostic thing displaying whatever is displayed in Android’s media controls — something my 5 year old Bluetooth car stereo can do. Yet, figuring which watches can do that and which rely on specific apps was way more painful than anticipated.

To my surprise Wear OS comes with a built-in “Media controls” thingy which launches as you start playing something on your phone (this is configurable). It even has media controls (hence the name), and even hardware button integration, and would be perfect if not a very odd design choice — hardware buttons control prev/next but not play/pause. I can’t think of why someone would design it like this or maybe I missed something (please correct me if I did) but this just moved this thing from nearly perfect to nearly worthless (see my next requirement). Luckily, there’s an app for that! ©

Verdict: it does exactly what I want.

Requirement #6: Physical buttons to control media

The problem with “California people” dictating all the “tech fashion” is that, apparently, they don’t know what gloves are. In my neck of the woods, I have to wear them for almost half a year. It’s cute that you can do a lot of things on your touch screen but those [usually] don’t work with gloves. Additionally, don’t tell me that skipping ads in podcasts is more conveniently done by looking at your watch than just pressing a physical button without raising your hand. So, I had a pretty hard requirement of being able to do at least play/pause with a physical button but preferably next/prev/skip/rewind as well.

Fossil Gen 5 has 3 physical buttons — center one is a rotating crown that can be used for scrolling and — to my surprise — controlling volume. Long press on it activates Google Assistant. And then there are the other two…

Those can be mapped natively to launch any app but, unfortunately, that’s where the native customizability ends. Built-in Media controls use these buttons for next and previous track (or skip/rew depending on the active app). Unfortunately, those built-in Media controls don’t use a hardware button for play/pause for whatever reason. I don’t know, maybe in some configurations/watches there are more than 2 customizable buttons or if there’s no Google Assistant for some reason you can use the center one for play/pause, but that’s not how it works on my Fossil Carlyle HR.

Luckily, there’s a reasonably healthy app ecosystem and a brilliant Music Center for Wear app. The app is completely free but I just had to donate to the developer for saving the day and adding some cherries on top of that.

Now, my top button launches Music center (if it’s not active) or pauses/plays (if it is), double-tap on it does previous track/rewind, and the bottom button does next/skip. In addition to that it has active areas that let me launch Spotify and Pocket Casts on my phone. So realistically not only there’s no need to pull out the phone to control my media but I can also switch from listening to podcasts to music and back straight from the watch. Perfect!

Verdict: perfect, thanks to Music Center for Wear.

Soft requirement #7: Google Maps (or other) walking navigation

I must admit I still didn’t do proper research on this in regards to third party apps but Google Maps experience is a bit underwhelming. You can use it for walking navigation and it works in a way, but for whatever odd reason you can’t pan and zoom the map while navigating. Which makes it nearly useless, unless you believe it’s perfect (and it isn’t). You can use the map to look up where you currently are (in non-navigation mode) and that is useful.

I’ve tried to use it on a commuter train where Google Maps was able to show me the route but for whatever reason it wasn’t able to lead me on it — which would be useful to know where to get off without constantly looking where you are. Maybe that’s coming but for now I got less than I expected.

Another app I tried is Komoot which is a fairly nice hiking app but its walking navigation mode on the watch was even more underwhelming. It only shows you arrows where to turn and a distance to that turn. It was neither accurate nor show distance in my preferred units (metric) in my limited testing.

There’s also Citymapper which doesn’t cover where I am, and some other apps. But I haven’t tried them yet.

Verdict: not impressed so far — remains to be researched.

Other things and final verdict

I didn’t want to publish this up until now because the watch had two fairly annoying issues that Fossil promised to solve with a firmware update and, knock on wood, they are resolved now. If you must know those were:

annoying ticking of the speaker. It just “ticked” in some random fashion. It wasn’t very loud so you wouldn’t even hear it in an “active” office but when you are in a quiet room by yourself it was fairly audible. Didn’t bother me much but I can totally understand that it bothered the hell out of some people; odd problems with connectivity. Every morning I found Bluetooth on my watch disabled. So, I had to re-enable it and often more than once.

I’ve had the new firmware update for only a few days now but both problems seem to be resolved.

There are also two “features” that I don’t find useful but they add to price, size, weight and energy waste. These are:

Making phone calls from the watch and having a speaker in general. I just find all of this a bit ridiculous but some people want it. HR monitor and not being able to turn it off. Sure, measuring your heart rate could be “fun” once in a while but it definitely adds to the thickness and wastes battery. What I didn’t anticipate was that it can’t be switched off like most other things can. I presume that this is somehow related to Google Pay (which isn’t available in my country) as it locks up if you remove the watch. And the watch uses HR monitor to make sure it’s on the wrist.

I understand that Fossil didn’t make this watch exclusively for me, and to other people these feature are hard requirements. I can live with them even if I can’t appreciate them.

Thoughts on Wear OS

When I was researching smartwatch options over two months ago, Wear OS seemed to be the closest to what I want (on paper). But all the Wear OS watch reviews were complaining about the terrible performance. And overall there’s a sense of abandonment of the OS in the community. Which is not something to sneeze on, knowing Google’s reputation for killing perfectly viable things.

Fossil Gen 5 addressed the performance issues by simply increasing the RAM to 1GB (the Snapdragon Wear 3100 CPU probably didn’t hurt either, but as far as I understand the RAM upgrade is the main performance booster). I don’t have any complaints about the performance.

What I didn’t anticipate is that the Wear OS community is quite active, the store is fairly populated with useful apps, and there are reasonably frequent minor version updates to the OS itself. I’ve got upgraded from 2.8 to 2.9 in a month I had it.

As a new Wear OS user I really don’t feel like the OS is abandoned but we will have to see how I feel in a year or so.

Time to wrap this thing up with a summary of pros and cons of the Fossil Carlyle HR…

The good

Looks good (subjective, but I think most would agree);

Customizable (even if with some 3rd party software help) hardware buttons;

Solid watch face and app ecosystem;

Standard straps (I’m eyeing a few extras);

In short: does everything I wanted it to do.

The so-so

Battery life could be better;

Screen could be brighter;

Screen bezel could be smaller (don’t even think about white/light watch faces);

Very subjective but I don’t get the leather-rubber band (neither vegan nor real leather feel on your skin).

Where to buy

In many countries you can buy the watch directly from Fossil either online or in a physical store.

For us, the rest of the world, or anyone who doesn’t want to deal with Fossil directly, Amazon could be a good option:

I’ve also seen a fairly good representation of Fossil smartwatches in general electronics stores. Though the ones in my city only had Gen 4 a month after Gen 5 was released. It may vary where you live.

Questions?

This is, obviously, a very subjective review but it contains information I wasn’t able to find when I was researching smartwatches. In case you have questions about this watch or Wear OS that I can quickly lookup for you, don’t hesitate to ask them here or on Twitter.