If most of your apps and services revolve around Google and you want tighter integration with them than Samsung’s Galaxy Watch Active2 can offer, you should get a smartwatch with Google’s Wear OS. And the Fossil Gen 5 watches are the best Wear OS devices available. With Wear OS, you get better support for your phone’s notifications, the Play Store, and Google Assistant. The Gen 5 supports all the latest Wear OS features, including custom app tiles and an ultra-low-power mode that keeps the watch running several days on a charge. There’s only one size option, which may feel too large on smaller wrists, but multiple styles are available. As with all Wear OS smartwatches, fitness tracking is still rudimentary, and the watch’s interface can be laggy.

By default, the Fossil Gen 5 receives every notification from your phone, alerting you with a quiet but strong vibration. Notifications on Wear OS are rich with images and the same embedded buttons you’d get on your phone; if you swipe them away on your watch, they also disappear on your phone, so you won’t be greeted by a wave of old messages when you pull your handset out of your pocket. Wear OS doesn’t group notifications from the same app, so the endless scrolling on a tiny screen can make dealing with busy email or messaging accounts tedious, but Wear OS lets you control which apps show notifications on the watch from your Android phone’s settings. You can also just flip on Do Not Disturb mode to silence everything for a while.

The Fossil Gen 5 is available in Carlyle and Julianna models—the Carlyle models have black and gray finishes while the Julianna models are gold and rose gold. Each model comes in multiple crown styles, but they’re all 44 mm cases, whereas the Galaxy Watch Active2 offers the smaller, 40 mm option. All Gen 5 watches have rotating crown buttons for scrolling and a big, bright 1.28-inch round OLED at 416×416 resolution. On the bottom is a magnetic charging ring that can be tricky to get aligned; we prefer the wireless charging on the Galaxy Watch Active2.

The point of a smartwatch is to get things done quickly without taking your phone out, but sometimes the Fossil Gen 5 is anything but fast. The hiccups you likely see from time to time on your phone are more pronounced here, as the watch might ignore swipes or stutter during animations while it does something behind the scenes. This is an issue for all Wear OS devices, and the problem hasn’t been solved on this one.

The Gen 5 uses the Snapdragon Wear 3100 chip, which is barely more powerful than smartwatch processors from three or four years ago and sometimes lags while you’re swiping through tiles or opening apps. The Wear 3100 does offer improved battery life compared with the processors of older Wear OS devices, though, and the Gen 5 should last through a full day (around 18 hours) of heavy use before it needs to go back on its charger. The Wear 3100 also enables the low-power mode and a moving second hand on the watch’s ambient display.

Google’s bundled fitness-tracking app is disappointing, too. Even with a recent revamp, Google Fit lags far behind Samsung Health. Your watch can track steps and log heart rate every few minutes, but that’s all it does automatically. If you want to track exercise, you have to manually start a workout from the wearable app. In contrast, the Galaxy Watch Active2 just knows when you’re working out and adds the session to the app, and even the Withings Steel HR can automatically detect some workouts.

Google Assistant is the most accurate and best-supported virtual assistant on Android, and it’s baked into Wear OS on the Fossil Gen 5. That means the Fossil watch can control smart-home devices, send messages, and help you manage your calendar, and it’s better at all those things than Samsung’s Bixby on the Galaxy Watch. Unfortunately, Google Assistant on Wear OS is slower and buggier than it is on a phone.

The Fossil Gen 5 has the Google Play Store included, so you can easily download apps and watch faces. The store includes apps for Uber, Pandora, and Facebook Messenger, as well as many more that you won’t find on other Android-compatible smartwatch platforms like Samsung’s Tizen. Google Pay is preloaded, too, so you can pay in stores with the NFC chip in your watch. However, some developers, such as Runkeeper and Nest, have dropped Wear OS support recently because of low usage. Google has done little to make apps easier to use on a small, round screen. And buttons and text are often cut off awkwardly and difficult to touch accurately.